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Tipped in Time. Their successes—and failures—are classic. Early this year an American girl (called "Eleanor" by the U.S. agents who worked on the case) on the staff of the U.S. forces in Germany met a Communist agent called "Paul" at the Embassy Club, a U.S.-run community center in Bad Godesberg. Paul called himself a naturalized American; romance developed, until Eleanor was blackmailed into promising to hand over to the Russians her boss's telegrams; thinking it over, she took her problem to the U.S. authorities, who promptly broke up the plot. In another case of blackmail, an East German girl named Rosalie Kunze was forced to serve as a spy in Bonn's Ministry of Defense or risk exposure of her recent abortion; for months, as secretary to the deputy chief of West Germany's navy, she pumped classified documents to the Communists; but when she finally confessed, her information led to the arrest and conviction of at least six important Communist espionage agents living in West Germany.
In the past nine years, the West Germans alone have arrested more than 18,000 Communist spies operating in the Federal Republic. Thousands more have been picked up in other Western countries, often as a result of the penetration that Allied intelligence agencies have made at many levels of all the Communist espionage groups. Other tips come from the steady stream of defectors to the West; most are small fry, but now and then a big fish comes along. Only last week, the West Germans disclosed that Guenter Maennel, a senior official of East Berlin's HVA, had recently sneaked across the boundary, bringing with him details of his espionage unit in East Berlin as well as the names of 14 Communist agents in Africa, Scandinavia and the Middle East.