Maybe it's just a coincidence. But the name of the former Stasi officer is missing on the doorbell of the gray-pink block of flats in Kyritz, Brandenburg. Only on the mailbox is: "Kopp / May".
A neighbor looks suspiciously from the top floor of the prefabricated building. "Who do you want to go to?" She barks. Two floors down another window opens. An elderly gentleman looks friendly: "I open," says Horst Kopp.
Kopp, 85, walks a little bent, but radiates energy and hospitality. He offers new plush slippers for visitors - a superfluous luxury in an apartment full of soft carpets. Here Kopp spends his old age with his partner and the one-eyed pug Bijou. In Bijous dog baskets lies a knitted bear, on the living room sofa perched a pillow with the request "push me". Above it the painting of a dreamy seascape.
Is mistrust not completely out of place in this homey living room? And yet a thought arises: Can one believe the nice Mr. Kopp? A man whose core business was the disinformation and launch of true, half-true and false news?
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Forgotten places: The abandoned HVA headquarters of the StasiHence a question at the beginning: "If you wanted to disinform me, how would you proceed?" Horst Kopp does not hesitate. "I would first inquire about your specific interests within the editorial office, and then provide you with what suits your interests." So: pass on information and possibly cleverly alienate it. "Any disinformation," says Kopp, "needs a kernel of truth."
"Deepen the fission fungus, stir up dissatisfaction"
In his old age Horst Kopp has written a book in which he describes himself in the title as "The Desinformant". For more than 20 years, he worked in the Department X of the Central Administration Enlightenment (HVA), the foreign intelligence service run by Markus Stasi. Department X was considered an elite unit responsible for "disinformation" and "active measures".
These included the processing of journalists, the launching of GDR-friendly messages in the Western press and the recruitment of unofficial employees (IM) from the media world. Kopp led "up to 27 IM in his best times". This can not be proven, most HVA files were hastily destroyed before the turnaround.
Kopp is today the last living witness of the Department X, who speaks publicly about his former craft. Some coincide with what Markus Wolf and Günter Bohnsack - another leading HVA specialist whom Kopp had once recruited - reported during his lifetime. Other remains unverifiable.
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Horst Kopp: The Desinformant"We launched statistics, they did not vote in front and in the back," says Kopp in a good mood. He had about his IM "Admiral", the frigate captain Wilhelm Reichenburg from Munich, had good contacts in the Bundeswehr. "Many soldiers in the troupe were dissatisfied with their salary and a lack of corps." This mood took advantage of the Stasi. "Deepen the fission fungus, stir up dissatisfaction," summarizes Kopp in the style of a head of unit.
"Secret as secret"
Under the same logic, his department sent fake news to the parties in the Bundestag. Especially famous was later falsified by the Department X letter of the 1987 deceased CDU politician Uwe Barschel. The letter burdened the party colleague Gerhard Stoltenberg as a confidant of the Barschel affair, which took up the ARD magazine "Panorama". The disinformants also alienated intercepted conversations of top politicians, triggering alleged "wiretapping scandals".
Department X was "an instrument of psychological warfare" and therefore "more secret than secret", writes Kopp proudly: "Only on the ninth floor of the HVA block - the boardroom of the Enlightenment - we have knowledge of our existence." Good disinformation, should Kopps superior Rolf Wagenbreth have preached, only work
about insider knowledge and attention to detail - but then according to the "time bomb principle".
These patterns are reminiscent of those topics that still determine the public debate today: cleverly launched false reports, "alternative facts" of populist politicians, who in turn accuse the press of lying.
The Stasi developed with the help of the KGB a great mastery in the art of misleading. A 1963 Drafting of Division X stated that it was necessary to "unmask" the "hostile intentions" of the Western intelligence services and to "disturb, disintegrate and paralyze its forces."
Action "Roast goose"
Horst Kopp did not march straight into this world. He comes from an apolitic family from Soldin in the Neumark, which today belongs to Poland. The father was an innkeeper and left the family in 1947 after returning from captivity. Two years earlier Horst Kopp's mother, weakened by flight and expulsion, died of typhus. The orphan grew up with relatives, did an apprenticeship as typesetter and became a FDJ official in Kyritz. In 1960, the Stasi wooed him.
The Nazi era was influential, as Kopp blamed the Nazis for the destruction of his family. "That was my motivation in Department X." The Stasi searched specifically for the Nazi past of West German celebrities, journalists were leaked files. Many things were right, some things were being worked on, things that were relieving were removed. An entanglement in the Third Reich was the easiest way to destroy careers and to discredit the Federal Republic.
Thus, reports on the Nazi past of Chancellor Kiesinger, Chancellor head Globke and Federal President Lübke also came with the help of intelligence agencies from the East in the press. "Nazi hunters" like Serge and Beate Klarsfeld received information from the HVA.
If the Nazi card did not work out, the Stasi experts became creative in a different way. The publisher Axel-Springer, a strict opponent of the GDR, tried to appraise depression and persecution mania with the help of an expert report. The "taz" printed an AIDS conspiracy theory spearheaded by the KGB and other Eastern intelligence agencies, according to which the HI virus came from US laboratories. And minutes of a telephone recording by Franz-Josef Strauß were to incite unrest in 1978 in the CSU. However, the action with the pretty alias "roast goose" did not light because the disinformant Strauss put words into his mouth that the one never used.
Biggest coup with IM "Dürer"
The SPIEGEL was also misled and cited 1980 from a fabricated position paper on the plan of the CSU to detach itself as the fourth federal party from the CDU. However, the SPIEGEL did not print fake "interrogation protocols" of the RAF with the abducted Hanns Martin Schleyer in 1977, although experts considered the paper to be authentic.
Kopp was particularly responsible for the advertising and management of the IM in order to obtain the necessary information for such actions. Hundreds of travel journalists visited the GDR - a chance for lasting contacts and mutual help. The Stasi also tried to recruit greats like Harry Rowohlt and Günter Wallraff, which failed, according to Kopp. Nevertheless, Wallraff was long referred to as "IM" in the Springer press, whereas in the end he successfully litigated.
Kopp also liked to advertise his IM under a foreign flag: "My specialty." Many of his West German IM would have thought to pass on his information to the British or Americans. To perfect the deception, Kopp sent middlemen to the US, who called their contacts from there.
Kopp's most important man in this game: Georg Fleissmann alias IM "Dürer", a well networked journalist from Nuremberg. "A gem," says Kopp today. With "Dürer" succeeded his biggest coup: the bribery of the CSU politician Leo Wagner alias IM "Lion", a guilty bon vivant and close bouquet confidant.
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Horst Kopp
The Desinformant: Memories of a GDR intelligence agency
Publishing company:
The new Berlin
Pages:
256
Price:
EUR 16.99
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About Fleissmann Wagner got therefore 50,000 Mark for a betrayal with big consequences: In the vote of no confidence against Chancellor Willy Brandt 1972, he abstained, along with another bribed deviant the vote. Brandt's Ostpolitik was saved. In the HVA, the head of the department had praised: "Fighting mission accomplished, comrades! Keep it up!"
Affair ends career
Kopp's career picked up speed thanks to the vote vote. For his 50th birthday in 1983, he received the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze. His colleagues gave him an armored-box seal and a "Kopp-SPIEGEL", a collage with matching text snippets from Western magazines, such as "How to make others go into the pan."
Two years later, shortly before being promoted to lieutenant colonel, Kopp's rise abruptly ended due to an extramarital relationship with a 22-year-old HVA employee. When Kopp reported his superior from the liaison, he was targeted by the defense. She did not relieve the otherwise so conscientious employee of the role of the dearest officer. Did he want to get some explosive information about the woman in order to sell her?
In 1979, the HVA man Werner Stiller defected to the west. "Thereafter, there was pure hysteria," remembers Kopp. He was interrogated, held for weeks, and was not allowed to go to the bathroom without a guard. Although he knew the methods, he says, "I was desperate, I just did not believe that I loved this woman." It almost felt like he had himself fallen into a disinformation trap.
In the end he allegedly narrowly escaped execution, Kopp claims. He was banned from the HVA as an "officer in special employment" and transferred to the city administration of Pankow. Nevertheless, he did not question the system afterwards. "That was my GDR," says Kopp, that he raised his sons in their favor. A betrayal would also have been dangerous and did not come to mind.
Kopp was not a friend of the reunification and still feels today as a "turncoat loser". He no longer found a reasonable job with his biography. Kopp had odd jobs, sweeping gyms, cleaning toilets, helping out in circuses, selling steel cabinets. Repentance does not plague the former disinformant: "I have never done anything other than to present the GDR positively."
