Help Wanted: Spies

Bored with your job? Well, there's this outfit in West Germany that has quite a few positions available, offering not only security, fringe benefits, promotion and good pay, but also foreign travel and exciting assignments. According to an eight-page brochure available at government employment offices, men and women are needed in more than 40 professions--from map makers and pharmacologists to computer programmers and historians. The eyebrow-raiser is the address to which prospective applicants should write: the headquarters of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Federal Intelligence Service, Bonn's equivalent of the CIA. What that agency wants to hire is spies.

Advertising for cloak-and-dagger men and women may sound strange, but the END, as the agency is generally called, maintains that it works. Since the search began six months ago, there have been hundreds of applicants from a variety of backgrounds. The biggest single group is young lawyers (sniff's a BND personnel officer: "Lawyers think they can do anything"). Most of the applicants were weeded out early, including one 13-year-old aspiring James Bond. This week a handful of survivors will be selected for training after final tests for IQ, language ability and extemporaneous-speaking talent--presumably on the assumption that spies must sometimes talk their way out of tight places. Most will fill routine assignments at BND headquarters in the Bavarian village of Pullach. But a few will be sent out as "spooks."

Though other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, run public advertisements to recruit technical specialists and other personnel, such candor is a bizarre turnabout for the BND, which has been supersecretive since the postwar days when Reinhard Gehlen organized it out of the ashes of Nazi Germany's military intelligence. The "Gehlen Organization" was as mysterious as its founder, who generally stayed behind the wire-topped, 10-ft. concrete walls at Pullach and refused to be photographed. But the old guard, including Gehlen himself, finally retired; and new recruits for an organization of 5,000 people could no longer be found by the traditional word-of-mouth method.

Gehlen's successor, Gerhard Wessel, 60, first attempted to remedy his growing staff shortages with blind newspaper ads: "Multinational company with worldwide operations seeks multilingual executive assistant willing to travel." Other multinational companies, however, outbid him with more intriguing ads and better pay. In desperation, Wessel decided to go public. He ordered his small public relations staff, whose major function previously had been to keep the BND out of the news, to thrust it into the limelight instead.

Unreconstructed intelligence men protest that this is no way for a secret organization to behave. They argue that the BND can now be infiltrated by counterspies armed with nothing more lethal than an application form. One answer to that, of course, is that the BND was unable to keep out double agents even when it was most secretive. To Gehlen's embarrassment, in the 1950s the Soviets stocked his organization with so many former SS intelligence men that Moscow had to do its own personnel work. When too many counterspies became concentrated in certain BND departments, the Kremlin pressured them to seek transfers elsewhere in the organization.

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