Top-rank MI6 mole ‘betrayed agents for a decade’

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Sunday Times
Justin Sparks



A FORMER German spy has claimed that a traitor in MI6, Britain’s overseas intelligence agency, leaked sensitive secrets to Russian agents throughout the 1990s. Norbert Juretzko, once an officer in Germany’s BND intelligence agency, says information about MI6 field agents and their handlers was passed to the Russians for nearly a decade. According to Juretzko, German intelligence discovered the leak — and learnt about the names and movements of British agents — but did not tell its British allies for several years because it feared British action might compromise one of its own spies operating in Russia.

Juretzko, who worked as a BND officer for more than 20 years, has revealed the existence of the mole to The Sunday Times. “Almost every time I met my source, who was our top spy inside Russian intelligence, he passed me microfilm which also contained sensitive information leaking out of MI6,” he said. “The highly classified material could have been obtained only by somebody in a senior position, as it revealed the identities of MI6 personnel and their activities. It also appeared to reveal the cover names and travel arrangements of British handlers.” The Germans finally informed the British about the leaks in 1998 and a joint operation was initiated between MI6 and Germany’s Militaerischer Abschirmdienst, which is responsible for counter-espionage. It is not known whether the mole was caught.

The operation was overseen in Germany by Colonel Joachim Zoeller, head of counter-espionage, and Richard Wandel, another military intelligence officer, according to a source in the BND who corroborated aspects of Juretzko’s story. Juretzko is a controversial figure in Germany. He is a friend of Peter Struck, the defence minister, and is acquainted with Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor. He left the BND under a cloud after he was convicted of false accounting over funds sent to his spies. Last month he published his memoirs and faces prosecution for breaking Germany’s secrecy laws.

His claims about the British traitor, which are not contained in the memoirs, are partly corroborated by classified documents he has retained. They show that the FSB, the agency that succeeded Russia’s KGB, set up a front company called Alpha 1 in July 1994. This firm, Juretzko alleged, was the destination for microfilm containing MI6 secrets that was smuggled from London. Alpha 1’s offices were in the Peking hotel in Moscow and ostensibly provided security services for western companies operating in Russia. Its staff was almost exclusively former KGB agents. According to the documents, official records had been doctored so that employees appeared to have been thrown out of the KGB, or to have parted from it on bad terms. “In fact they continue to be in the employment of the FSB which also pays their salaries,” says the report. The firm was headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Andrei Tolmatschov, who had been stationed in Quedlinburg in the former East Germany during the cold war. He was said to be an alcoholic and relations with his superiors were strained.

More:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,2762,00.html

[gandalf]

1. Germany had a spy in Russia in the nineties?

I thought Jelzin was such a good friend of Helmut Kohl...