The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Heinz Felfe.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	location	updated	relations
Intelligence & Government	Person Germany KGB CIA BND Soviet ColdWar Intelligence DoublAgent Nazi SS 1950s 1960s	Former SS officer and KGB double agent who joined the CIA-funded Gehlen Organization in 1951, rose to chief of BND Soviet counterintelligence, and was exposed in November 1961.	1918-03-18	2008-05-08	East Germany	2026-10-12	type with start end role fn employed_by Gehlen Organization 1951-11 1956-04 counterintelligence section officer 2 type with start end role fn employed_by Bundesnachrichtendienst 1956-04 1961-11 deputy chief and in practice chief of the Soviet counterintelligence section 1 type with start role fn informant_for Stasi 1969 full-time informal collaborator after the exchange 4

Heinz Felfe was born March 18, 1918, in Dresden, Germany. He joined the SS and served as an officer in the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence service, during World War II. He finished the war as an Obersturmführer in the Waffen-SS and a British prisoner of war, interned at the Blauw Kappel interrogation center near Utrecht, which specialized in former German intelligence personnel.¹ He returned to West Germany in November 1946 and from 1947 worked as an agent of a British military intelligence unit (Sixth Area Intelligence Office, BAOR), reporting on communist student groups at the University of Bonn and joining the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) under British instruction.¹ The British decided in April 1950 to drop him, citing his attempts to sell information to other agencies and his contacts with former SS men, among them Helmut Proebsting and Hans Clemens.¹ The CIA study gives his entry into an SS reserve unit as 1938; the historian Norman Goda gives 1936 for his entry into the SS and 1943 for his commission.¹² He died May 8, 2008, in Germany.³

Soviet Recruitment

Following his release from British custody, Felfe was recruited by Soviet Union intelligence (the MGB, predecessor to the KGB) during the postwar occupation period.³ According to the CIA study, the Soviet effort ran through Felfe's former SD colleague Hans Clemens. Clemens went to Dresden in February 1950, was recruited there by a Soviet officer, and then recruited Erwin Tiebel and Felfe in West Germany; Felfe, then working as a refugee interrogator, resisted the trip east for another year.¹ Goda dates Felfe's full status as a Soviet agent, codenamed Paul, to September 1951 and his job in the Gehlen Organization's counterintelligence section to November 1951.² The CIA study adds that Felfe may have been recruited earlier, during a 1948 trip east while working for the British, and that Goleniewski reached the same view.¹ Soviet intelligence had specific interest in recruiting former SD personnel who possessed intelligence tradecraft and might be positioned to penetrate Western intelligence structures, and Felfe's SS background, rather than disqualifying him, made him an attractive candidate for exactly this purpose.³

Entry into the Gehlen Organization

In 1951, Felfe was recruited into the Gehlen Organization, the Central Intelligence Agency-funded intelligence network that Reinhard Gehlen had built at Pullach, Bavaria, from the remnants of his wartime intelligence apparatus. Felfe's SS and SD background was not disqualifying within the Gehlen Organization, which recruited extensively from former Wehrmacht and Nazi intelligence veterans. He entered the counterintelligence section and rose progressively through its ranks.³

When the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) formally succeeded the Gehlen Organization in April 1956, Felfe transitioned into the new service's structure and continued his rise within the counterintelligence apparatus. He eventually became chief of Soviet counterintelligence within the BND - the section responsible for identifying and neutralizing Soviet penetration agents within West German intelligence.³ The CIA study describes him as an officer of the BND for ten years, six of them as deputy chief (in practice the real chief) of the section responsible among other things for countering Soviet espionage, having succeeded his superior Reile in late 1956 or early 1957.¹ Goda states that he took charge of counterintelligence against the Soviets in 1955.² Bodo Hechelhammer, the BND's chief historian, says he rose to head of counterintelligence against the Soviet Union, and ZDF calls him head of the section "Gegenspionage Sowjetunion."⁴⁵

The Army's Counter Intelligence Corps noted in 1953 Felfe's role as leader of an "SD clique" in the Gehlen Organization, in 1954 that he was probably leaking to the Soviets, and in 1955 that suspicion of him and the clique was growing; the CIA suspected him by 1957, but he had the confidence of Reinhard Gehlen and personally briefed him on sensitive Soviet matters.² From 1958 Felfe pressed the CIA for information on its Karlshorst penetration program. The CIA's record shows first official briefings to him in May 1958, February 1959 and July 1959, after which he became the BND headquarters supervisor of the joint program.¹ The CIA's 1963 damage assessment estimated that roughly 15,000 individual items were blown or compromised.² Hechelhammer states that the whole Soviet counterintelligence of the BND collapsed for years and had to be rebuilt.⁴

Wilhelm Harster, an SS lieutenant general who had been Felfe's superior, could not join the BND as a security risk but presented himself as a BND agent and recommended former SS contacts to the service; the CIA's file indicates he used Felfe to reach the BND.⁶

Decade of Penetration

Felfe operated as a KGB agent throughout his tenure in the Gehlen Organization and BND, from 1951 until his exposure in November 1961 - a period of approximately ten years. From his position as counterintelligence chief, he had access to:

The identities of Western agents operating in the Soviet bloc who had been compromised through BND channels; the existence and details of CIA-BND joint operations in East Germany and other Warsaw Pact countries; the organizational structure, personnel, and procedures of the BND itself; and material that allowed Soviet intelligence to anticipate Western counterintelligence activities.

The full extent of the damage was difficult to assess because Felfe had in his counterintelligence role the authority to handle cases involving suspected Soviet agents - a position from which he could protect Soviet sources, mislead investigations, and channel false information to American and West Germany analysts.³

Exposure

Felfe was exposed in November 1961. The CIA study states he was detected through a lead provided by a CIA-run penetration of the Polish Intelligence Service (UB) and names the defector Michal Goleniewski, a senior UB officer, as the officer who provided the lead.¹ He was arrested along with two accomplices, Hans Clemens and Erwin Tiebel, who had also been working within the Gehlen/BND network.³ News of the arrests was generally known throughout the West German government by December 2, 1961, and appeared in the newspapers by December 12.¹

The timing was significant: his exposure came only months after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, a period of heightened tension in which the extent of Soviet penetration of Western intelligence was a matter of acute concern.

Trial and Conviction

Felfe was tried in West Germany on charges of treason and espionage. He was convicted in July 1963 and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. The trial established the factual record of his decade of KGB service and the scope of the material he had passed. His cooperation during trial and sentencing was limited.³ Hans Clemens received nine years and Tiebel two years at hard labor.¹ From prison Felfe re-established contact with the KGB through his mother in Dresden and corresponded with the Soviets; the Soviets several times tried to obtain his release in exchange for prisoners held in the East.¹

Exchange and East Germany

In February 1969, Felfe was exchanged for a group of Western agents held by East Germany in a spy exchange negotiated between the two German states. Goda states that Felfe was released to East Germany in 1969 in exchange for three West German spies, and a BND archive photograph published with Hechelhammer's interview shows the exchange at the Herleshausen border crossing.²⁴ He settled in East Germany, where he was received as a hero of socialist intelligence work; Hechelhammer states that he became a full-time informal collaborator of the Stasi.⁴ He later published a memoir, Im Dienst des Gegners (In the Service of the Enemy, 1986), presenting his account of his career as a double agent and his motivations. He taught at Humboldt University in East Berlin and remained in Germany after reunification, dying in 2008.³

Significance

Felfe's career was among the most damaging Cold War penetrations of a Western intelligence service. Its specific significance derived from his position in counterintelligence rather than in operational work - he did not merely report on operations but actively managed the processes that were supposed to protect them. The Felfe case reinforced American intelligence concerns about the security vulnerabilities of the BND stemming from its origins in the Nazi intelligence establishment, and contributed to a reassessment of the degree of access given to BND personnel in joint operations.³

Footnotes

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1. Central Intelligence Agency, "KGB Exploitation of Heinz Felfe: Successful KGB Penetration of a Western Intelligence Service," March 1969, document C02606328, released February 21, 2019. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/node/2071209 ↩︎

2. Goda, Norman J. W., "CIA Files Relating to Heinz Felfe, SS officer and KGB Spy," Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2008. https://fas.org/sgp/eprint/goda.pdf ↩︎

3. Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007, pp. 33-56. Felfe, Heinz. Im Dienst des Gegners: 10 Jahre Moskaus Mann im BND. Rasch und Röhring, 1986 (Felfe's own account). Breitman, Richard, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Cambridge University Press, 2005. ↩︎

4. Hechelhammer, Bodo, interview, "Spion Heinz Felfe: Für ihn lieferten die Sowjets kleinere Fische ans Messer," t-online, March 22, 2020. https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/panorama/wissen/geschichte/id_87517540/spion-heinz-felfe-fuer-ihn-lieferten-die-sowjets-kleinere-fische-ans-messer-.html ↩︎

5. ZDF, "BND-Affären: Von Hanning und Felfe bis Landesverrat an Russland," October 6, 2026. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/bnd-affaeren-spionage-hanning-skandale-100.html ↩︎

6. Breitman, Richard, "Historical Analysis of 20 Name Files from CIA Records," Interagency Working Group, 2001 (entry on Wilhelm Harster). https://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/historical-analysis-by-breitman.pdf ↩︎