As we mark the 25-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new surge of public interest in one of the Cold War's darkest chapters is making its way across Europe and North America. The Staatsicherheitsdienst-- better known as simply the Stasi --has long had a well-deserved sinister reputation as one of the most repressive and vicious secret police agencies in the now- defunct Soviet bloc. From the time it was created in 1950 until it collapsed nearly four decades later the Stasi operated as the East German government's primary instrument of terror against both internal and external adversaries. Its very existence was a stark testament to the truth of the ironic adage “a police state is a country run by criminals”. Its own agents perpetrated acts often far worse than anything the Communist regime deemed to be a crime. Not only did it tolerate the presence of anti-Western terrorists in East Germany, but it arrested ordinary East German citizens for doing things which in most other countries wouldn't even be seen as warranting a fine.

    Yet even by the Stasi's own notorious standards, the plot hatched by two of its senior officers during the late 1970s to undermine West Germany(and by extension her ally the United States) through what can best be described as environmental terrorism against the citizens of West Berlin was so undeniably outrageous that when the truth about the conspiracy finally came to light it sparked widespread condemnation of its participants on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The uproar over the conspiracy would cost East German state security minister Erich Mielke his job...and according to some rumors, his life.

******

    Just how much Mielke knew about the conspiracy to poison West Berlin's water supply, and whether he ordered its poisoning, are questions that even today remain hard to answer. Many of the relevant files on the subject are now lost because they were either intentionally destroyed by the crumbling East German Communist regime in its final throes; carelessly torn to pieces by angry mobs as Stasi offices were being ransacked when the regime fell; or simply misplaced in some forgotten archive in the rush to consolidate East and West German government records during Germany's 1990 reunification. But from those files which are still accessible to the public we can see at the very least Mielke did little to discourage the conspirators. Given that as a young Marxist agitator in the 1930s Mielke had killed a Berlin policeman as part of the German Communist Party's unsuccessful battle to bring a Soviet- style government to Germany, it's not wholly unreasonable to suggest that he himself might in fact have tacitly encouraged the plot.

     The water poisoning conspiracy, dubbed Case Pelican by the officers who devised it, was breathtaking in both its simplicity and its cold-bloodedness. Undercover Stasi agents would infiltrate the West Berlin public works bureau and gain access to West Berlin’s water system; once that access was obtained the agents would introduce a series of toxins into the water supply. Once the poison had started to take effect on West Berlin’s citizens, anonymous notes would be sent to various Western diplomatic, governmental, and media offices in West Germany threatening further poisoning attacks on West Berlin unless the United States and its NATO allies swiftly and significantly altered their foreign policies toward the Soviet Union and East Germany. The Stasi men who conceived Case Pelican didn’t seem to understand or care that what they were proposing to do would incur massive civilian casualties-- in fact, one of the co-conspirators in the plot would later tell a Stern magazine correspondent the entire operation had been planned to a significant extent with the aim of inflicting the highest possible number of deaths on West Berlin’s population.

     So far as historians have been able to determine, Case Pelican began in September of 1978 as an interoffice memo between two Stasi majors discussing the theoretical question of how one would go about sabotaging West Berlin’s water purification systems. Had anyone realized the consequences which would ensue from the drafting of that memo, it’s highly possible its authors might have been cashiered on the spot.As it was, the memo took on a sinister life of its own; in January of 1979 an expanded version of the memo reached Erich Mielke's desk, and after reading it he summoned its authors to a meeting with him and his second-in-command in his office. If Mielke felt any moral qualms regarding what the architects of Case Pelican were proposing to do, he did an excellent job of hiding them; according to a transcript of the meeting found in the post-Cold War German defense ministry archives in 1998, the Stasi boss was rather enthusiastic in his initial reaction to the scheme.

     The plan picked up momentum as East-West relations continued to worsen in the face of the impasse between the Carter Administration and the Brezhnev regime in Moscow over nuclear arms control. In October of 1979, just over two months before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the principal conspirators in Case Pelican received the final go-ahead from the Stasi high command to go forward with their plans to poison West Berlin’s water supply; a month later the process of training the agents who would carry out the lethal mission got underway in earnest. These men were recruited from civil engineering classes at East Germany's most prestigious universities for both their socialist zeal and their extensive knowledge of the fundamentals of operating an urban water distribution system.

     In January of 1980 the principal conspirators contacted their Soviet colleague, KGB chief Yuri Andropov, to solicit his assistance with putting Case Pelican into action. It was at this point that the conspiracy ran into its first major problem. Despite having a less-than-favorable view regarding the West in general and the United States in particular, Andropov was in no rush to get involved with a scheme whose potential blowback could spell the end of the Warsaw Pact; he realized all too well the devastating consequences for the Soviet bloc should even the vaguest hint of the scheme leak to NATO. He told the conspirators in no uncertain terms that Moscow would have nothing to do with the water poisoning plan and would disavow any knowledge of it if it were publicly exposed. As one might imagine, this didn't sit well with the conspirators and may have helped accelerate the decline in relations between the Stasi and the KGB in the final years of the Cold War. For that matter, at least some of the theories surrounding the mystery of Erich Mielke's death in the final days of the GDR suggest that lingering depression about Andropov's refusal to support Case Pelican may have eventually driven Mielke to suicide.

******

    The second major obstacle to implementing Case Pelican raised its head, or more accurately its beer mug, in May of 1980 when a key member of the main operations team for the water poisoning conspiracy was found to have become a severe alcoholic. This development set the conspirators' plans back by nearly six weeks as they were forced to scramble to find a replacement for the agent in question; a heated exchange of classified memos between the two principal conspirators over those six weeks indicates that this uncharacteristic lapse in the normally air-tight discipline of Stasi agents in general and the Case Pelican team in particular started to drive a wedge between the organizers of the plot. Cold War scholars who are familiar with Case Pelican's history have said it's astonishing the conspiracy didn't collapse as soon as the ink dried on the first such memo.

    What made the setback even more alarming from the conspirators' view was a growing realization in the upper ranks of all Warsaw Pact secret services that the post-Vietnam War era of Western retreat in the face of Communism was about to end. Already voters in Great Britain had turned prime minister Jim Callaghan's Labor government out of office and replaced him with Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the staunchest anti-Communist to occupy 10 Downing Street since Winston Churchill; by November 1980 Jimmy Carter, who in one of his earliest major foreign policy speeches as President of the United States had criticized his fellow Americans' supposed “inordinate” fear of the Soviet bloc, would see his hopes of a second term dashed by Ronald Reagan-- a man who not only shared Thatcher's anti-Marxist sentiments but was prepared to take the Soviets and their allies on whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself.

    Towards that end, one of Reagan’s first major national security policy decisions following his January 1981 inauguration was to sign an executive order authorizing Congress to increase defense and intelligence aid to the West German government so that it could keep a sharper eye on the Stasi. He wasn’t yet aware of Case Pelican, but he still suspected the East Germans of aiming to destabilize the West in general and West Germany in particular by any means possible. Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey, harbored a similar distrust of East Berlin’s intentions; less than three weeks into his tenure as agency director he had already instructed his West Berlin station chief to step up surveillance of the East Germans.

     Even in West Germany, whose own counterintelligence services had been deeply penetrated by the Stasi and whose younger population harbored a good deal of pro-Marxist factions, a harder line towards the Honecker regime was beginning to take shape as the Social Democratic Party administration headed by chancellor Helmut Schmidt faced a serious political challenge in the form of Christian Democratic Union leader Helmut Kohl. With Kohl’s election as the new West German chancellor in October of 1982, there was now a third obstacle to successfully putting Case Pelican into operation. If the chief plotters in Case Pelican had been a bit more superstitious, they might have wondered if a jinx had been put on their operation....

******

    ...but one needn't believe in jinxes to agree Case Pelican was running into a series of increasingly serious complications. First the Soviets had turned down the conspirators' request for assistance in implementing their plans, then one of the Stasi agents assigned to Case Pelican had turned out to be a drunk, and now the government of West Germany was being run by a man who in all likelihood would be noticeably more proactive than Helmut Schmidt had been in confronting East German subversion activities against the West. A letter sent by the chief planner in Case Pelican to one of his cohorts in April of 1983 and preserved in the modern German defense minstry's archives suggests at least passing thought was given to scrubbing the entire operation out of fears that if things got much worse one of the Case Pelican team's own agents might be inadvertantly killed.

    Seven months after that letter was sent a fourth obstacle to implementing Case Pelican surfaced-- and this one had the potential to do more than simply disrupt the water poisoning conspiracy. During the Cold War NATO annually held a defense readiness exercise in November code-named Able Archer; this exercise simulated a regional nuclear conflict between NATO and Warsaw Pact land forces in Europe. The Able Archer '83 exercise commenced on November 7th, the 56-year anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. This mock nuclear war inadvertantly convinced a paranoid Yuri Andropov, now the Soviet premier, that a real nuclear war was just around the corner. The East German government felt that same anxiety, and as a result all Stasi foreign intelligence operations-- including Case Pelican --were suspended for nearly 36 hours. By the time Stasi headquarters lifted the suspension, the already much-delayed activation of the main Case Pelican operations team had been pushed back even further. It wasn't until June of 1984, almost six years after the plan had first been conceived, that the agents assigned to carry it out would finally start infiltrating West Berlin; at that point, both the country and the ideology they served were well along the inexorable slide towards final collapse.

******

     Konstantin Chernenko, Yuri Andropov's successor as Soviet premier, shared many if not all of his predecessor's reservations about Case Pelican. Nor were those the only qualms he had regarding the conspiracy: he worried that if the Reagan Administration got the slightest hint what was going on with the agents involved the United States might respond by sanctioning similar covert actions against Cuba or Nicaragua, two of the Soviet Union's key Third World allies at the time. So when one of the conspirators contacted the KGB's station chief in early July of 1984 to resubmit the Case Pelican team's request for Soviet help in implementing their plan, Chernenko instructed the station chief to turn the request down flat.

     Not that the station chief needed too much instruction; most KGB and GRU officers aware of the water poisoning plan agreed it was a recipe for disaster and had been desperately trying for months, if not years, to talk their Stasi brethren out of going through with it. A telegram discovered in 2003 and kept today in the archives of the Russian defense ministry indicates that at least two of the GRU's operatives inside West Germany had discussed liquidating the leader of Case Pelican's main operations team as a last resort to prevent the plan from going forward.

     Yet when all was said and done it wouldn't be the Americans, the Soviets, or even the West Germans who drove the final nail in Case Pelican's coffin. In one of the profound ironies of the Cold War it would be a respected and high- level commander from within the Stasi's own ranks that blew the team's cover by committing an act so unthinkable it would send shockwaves all across both sides of the Iron Curtain....

To Be Continued