The RAF terrorists wanted by arrest warrant from 1970, including Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin
Photo: A9999 DB Police/dpa
In the 1970s, intelligence officers had a lucky moment.
While listening to phone calls, they overheard a couple they were interested in wanting to go on vacation alone.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) saw its chance: Two employees should drive to the same place, play a couple and make friends with the two.
The target persons, i.e. the couple, came from the supporter scene of the Red Army Faction (RAF).
The left-wing terrorist group has unsettled the country since it was founded in 1970, with hostage-taking, bank robberies and assassinations.
The RAF terrorists killed a total of 34 people, including employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer.
At the time of tapping the couple's phone, investigators had been unsuccessful in infiltrating the terrorist group.
Should they succeed with the undercover mission on vacation?
Apolitical legend
The mission was initially successful, the male observer and the woman from the middle service managed to get to know the couple and successfully pretend to them that they were a couple themselves.
But then the initiation failed because of the apolitical legend that the office had prepared for the two employees.
The BfV woman pretended that she was a saleswoman.
Apparently she wasn't very interesting for the RAF sympathizer and her partner.
And apart from that, the constitutional protection officers, who were disguised as a couple, had hardly anything to say that was supposed to get the left to fix it.
The friendship between the two couples hoped for by the office was a long way off.
The case reveals a general problem facing the West German security authorities at the time: they didn't understand what made the scene tick.
And if there are already problems with the analysis in advance, intelligence actions can usually only fail.
One of the reasons why many an undercover operation against left-wing terrorists failed at the time: the scene was strongly dominated by women, but the services were almost exclusively men - who were obviously overwhelmed by the new phenomenon of militant women.
At least that became clear from numerous conversations with intelligence officers who were part of research for a SPIEGEL book on the work of secret agents.
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