October 19, 2021 in Berlin. It was a cloudy morning, the temperatures weren’t up to 10 degrees when the man hit the sidewalk.
At 7:20 a.m., the body of the 35-year-old employee of the Russian embassy in Berlin was found. He fell out the window. Or been overthrown. Cause of death: unclear. Exact time of death: also unclear.
The dead man in front of the Russian embassy: According to the German security authorities, he was a camouflaged agent of the Kremlin!
A crime thriller, which was first reported by “Spiegel” yesterday, is taking its course: The Berlin police cannot initiate a death investigation. The embassy blocks. The body is quickly taken out of the country.
What remains are questions: Accident? Suicide? Murder?
One thing is certain: lintel windows are an unusually common way of death in the empire of the Russian rulers. Anyone who talks too much in the country falls out of the window or is run over. Lintels recently hit a noticeable number of doctors who spoke out against the Kremlin’s corona policy in Russia. Traitors used to fall out of the windows in Paris, Berlin or London.
At that time there was the Cold War. Today again.
Now the lintel in the eternal espionage capital Berlin!
World famous: Agents were exchanged on the Glienicke Bridge between Berlin-Wannsee and Potsdam during the Cold War (film: “Bridge of Spies”).
During the GDR era, Berlin-Karlshorst was the western headquarters of the notorious KGB: From there, work was carried out in the GDR and, above all, against the West. Most of the papers that today’s Kremlin ruler Waldimir Putin (69) once sent as a KGB agent from Dresden to his Directorate S in Moscow also ended up there.
The Moscow agents went into hiding in Potsdam in the chaos of the Wende: until 1994 they were camouflaged as the western group of the Soviet armed forces – they also organized the reorganization there, pulled the strings for many of their cadre’s political and economic careers in a united Germany.
Since then, the Kremlin network has been operating covertly through companies, institutes, associations and think tanks. The old KGB structures: today largely privatized.
Experts assume there are 3000 to 5000 active or “sleeping” agents, sources and influencers of the Russians in Germany! Among them: many “illegals” who were smuggled into both parts of Germany during the Soviet era (almost 100 each / year): Agents – can be activated if necessary. Active attention, for example, when trying to expand the Pegida movement from Dresden to Potsdam. Others as extras in staged fairy tales of the Russian media (“Case Lisa”).
More than 300 Russians work in the embassy in Berlin – 25 percent are agents.
Spies keep flying up:
►A few weeks ago the Attorney General arrested a small employee of the British embassy in Potsdam. He had passed documents on.
►At the end of October, Jens F., an ex-Stasi man, was convicted for having forwarded building documents from the Bundestag to the GRU military intelligence service.
►The trial of the contract killing in the Kleiner Tiergarten is still pending before the Berlin regional court: On August 23, 2019, a Kremlin contract killer shot a Georgian citizen in the middle of Berlin.
Spied for the Kremlin and posed in front of the Russian embassy: David Smith from Potsdam was arrested in AugustPhoto: EAST2WEST NEWS
►For years, US services have observed at least two senior civil servants close to Angela Merkel who are suspected of being Moscow’s influencers. One was transferred.
Other spies in Berlin allow Western services to work in a targeted manner or feed them with false information, and follow the routes taken by stolen documents and information. For years, for example, the wife of a well-known urban planning researcher in Berlin, as an employee of the Left parliamentary group, carried secret documents from an investigative committee of the Bundestag directly into the Russian embassy.
Agent nest: The government district is also bugged from the Russian embassy in Berlin. It is better not to discuss anything confidential while walking …Photo: AFP via Getty Images
Moscow is so deeply rooted in Berlin that it is no longer just about pure espionage. Many agents are now deployed to secure the hidden property of the Putin clique. Because the wives of the defense minister and high-ranking Kremlin and secret service cadres have invested millions in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg via covert channels, according to German security authorities. In Berlin, for example, in well-known shopping malls.
But above all, the Kremlin’s sources of income have to be protected from Berlin: for example the refinery in Schwedt (Rosneft) and the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines along with the pipelines through Germany. Because. Nowhere does the Kremlin earn more with gas and oil than in the West – and above all in Germany. In the greater Berlin area, almost 90 percent of petrol comes from Kremlin refineries.
And if you want to talk about secrets undisturbed, you should not do so in Berlin near the Unter den Linden boulevard – the Russian embassy can monitor you from a wide area from its embassy premises.