Summary: In the first chapter of this series we reviewed the story behind thecreation of Case Pelican, the Stasi’s infamous conspiracy to poison the water supply in West Berlin during the late stages of the Cold War. In this segmentwe’ll look back at the chain of events leading to Case Pelican’s cancellation and reveal how the conspiracy was finally exposed to the public.

To the great dismay of Soviet bloc leaders in general and Stasi officers in particular, who'd been hoping that American liberal discontent with Ronald Reagan's hardline stance on Communism would pave the way for a Walter Mondale presidency and a return to the days of detente, Reagan easily gained a second term in the 1984 U.S. presidential election. The Stasi high command regarded Reagan's decisive victory over Mondale as grim news for many reasons-- one of them being that four more years of the Reagan White House's relentless effort to put an end to Soviet bloc expansionism and the threat it posed to American national security would inevitably heighten the chances of Case Pelican being discovered by NATO intelligence agencies. That in turn increased the risk of the United States and West Germany(not to mention their NATO partners) taking retaliatory action against East Germany.

    One Stasi officer who was especially disturbed by the potential blowback of Case Pelican was Colonel Rainier Wiegand, a senior deputy to Erich Mielke who from the very start had been adamantly opposed to the operation and had been trying since 1980 to convince his boss to scrap it before it brought an unimaginable catastrophe down on all East Germans. In the end Wiegand's fears regarding Case Pelican would drive him to do something that, for a Stasi man, was tantamount to treason: defection to the West. Among Case Pelican-related files still accessible to the public are a series of memos written by Wiegand to Erich Mielke in which Wiegand's anxieties about the conspiracy, mixed with a growing frustration over his inability to convince Mielke to listen to his concerns, are reflected in apocalyptic and increasingly vociferous language. The last of these memos, written shortly before Wiegand defected to the West, eerily predicts “political catastrophe” for the Honecker regime.

    Even without his anxieties over Case Pelican to motivate him it's likely Wiegand would have defected sooner or later; the Stasi's support of Libyan terrorists appalled him both as a man and as a police commander, and he had been steadily losing faith in the socialist system in any case. But the water poisoning conspiracy helped hasten his decision to go over to the West-- and the eventual demise of the regime he'd been serving his entire adult life. He secretly started planning his defection in July of 1984, about a month after the agents of Case Pelican's main operations team finally began infiltrating West Berlin. It took Wiegand nearly two years to secure an opportunity to go over to the Western side, but when that opportunity came he made the most of it.

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     When Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet premier in March of 1985, nobody on the Case Pelican team gave the slightest thought to making another request for Soviet assistance. The Kremlin had made it all too clear that they could expect no help from Moscow with their conspiracy. Furthermore, Gorbachev was likely to do more than simply turn them down flat if they approached him; the Case Pelican main operations squad leader had it on good authority from a friend at the East German embassy in Moscow that the new Soviet premier had threatened to have the KGB leak everything it knew of the conspiracy to the United States if the Stasi made any further attempts to inveigle the KGB in the Case Pelican plot.

     In a macabre irony, the only person to actually die as a result of the poisons that were to have been used in the Case Pelican plan was one of the conspiracy's own operatives. In July of 1985 the Case Pelican main operations team's second-in-command was accidentally exposed to a combination of toxins that included a crystalized form of mustard gas; he was dead within less than 48 hours. One would have thought that such a fatal miscue would give the Case Pelican team ample reason to suspend their operations, if not terminate them altogether. And one would have been wrong. Far from having any desire to pull the plug on what they were doing, the Case Pelican conspirators viewed their comrade's death as a sign they needed to move more quickly to implement their plans lest another lethal accident blow their cover and alert the West to the water poisoning conspiracy's existence.

    For Wiegand, that refusal to turn back from Case Pelican's objectives was the last straw. He'd been horrified enough at the Case Pelican team's callous attitudes towards the lives of the West Berliners they were targeting as part of their conspiracy, but to see them so unfeelingly brush off the loss of one of their own comrades was more than he could bear. In his mind, it validated his decision to go over to the West and summarized everything wrong with the regime he’d once been proud to serve; when he finally did defect in late June of 1986, two months after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, Wiegand told officials at the U.S. consulate in West Berlin he was more than willing to cooperate with U.S. and NATO intelligence agencies in exposing his former colleagues' activities in West Germany as a whole and the Case Pelican team's operations in particular.

    Among the papers Colonel Wiegand took with him when he fled East Berlin were copies of the memos he'd sent to Erich Mielke attempting to convince the Stasi chief to pull the plug on Case Pelican. These memos gave the CIA their first concrete inkling of what the Case Pelican conspirators had been up for nearly eight years-- and touched off a geopolitical and diplomatic firestorm that would destroy first the Stasi's boss, then the Stasi itself, and finally the German Democratic Republic. Wiegand's revelation of the existence of Case Pelican was sufficiently alarming from the White House's viewpoint to prompt President Reagan to deliver an hour-long televised speech on July 2nd, 1986 in which he denounced the water poisoning plot as “a latter-day Pearl Harbor”.

     Within a week after Reagan’s speech, newspapers all over North America and western Europe were printing editorials lashing out at East Germany as a whole and the Stasi in particular. That could have been expected. What could not have been expected was that newspapers in eastern Europe, who most of the time faithfully recited the official Kremlin line almost word for word, would join in these condemnations. Even the official East German government paper, Neues Deustchland, blasted the Case Pelican plotters as “monstrous thugs” and called for their immediate arrest. Gorbachev made good on his threats and had the KGB leak what it knew about Case Pelican to the White House. From then on the jig was up, and on August 2nd, 1986 the Case Pelican team finally canceled the operation and ordered the recall of their agents from West Berlin.

     Unfortunately for them and the GDR, the recall order came too late. The genie had escaped from the bottle with a vengeance, and even as the agents on the Case Pelican main operations team were hastily packing their bags to hot- foot it back to East Berlin police the West Berlin police were getting ready to throw a dragnet over them; just across the Berlin Wall the Honecker regime was being confronted with the most serious political crisis it had yet faced in its eighteen-year history...

To Be Continued