Let's go.
Did I say it correctly?
During the height of the Cold War, Werner was a G2 undercover political operative and conducted authorized espionage missions behind the Iron Curtain.
Werner was apprehended in action in 1955, where he was accused of and tried for anti-communist activities.
He was then sentenced to 13 years of incarceration for so-called crimes against Article VI of the Constitution of the German Domestic Republic.
As a political prisoner, Werner spent six years of his imprisonment in the infamous torture chambers of the Stasi secret police in Berlin, Hohenschönhausen.
The notorious Red Ox in Halle and other inhumane barbaric prisons, such as the Brandenburg-Gordon Penitentiary.
Today, Werner is a Cold War historian who lives in the Midwestern region of the United States.
We are honored to have you here.
Please welcome Werner Juretsko.
Thank you kindly for the introduction.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
And today, I will give you a short lecture on Espionage 101.
Perhaps it was a subject matter which you have never taken in school, so let me allow you to give you a lecture in 101.
But before I start, I actually would like to have a raise of hands.
Could anyone tell me who is Raymond Benson?
Show of hands.
Raymond Benson.
Anybody ever heard of Raymond Benson?
Can I see another show of hands?
Did you ever hear the name of James Bond?
Okay, thank you.
Let's talk about Raymond Benson.
See, Raymond Benson, to a lot of people, it's been unknown that he is one of the authors of the James Bond series.
Well, later on, we have the pleasure of Raymond Benson, he will be the speaker following me.
Well now, let me tell you how I met Raymond Benson.
When I heard about Raymond Benson, When I met Raymond Benson, Oh, thanks man.
When I met Raymond Benson, I said, we have to get together.
That's the guy I heard, he wrote all those James Bond books.
And so we had a first meeting, and so we met, and as we met, I asked him, one of my first questions was, I said, you know Raymond, you wrote all those James Bond books, I mean the books which actually keep the whole world reading those books day and night,
so it's exciting.
I said, I only have one question.
How many spies have you met?
And he looked at me and he said, wait a minute, that's a question, you know nobody ever asked me that question.
You're the first one who asked me that question.
Basically, if I think about it, I have never met a spy.
And having said this, he reaches in his pouch and he takes, he gives me a book, fresh from the press, James Bond.
And we all read here, James Bond, High Time To Kill.
And on the bottom, you see very small Raymond Benson.
So basically, I and Fleming only wrote two books.
And the rest was written, well, as later on, Raymond Benson will tell you.
So let's go to another poem.
This is the great seal of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
And from early days, to me, it has been the great seal of terror.
Whenever I do a program, I always dedicate this program to Bandolo, Burjanek, Kogel, Misera, plus the dozens of other men and women, convicted Cold War spies who lost their lives under guillotine, and to the memory of all my fellow comrades in chains who spent years of agony in prisons behind the Iron Curtain,
and also to the people you are about to meet.
Espionage was a weapon during the Cold War.
World War II has not come to a closing yet when the Cold War began.
How did it start?
It was a result of a number of poor, bad, and stupid decisions by the Western allies at the conferences of Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam.
Stalin openly showed his intention to spread communism around the globe, not shying away from using military force.
March 1946, at the commencement speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Prime Minister Winston Churchill stated that from the port city of Stettin at the Baltic to the Aegean Sea, an Iron Curtain descended over Europe.
And the Berlin Lift began shortly after the West woke up when it realized four and a half million Red Troops stationed in Poland , Hungary, the Soviet zone were ready to push westwards to the Atlantic.
NATO , the North Atlantic Treaty Organization , was formed.
Formed on the opposite side was the Warsaw Military Pact.
The Warsaw Pact spanned from Vladivostok in Siberia to the Fulda Gap in Western Germany, covering 11 of the 24 time zones of our globe.
Who was in the Warsaw Pact alliance?
These are the flags of the Warsaw Pact member states.
Albania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.
And the pact was established 1955 and disintegrated March 91 with the fall of the Soviet Union.
Why is it called the Warsaw Pact?
Well, very simple.
It's called the Warsaw Pact because the treaty was signed in the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw, Poland.
And the logo of the Socialistic Brother in Arms was their goal, together we will defeat American imperialism and the capitalistic Wall Street warmongers.
And remember, at least from history, Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations, pounding the shoe and threatening the world, we will bury you.
You probably heard it in history.
Well, later we'll get back to Mr.
Khrushchev.
Now, the Berlin Wall.
The Cold War was most visible here in Berlin.
When NATO and the Warsaw Pact maintained a threatening powder keg set to explode at any time, and Berlin became a bloody battleground.
On Checkpoint Charlie, which is known there, was a confrontation between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union where tanks were actually facing each other with loaded barrels.
And you know, this was the closest we ever came to a military conflict.
The world waited for the first shot.
Well, intelligence.
Intelligence is the better word for espionage.
The West is building up and restoring its military strengths.
And the strength of an armed military force lies within the mastery of intelligence.
More battles were fought, manipulated, won, influenced by actions far removed from the battlefield.
In many cases not even recorded by history.
Namely, by means of espionage.
Basically, to know what the other side has is a battle half won.
Not to know is a battle or a mission half or totally lost.
Think of the Rosenbergs, the Bay of Pigs, Paul Revere, and other pieces of intelligence which changed the course of history.
And the Cold War was no different.
Now, let me give you an introduction to Espionage 101.
And let's clear up a few things about espionage.
We, the United States, do not commit acts of espionage.
This is being done always by the other side.
We just gather intelligence, right, that you know.
So, now, let me get you acquainted with three historical events in world, international, and national espionage.
So let me talk about the first event, and the world's second oldest profession.
Now, the first profession you have to consult somebody else.
Dr.
Ruth would be the right person.
Okay, so let's go back.
Some 4,500 years ago, according to the Old Testament, reading from the book of Numbers, chapter 13, 1733, the Lord said to Moses, send men to spy out the land of Canaan, go into the Negev, and go up the hill country, and see what the land is like, and see the people who dwell in it.
Are they strong or weak, few or many?
Are they tall or small, and the cities they live in?
Are these camps or strongholds with walls around them?
And these swords, and these swords, are those short or long?
Well, after 40 days, these men returned and reported the finding, making this the oldest reported spy mission in the world, and also the world's second oldest profession on record.
And that's not for you, that's only for people who slept during Bible studies.
And we see the chapter 13, sent men to spy out the land, spied out the land, spying out the land, and just spying and spying in the Bible.
So what does it really tell you?
It tells you one thing, that the spy is the creation of God.
Now, should you disagree, you take it up with your pastor, priest, or rabbi, and tell him he should not tell you all that thing in the Bible.
Because that's what it is.
Thank you.
So now let's go to the second event, the spy mission operation overflight.
Well, from...
Okay, I have to go back.
Okay.
On May 1st, 1955, from an airport in Peshawar, Pakistan, the U-2 takes off with a destination in Bordo, Nabek.
Now, their mission was the same objective, go and spy out the land.
See if the swords are long or short.
In this case, the swords, technology has changed.
The swords were not any more those swords.
The swords at that time were ICBM, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, stationed right there in the area of Kyrgyzstan, where you see the plane.
And those missiles had names of the targets written on them.
And those targets read Chicago, San Francisco, New York.
They were all heading our way.
And we wanted to know what is their potential of those swords, those swords short or long.
Okay, here just we see, we know what happened to the U-2.
It was shot down.
And there we see a fragment of the U-2 spy plane.
And it shows Francis Gary Powers, the son of the U-2 pilot.
And by the way, there is a movie on right now, Bridge of Spies.
I encourage you to visit this, to see that movie.
I'm going to talk about it.
Okay, that is the only piece of the U-2 which is currently in the United States.
The rest of the U-2 is in a military museum in Moscow.
And we are showing this in Oshkosh at Airshow.
Okay, so now we know the world's most famous spy exchange.
What happened to U-2 pilot Powers?
Well, he was exchanged for Rudolf Abel, the force on that picture here.
The exchange took back on the Glyndyka Bridge, Powers for Abels.
And now
, let me go to the third event.
And that is my mission, Soviet airfields.
Early August 1955, I am crossing the Iron Curtain into East Germany.
As a reference only, this was five years prior to the 2U incident in 1961.
And my mission is the same as it had been 4,500 years ago.
Nothing changed.
Go and see the strongholds and the swords.
Are those short or long?
Well, only in my time, 4,500 years later, the swords have changed.
The swords at this time are now MiG-15s and MiG-17s.
The fuel depots, radar installations, and troop movements, and all other military objective of importance.
So my mission went well.
Then, the unexpected happened.
I was caught in action.
As shown in the following communication, with SAC, the Strategic Air Command in Dallas, and direct FBI eyes only, we see a note.
G2 agent Marcus lost in the cold.
Little, little gobbledygook here, and as of 9-15-55, the intelligence operative, also known as Ronald Marcus and Stanislaw Swoboda, failed to maintain contact with his base in West Germany.
Now, let me just add an 11-month silence set in.
So let me describe to you the U-boat.
In October 1946, the KGB established an underground central detainment prison located in Hohenschönhausen in Berlin.
A section of cells were without daylight.
The treatment of prisoners were physical violence, psychological torture, standing only and water cells, disorientation, isolation, cold, heat, water, noise cells, feeding salty food with the absence of water.
These were the most common physical torture.
1951, the prison became under German administration.
So, what happened to Agent Marcus?
Well, we'll hear again from him the first time in November.
So during the last days of November in 1955,
during the last days in November of 1955, this underground KGB-Stasi interrogation cell in East Berlin held two men.
Prisoner number 12-2 and prisoner number 12-3.
From here, prisoner 12-2, British spy 554, Heinz Friedman, was led to the guillotine and beheaded on December 22, 1955.
Prisoner G-2, prisoner 12-3, G-2, United States Army intelligence operative, received the sentence of 13 years and was transported to a maximum security prison.
I was classified as a maximum security prisoner.
This is my prison guard.
Later on, if you have a chance, you can go in the other section of the safe house.
There is a cell door from this KGB prison and if you open the clip, you can see the prison uniform, this prison uniform on display right here in the safe house.
The safe house has some history.
The red arm and leg bands signify a maximum security prisoner to be held in constant isolation.
Let's follow just agent 554 Friedemann.
And Friedemann was turned into the KGB by British double agent Kim Philby.
This is the final interrogation of British agent 554.
He was interrogated by Major General Gerhard Niebling, who also was my second interrogator.
And as we just follow, if I followed him a little bit in his later life, in 1945, Niebling was a farmhand.
In 55, a lieutenant and interrogator.
In 1989, Major General.
And in 1990, he was the deputy defense minister and the co-author of the four plus two German unification treaty.
What did I do?
Okay, step on something.
Let me just brush... okay.
That is the presidential pardon for clemency was denied.
And British agent Heinz Friedemann.
And I also make a reference to U.S.
agent Eli Bachitis during the time in my interrogation.
She was my cellmate on the right side.
And every morning, day or so, I never saw that woman.
We made a little, you know, like a good morning by a code or scratch on the wall.
And one day it stopped.
Well, what happened?
I learned later on, Eli Bachitis, she also was then executed.
One day she had lost.
So, after the clemency was denied, they were transported to the death house in Dresden.
And here, 46 Western agents were guillotined.
These are only those ones I know which were guillotined during my time.
Some I met, some I lived the last days with, and some I only heard about.
This is the cell block, the place of no return.
And this is the execution holding cell.
And here is where you live the last moments of your life, see the last ray of light, eat the last meal, mumble the last prayer, and then, with an indescribable fear, you will enter the world of darkness forever.
This is the protocol of execution, and just let me read the excerpt from my buddy, Friedemann.
The condemned was notified that his petition for mercy had been denied, and that the execution will be carried out during the morning hours of December 22nd, 1955.
The condemned remained calm to his announcement, and when asked, he begged to be allowed to write to his family and to smoke.
He also begged for something to eat.
All his wishes were granted.
The condemned spent the night smoking and writing.
He kept calm all night and caused no problems.
At 0255 hours, he was shackled and led into the execution room, where in the presence of three comrades from the Stasi Berlin, and comrade Dr.
Strobeck, chief medical examiner, as well as the warden, the verdict was briefly announced once more.
Thereafter, he was sent over to the executioner, and the execution lasted two seconds, and the execution took place right here.
This is the guillotine.
After he was guillotined, the official death of cause was written, and this is a copy of the original execution, and it's in German, and the cause of death tells you... that means heart failure.
So, basically, you know, you talk to any medical, once you have this chapter, you have a heart failure, so, whatever.
Okay, that's a very interesting list.
This is the list of the people I had been with, and the dates on here actually show the dates of execution, like in this one, Helen Barchaitis, by the way.
She was one of our most important agents we ever had.
She was the secretary of the Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, and she was, during that time, our girl.
Whatever happened in that office, we knew that.
And of course, I heard about it later on.
They were so mad at her, that when she was executed, they turned her around, facing the blade up, and ridiculed her before they had the blade come down.
That was Helen.
Here we see Heinz Friedemann, that cellmate, prisoner 12-1, and on and on.
Well, these are my discharge papers, and so basically, returning after six years and two weeks, stepping on western soil again, I filed a two-word report.
Very simple.
Mission accomplished.
I was alive.
There are two ways of... nobody ever stays in prison.
They all leave prison.
In our two positions, you can leave it.
It's horizontal and vertical.
I was lucky enough, I returned and stepped out of that vertical position.
So, thank you, thank you.
Well, that goes a little bit detailed.
Don't even go there, because those things don't even exist.
Okay, but there's something very interesting.
There's something that happened only half an hour from here.
Well, espionage worked during the Cold War.
You know, I took that line from Eric Murray Remark's book, Nothing New on the Western Front.
And here we are, in Waukesha, at the missile base in Waukesha, which we desperately want as part of the Cold War Museum.
And there we are.
There's Powers, the son of U2 pilot Powers.
And there we see Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev.
And, of course, me then.
And there we are now, historians.
We belong in the Cold War Museum.
And we have now people from both sides.
So, Sergei Khrushchev is in the Cold War Museum.
So is John Eisenhower, the son of President Eisenhower.
So basically now the children of them get together and discuss what was wrong or right with the Cold War, any case.
But there is not.
Now, here this is a shot taken in the missile silo at Waukesha.
And there is Sergei Khrushchev and I.
And we were discussing.
And as we talked, as we talked, I just couldn't hold back.
And I said, you know Sergei, do you remember when your old man, wherever he is now, in heaven or hell, we don't know, but he is somewhere out there.
You know, when he went and he pounded his shoe on that, on the table in the U.N.
and he said, we will bury you.
I said, you know, when you see him, just tell him, give him my regards and tell him that Rona said, when you see your old man, tell him that if he would have wanted to bury us, we would have converted him into a mushroom cloud from here on.
If it's true or not, I don't know.
I talk with my hands.
And that is basically where one of the reporters thought, I want to choke him.
But that was not my intent at all.
I'm just gesturing.
But that is basically when I told him, whenever you see your old man, tell him that we would have that.
Let me just go there.
Okay, this is the document of Gosprius.
We do not have the time to go into details.
Where I escaped from the east to the west, another time.
That's another about my activities in the KGB, the fifth column in West Germany.
I'm just taking reference.
Okay, and that is one of my...
Okay, that is one from my book.
And basically it is summarizing it and it says, the seventh spy mission behind the Iron Curtain proved to be the unlucky last.
Dooming the author, wanted to rescue barely 23 to be confined to a communist dungeon.
Thrown into an underground prison literally without a gleam of daylight, he began a 13-year sentence that seemed like several lifetimes stretched end to end, all terminated by new terror through punishment, interrogation, and started anew by entering into one of the 68 underground cells that had become the main interrogation prison of East Germany's State Security Police.
Here is a book which I would recommend, Stasi, The Untold Story of the East German Police.
It's written by John Okola, who here very humbly introduces himself, being the European chief correspondent of the Washington Post.
Well, he was for, I believe, 20 years.
What actually John Okola is not saying in here publicly is that he was also the second man in command of General Harrington, who was the chief of the CIA in Berlin.
He wrote a book, and actually it was in this book where he actually went through, when a declassification process took back and my name was just removed and, you know, and so on and so forth, that he contacted me and wrote .
So there is an article in Stasi, so he actually then, after so many years, revealed my identity as, as I am the machinist , which was my cover name.
So, at this point, thank you, and whatever time we have, I'm ready for some questions, if I can just...
So, any questions?
Yes, sir?
Well, you know, it's... you gave me a question , I want to give you a fast answer .
I'm thankful that my mother taught me how to pray.
That was just about, that was just about all what you had.
The whole darkness, whatever it is.
Yeah.
It was basically my faith.
Yeah.
And you know, let me just tell you, because you said this, I spent some awful time, I have been in many, in many other cells, I was in a cold cell, you know, this, whatever.
That was the worst cell, because I remember that.
You know, the worst thing whatever can happen to you, be in a boat, somewhere in the ocean, and you are there with your best friend, and there is only one ring.
Live.
Now, the same situation.
There was the, there was the 21st of November, 1955, I will never forget it in my life.
I was called up, brought up again, and there is an officer, who is just very bureaucratic, he just announced, he said, look, prisoner, you are up here, I am not your interrogator, I am not interested in whatever it is, but I am just having an announcement to make,
here, go ahead, I just have to announce that you will not be executed.
Here, sign.
And that was the time where I actually, he had it signed, and dated, and this is how I know it was the, it was the 21st of November.
I already, in my mind, I thought, I thought it must have been very shortly, like a week before Christmas.
I lost track.
Right ?
So, and then I was just, I went back in my cell, and there, a couple days earlier, Friedemann returned, and there is a story in itself again, and he said, you know what, I'm going to be executed, and now, I live with a death candidate, you know, I mean,
he never slept, you know what I said, but what I saw was, was, there was that little lamp up there, and when he stood, when he stood, that mean, he was just sweating, I don't know where he took that liquid from, but it was just running constantly, it was cold in the cell,
kind of, and as I looked, and as I looked against that light, that sweat had actually red, red pigments.
And there is, now again, again, we are coming back to the faith.
I think my mother, a very simple woman, country woman, I think in her entire, in her entire life, she only read two books, one was the Bible, which was that thick, and the other was a book on health, and there was everything how to cure from a calf to a child with earaches,
one of those things, so there was it.
And there she always read those pictures in that Bible , and there she always said, and you know , and there was the time when they let poor Jesus up there, and up there, and he was so afraid that Magdalena came and she gave him that, her scarf, and she wiped off the blood from his face.
And you know, and that was just about what hit me there.
It might be pretty dumb, but that is basically what it was.
So it was faith in this what gets you through.
Any other questions?
Okay, now, how much time we have?
Then I will tell you a first story how we found...
Do we have still 15 minutes?
Okay.
Now, so people disappeared.
When I, when I was released from prison, and I went through the debriefing, and I told my debriefers, well among other things, you know, I think they are, they are guillotining over there.
And well, I was received with a lot of skeptics, and they said, now listen, we did not send you into the French Revolution, did we?
Like guillotine.
Then how do you know that?
I said, well, how do I know that?
Well, nobody told me, but I heard it.
So where did you hear that?
I said, well, I heard it in the walls.
Oh my God, I heard it in the walls.
How did you hear it?
Well, I heard it by scratching on the pipes.
So, how you take an informant who tells you he gets all that information, right?
He picks it up from scratching on the wall, from tapping on the pipes, from rumors, and on and on.
So basically, that was a thing.
Okay, you know what, we know the stress you're in.
Why don't we just, why don't you just, have you ever been in the Alps?
Why don't we just get you a week in the Alps and just keep walking between the mountains and see the reindeer hopping from rock to rock I would go in two weeks and, you know, forget all this stuff.
You know what, why don't we send you out?
We send you out three weeks.
So I'm in the Alps, I've been walking, so that, and things are going in my head.
I could never forget.
So for many, many, many years, I'm carrying this guillotining, this, those guys never showed up, which I, which I lost track of.
And then something happened.
There is a unification of Germany and a little cemetery in Tolkovitz, outside from Dresden .
The grave diggers, the sun came out and they are, and they are taking their, their sandwiches and they sit outside and, and there is a kid among them and he said, hey you guys, have you ever heard of that old grave digger here?
Well, whatever happened, he just, no, you know about this guy, he taught me how to dig the graves and then he just disappeared.
You know, that guy who always talked to Goofy, he, he always talked to Goofy, he always said, you know, somebody, somebody, somebody should one day, right, that tree over there, that grassy area, somebody should put a shovel there.
That's all what he said, right ?
So, and that kid is just talking about this and this and this and he, the kid just talks about it even in, in, in the local tavern and, and somebody, somebody just heard and he said, well, what are you talking, right?
And sure enough , we'll make that story short, they went in.
They went in, right, to that grassy area in Torkovitz, put the shovel in and what do you think they found out?
They found hundreds of skeletons, including every single one of the 46 of my buddies.
They found them right there.
That is how they dug them out and that is how Friedemann was unearthed early by Chinese and all the, and all the Western agents I just listed on my thing, they were all unearthed there.
Just to think, this is how it worked.
Yes, sir?
You know, I do have a, yeah, it's okay.
Of course, as you've gone through everything, were there any other survivors that, that you maybe keep in contact with today?
Yeah, yeah, well, yes, yes, good question.
Yes, after that, I kept, I kept, I kept contact with some of them and over the years, but you know, look, actually, actually, I was one of the youngest one.
I was one of the youngest one.
Let me put it this way.
I actually started, the story in itself, read my book, then you'll see that.
I started in intelligence when I was 17 years old, right?
That is when I started, so I was one of the youngest one.
I infiltrated, I infiltrated the Communist Party and on and on and on and on, okay, before I went into military intelligence.
And the other people were always older, they were older, you know, and so when, last year, last year, I met two, two of my associates, and there it is, a very, very sad.
In both cases, there is that Peter, he spent nine and a half years, and after he was released, he was successful, he made his Ph.D.
in mathematics, worked for IBM, and now I was, I was sitting with him, you know, and I felt really sorry for him, because most of the time, he didn't even know who I was.
And the other one, the other one, very, very successful, I mean, if you wouldn't know the stories, I mean, you know, like today, you are all hackers, but in our time, in our time, there was no, I didn't even know how to write computer, that word didn't exist.
It did not exist.
And if, well, the last three minutes, one minute?
Okay.
Pardon me?
Okay.
Well, basically, so, so, so, the people, the people which were very active, very intelligent, are now actually, by age, human wrecks, and, you know, by the way, I'm 84 years old now, and so, thank you.
So I still remember, and so actually, too bad, we don't have enough time, and now you got that fellow who really wrote all those books on James Bond, and he is going to talk the rest of it.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you, Warner.
Just a reminder, open bar right now.