Espionage | Agent life: For love – and also for cash

Horst Tatzkow spied for the CIA for ten years before being exposed in 1968 and sentenced to life imprisonment; his wife received eight years. He had only himself to blame for being exposed: he dropped his letter into the mailbag of the friendly postman who was emptying mailbox number 33 on Greifenhagener Strasse in Berlin at 6:50 a.m. However, the postman was actually a member of the Stasi, namely Jürgen Raasch, an operational employee of Department M, responsible for mail control. Department M had already intercepted 13 letters sent to cover addresses in the West and had been searching for weeks for the sender. Raasch recognized the handwriting on the envelopes. And now he recognized it on the letter that had been posted. That was it.

Days later, and a few meters away, in front of the house at Wisbyer Straße 66, Käte Tatzkow and her son Jürgen said goodbye to their Thuringian relatives. An hour after the family photo was taken, the prosecutor and his entourage rang the doorbell, presented the search warrant, and took the mother away. The 15-year-old son watched in surprise as a receiver disguised as a battery, ink, papers, and other intelligence documents were found and confiscated in his parents' apartment. Suddenly, he and his two-year-older brother Erich were without parents...

Jürgen Tatzkow became a teacher in the 1980s, then a school principal in Köpenick, and in the 1990s even became a civil servant. Today he is retired. Two decades ago, he conducted interviews with his father, who died in 1996, and researched his secret service activities in archives. He received only half of the documents from the Stasi Records Agency, not a single sheet from the CIA, and other Western services also turned a cold shoulder to his requests. He wanted to know when and why his father had worked first for the CIA, then as IM "Kowalowsky" for the Stasi, and after the fall of the Wall, presumably again for the US intelligence service. It must have been love. His friend, who introduced him to the CIA, had – so both father and son suspected – been sent to the West by GDR intelligence and had probably been turned there.

The spy story, supported by evidence from various sources, is convincing, but patchy, and not only because of a lack of testimony—even Tatzkow's father didn't tell him the whole truth, as the author discovered during his research. But there's a second layer, and I find it almost more fascinating than this sometimes opaque secret service nonsense. Jürgen Tatzkow recounts how the two brothers, temporarily orphaned, made their way on their own because the Stasi prevented them from being placed in an orphanage. We read how they received support in various ways and developed self-confidence. The two were neither ostracized nor cast out of society; they completed their apprenticeship at a television electronics factory and were active in the FDJ singing group there. After leaving the NVA, Jürgen Tatzkow earned his university entrance qualification at night school and studied at Humboldt University. Only when he wanted to marry the daughter of a very well-known GDR historian did his parents' past seem to come back to haunt him for the first time. The professor had been burned: He was reprimanded because his other daughter had protested against the Allies' military intervention in Prague in 1968. He didn't want to experience that again. Well, things worked out, and Tatzkow is still married to this woman, a historian.

The life stories presented in this book are unique, yet somehow typically GDR. It is, of course, the bizarre story of a double agent, but one who wasn't really one, for he worked for the intelligence services of both sides, not simultaneously. In an interview with his son, he confessed: "I wasn't well suited for this job." But he did it. For love and also for money, less out of conviction. The damage he caused was limited: He provided personality profiles, reported on the mood in society and in his party, the SED. Sources like Tatzkow—and there were more of them in the GDR than its security forces knew—provided the information with which the Western intelligence services constructed a precise picture of the state of GDR society and derived conclusions for policy. Even when amateurs provided them with fodder, they used this as live ammunition in the class struggle.

Jürgen Tatzkow's book activates insights that had long seemed buried. Although he is a teacher, he does so not with a wagging finger, but rather in a memorable and convincing manner.

Jürgen Tatzkow: My Father, the Spy. Commissioned by the CIA and the Stasi. Edition Ost, 256 pp., paperback, €20.