First there was the mysterious death of Rear Admiral Hermann Lüdke, suspected of photographing NATO documents for a foreign power. Then came the suicides of four other West Germans involved in government or defense work. West German counterintelligence agents had only begun to sort all that out when Bonn admitted yet another seriousand bizarresecurity gaffe. Attorney General Ludwig Martin announced that three men had been arrested for providing the Soviet Union with secret equipment, including a U.S.-designed missile, stolen from a supposedly tightly guarded NATO base.
The trio's exploits began in April 1967. Master Sergeant Wolf-Diethard Knope, a Luftwaffe Starfighter...