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A trio of spies who may have worked with Tiedge are also believed to have followed him to East Germany. A 61-year-old woman using the false name Sonja Luneburg disappeared last August after serving for twelve years as secretary to Martin Bangemann, the West German Minister of Economics. Another woman living under an alias, Ursula Richter, 52, worked as a bookkeeper for a Bonn- based lobbying group for German refugees from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the U.S.S.R. She also vanished last summer.
When police searched the apartments of the missing women, they found several tools of the spy trade, including camera equipment that could be used to photograph documents and a briefcase with a secret compartment. West German authorities think that a third possible spy, a friend of Richter's named Lorenz Betzing, may have also fled eastward. She once worked for a firm that installed air conditioning at a military hideout built to serve as an emergency command center in case of war.
Last month the KGB's senior agent in London, Oleg Gordievsky, defected after years of providing the British with intelligence on Soviet espionage operations. Within a week the British government dismissed 31 Soviet diplomats, trade officials and journalists whom the double agent had identified as spies. Moscow, clearly embarrassed by the incident, retaliated by expelling an equal number of British citizens.
Reagan Administration officials last week confirmed another coup: Sergei Bokhan, deputy director of Soviet military intelligence in Athens, had ^ defected in May. Bokhan has provided information about the extent of Soviet infiltration of the Greek military, which may explain why the U.S. postponed a sale of 40 F-16 fighter jets to that country.
One recent disappearance remains unresolved. Vladimir Alexandrov, a prominent Soviet physicist, vanished without a trace while visiting Madrid late last March. Alexandrov originated the mathematical model for the nuclear winter theory, which holds that the smoke and dust hurled into the atmosphere by a full-scale nuclear war between the superpowers would block the sun's rays for weeks, causing the earth's temperature to plummet. The mystery of his disappearance has been compounded by the suspicions of some Western scientists that the nuclear winter scenario was promoted by Moscow to give antinuclear groups in the U.S. and Europe some fresh ammunition against America's arms buildup. Conspiracy theorists speculate that Alexandrov was planning to renounce the nuclear winter concept and may have been kidnaped by the KGB. According to another theory, the physicist defected to the West. In any case, a delegation of Soviet scientists skipped an annual conference in Sicily this summer, giving neither an explanation nor an advance warning of the boycott.