High Crime

An Alpine spook

For seven days last November, 32,000 Austrian soldiers slogged through a muddy stretch of the Danube River valley in what was billed as the country's biggest military exercise since World War II. Though the Austrians invited observers from all the East bloc countries to watch the maneuvers, they were not pleased with the interest shown by a middle-aged man who turned up around the barracks in the small town of St. Polten. He wore high rubber boots, and carried the classic impedimenta of espionage: a camera, binoculars, maps and a notebook.

For days, police shadowed the man as he moved around in a rented car. Sometimes he would boldly venture into a command post to ask directions; evenings he would invariably down a glass of wine before retiring to a local hotel. Finally, the police grabbed him.

Their quarry was Kurt Schilling, 57, a Swiss business consultant working, he insisted, in "the interests of Swiss defense." At first the Austrians laughed: they thought he was an East bloc spy. Then Swiss officials discovered that Schilling had indeed been dispatched on an information-gathering mission, albeit unauthorized, by one Colonel Albert Bachmann, a defense department intelligence officer. Reflecting the surprise shared by Austrians at the revelation that a freelance spook from their equally neutral neighbor had been snooping on them, the Vienna daily Die Presse dubbed Schilling "the spy who came in from the Emmentaler," the best-known Swiss cheese.

Bachmann dreamed up the assignment for Schilling, a military buff, on his own. The colonel, whose zeal was said by the Swiss to have been "a problem," said that Schilling was an apprentice agent whose prowess he wanted to test in an easy job. The Swiss suspended Bachmann from duty. As for Schilling, the Austrians last week announced that he would be tried on espionage charges. The price he could pay for his spy tryout: three years in prison.

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