Not at all. Of course, we tried to work Americans living in Germany. We knew if we were successful that they would then go on to some important position in the United States. In the last years we tried things in the U.S. after we had an embassy there, but the most important success was with Germans who worked with American authorities in Germany [such as] the American Mission in West Berlin. There were successes-usually money was decisive-with U.S. Army members who had access to information.
Not at all. We had fairly good knowledge on the close cooperation between the Federal Intelligence Service and Mossad. One knows that Mossad is not very delicate in its methods. There was one case in the late ’70s when the West German service helped Mossad to contact Palestinians imprisoned in West Germany who were to be used for assassination attempts against leading PLO politicians or security people. It became known at that time that such an attempt was made against the security chief of the PLO, who was known by the name Abu Iyad; he was our partner in Berlin. It didn’t work then, but Abu Iyad was murdered this year in Tunisia.
The most important things I know about the CIA, I know from books and films. Of course, the CIA is a powerful organization. And I know from my own apparatus, the larger it is, the less effective it is. That means that with this mass of information, there were a lot of cases where the CIA came to the wrong conclusions in the end. I remember a case years ago where they made a prognosis of changing power relations in India, and the outcome was exactly the opposite of what they predicted. The CIA is, of course, considerably more active in direct and militant influence on developments in other countries. In a lot of cases the CIA has fewer scruples than we had.
Less is more. Concentrate on the decisive points and liberate yourself from a lot of bureaucracy that keeps you from the essential intelligence work.
From the perspective of the collapse of our former system, it would appear not. But I can say with a clear conscience that we did something necessary during the cold war. We made the other side transparent, so they knew nothing could happen without us knowing about it. That had a certain peacekeeping element.
