The Spies That Were Left Behind

When a major Russian spy defects to the West, the CIA is usually so delighted that it can hardly wait to tell the story to the world press. The resulting headlines are expected to be a damaging blow to Soviet prestige in general and the KGB in particular. Last week, however, with an important new defector on its hands, the agency kept its mouth shut. It had nothing to say --not even to the State Department --when the West German government revealed that Evgeny Evgenievich Runge, who held the high rank of lieutenant colonel in the KGB, had made contact with the CIA in West Berlin and asked for asylum. Apparently piqued that Bonn had broken the story, the CIA would not even tell Runge's age (39) or how many members of his family had accompanied him into exile (his wife and eight-year-old son). Nor would it admit the fact that Runge had been taken to a "safe house," somewhere in the U.S., for extensive "debriefing."

Blown Covers. No such secrecy was evident in West Germany, which is apparently the most spy-crowded nation in Europe (an estimated 5,400 Communist agents alone are operating there.) Bonn, to be sure, did not say very much about Runge, probably because it did not know very much. But it was bursting with news about the spies he had left behind. Operating since 1955 as a travelling jukebox salesman, the KGB colonel had been in charge of at least two spy rings, and he blew their covers when he left. The police moved in immediately. Government Prosecutor Ludwig Martin announced solemnly that "this is the most important case of espionage in the history of the Federal Republic."

Runge's rings were both small, but both were extremely effective. One consisted of Leopold Pieschel, 44, a messenger in the French military mission, and his brother-in-law, Martin Marggraf, 41, a waiter whose specialty was bugging diplomatic receptions and dinners at such places as the presidential villa and Chancellor Kiesinger's Palais Schaumburg. While Marggraf planted mini-microphones, Pieschel systematically photographed secret NATO documents from the French commandant's safe--the key to which he had stolen, duplicated and returned in 1958.

Documents for Lunch. The other ring operated in the Foreign Ministry. It was run by Heinz Suetterlin, 43, a freelance photographer, and his wife Leonore, 39, a plumpish woman who was the personal secretary of the director of the ministry's administrative Zb Section--where the files contain personnel records, incoming dispatches, the complete Allied contingency plans for the defense of Berlin, and the West German diplomatic code. Leonore had access to everything. One by one, she stuffed papers in her purse and took them home at lunchtime for a quick snap from Heinz's ready camera. In five years, the couple delivered copies of more than 1,500 secret documents to the Russians. The ministry has had to switch to a new diplomatic code.

Leonore, apparently, had done her spying mostly out of love. West German investigators discovered that Heinz, a trained Russian agent, had been sent to Bonn in 1959 with the specific assignment of wooing a highly placed Foreign Office employee; Leonore turned out to be his pigeon. When her police questioners told her why her husband had married her, it was more than she could take. She hanged herself in her cell at Cologne's Klingelpuetz prison.

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