An insight into Cold War espionage through the life of Hüseyin Yildirim, a mechanic turned Stasi spy handler.
Written by Bernd von Kostka, expert and author of Capital of Spies, we’re given front-row seats to one of the deadliest duos in GDR history.
In 1979, Hüseyin Yildirim was living in West Berlin and started to approach the East Berlin Stasi “to do business”. He was mainly interested in money but in fact he had nothing to offer. No contacts to any of the occupation forces in Berlin and no contacts to any kind of interesting persons. So the Stasi did not cooperate with him, sent him back to West Berlin, and told him to come back if he ever got access to anything interesting.
So Yildirim applied for a job as a mechanic in a US Car repair shop for US soldiers in 1982 – and that was his entrance into the world of espionage. Now the Stasi were at least willing to listen to him. While repairing their car he starts chatting with the young soldiers about their job as well as about their financial situation to find out if they could be interested in extra money. That was the way he met James Hall. Hall offered his service to the KGB several month before so it was easy for Yildirim to hire him for the East German Stasi. James Hall was working on the Teufelsberg – the famous West-Berlin listening station and of course, the Stasi were very interested in any kind of information coming from there.
From 1982 to 1985 Hall managed to get documents out of the Teufelsberg and handed them to Yildirim who went to East-Berlin to negotiate the price for the documents and to give them to the Stasi. The motivation for Yildirim and Hall was always money and therefore they became the dream team for the Stasi during those years. In 1985 the Teufelsberg episode closed because Hall was transferred back to the US but later applied to the 205th Military Intelligence in Frankfurt/Germany. There he continued to spy for Yildirim (and the Stasi) before both were arrested in December 1988 in the United States.
Remarkable that as early as 1982 Yildirim was accused to be a spy for the Satsi and was interviewed by the West-Berlin office for Counter Intelligence. But his open nature and his ability to persuade people helped him to survive this critical situation. James Hall was also targeted in 1985 when a huge amount of cash in his car was noticed by his colleagues; he also managed to get away with this by weaving stories about the rich relatives of his German wife.
Yildirim was sentenced in May 1989 to a lifetime in prison but was hoping to get released in a Prisoner/Spy exchange between the US and the DDR. But in November 1989 the DDR collapsed and a Unified Germany had definitely no interest in Yildirim. Finally after 15 years he was released from prison and sent back to Turkey in 2003.
After his release Yidirim met the former East German Spymaster Markus Wolf for the very first time at the Berlin Allied Museum in 2004 – where I work.
Capital of Spies
By Bernd von Kostka and Sven Felix Kellerhoff
For almost half a century, the hottest front in the Cold War was right across Berlin. From summer 1945 until 1990, the secret services of NATO and the Warsaw Pact fought an ongoing duel in the dark. Throughout the Cold War, espionage was part of everyday life in both East and West Berlin, with German spies playing a crucial part of operations on both sides. The construction of the wall in 1961 changed the political situation and the environment for espionage – the invisible front was now concreted and unmistakable. But the fundamentals had not changed: Berlin was and would remain the capital of spies until the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this book Journalist Sven Felix Kellerhoff and historian Bernd von Kostka describe the spectacular successes and failures of the various secret services based in the city.
Bernd Von Kostka is curator at the Allied Cold War Museum in Berlin.
Sven Felix Kellerhoff is a journalist.
Casemate | Hardback | £25.00
Pre-order via Casemate
Follow