RUMRICH, GUNTHER

In January 1938 Capt. Guy Liddell, then MI5’s deputy director of counterespionage, visited Washington, D.C., to share information about MI5’s surveillance on Mrs. Jessie Jordan, a suspected German spy resident in Dundee and working as a hairdresser with an unusually large overseas postbag. Liddell supplied the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the address of Jordan’s principal correspondent in the United States, a “Mr. Kron,” and the interception of her mail resulted in the identification of Sgt. Gunther Rumrich, a Sudetan German who had become a naturalized American citizen and was a deserter from the U.S. Army who had absconded with the sergeants’ mess funds from Fort Missoula, Montana. Under interrogation, Rumrich confessed that he had been recruited as a spy in May 1936 and ever since had communicated with his controller in Wilhelmshaven through Jordan. In addition, he named the other members of his network, including two couriers working on the SS Europa and four other spies, among them an aircraft mechanic and a draftsman working for the Sikorsky plant at Farmingdale, New York. J. Edgar Hoover’s delight at rounding up a major Abwehr spy ring was tempered only by the embarrassment caused by one of his special agents, Leon G. Turrou, who promptly gave a mildly inaccurate account of the case in his book Nazi Spies in America and was dismissed from the FBI.

ROTE KAPELLE

The German code name applied by the  Sicherheitsdienst to a large  Soviet espionage network, led by Leopold Trepper, which extended through much of Western Europe and was centered in Belgium and Germany before and during World War II. After the war, the Central Intelligence Agency devoted considerable resources to studying the Rote Kapelle and one major report, written by Dan Pinkus, was declassified in 1979. Further work, based on the network’s intercepted wireless traffic, was undertaken by Jim Olsen for the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.

ROTE DREI

The German name applied by the Swiss Bundespolizei to a Soviet spy ring, led by a Hungarian, Rudolf Rössler, that was active in  Switzerland during World War II. It acquired high-quality military intelligence about the Nazis and passed it to wireless operators for transmission to Moscow. The first two radio operators, Edouard Hamel and Margaret Bolli, were arrested in October 1943 after their traffic had been monitored for some months, and the third, an Englishman named Alan Foote, was caught while transmitting from his apartment in Lausanne at the end of November 1943. In the highly compartmented spy ring, all three had been run by a Hungarian cartographer, Sándor Radó, who escaped to Paris in 1944 and was evacuated to Moscow. Code-named DORA, an anagram of his surname, Radó had avoided direct contact with Rössler, who was code-named LUCY, and seemed to have liaised closely with a branch of Swiss military intelligence headed by Hans Hausamann that had penetrated Nazi Germany with a network known as VIKING.
The precise relationship between Hausamann and Rössler has never been clarified, but when Rössler was arrested after the war on a charge of having spied for Czechoslovakia, he was quickly released, prompting speculation that he had always acted for the Swiss.
Intriguingly, some of the messages  intercepted and read by Swiss cryptanalysts suggested that Moscow Center was equally keen to learn the sources of Rössler’s information, code-named TEDDY, ANNA, OLGA, and WERTHER, but he never identified them. As all the participants are now dead, and the memoirs written by Foote, Handbook for Spies, and Radó, Codename DORA, do not identify them, only the permanently sealed Swiss intelligence archives can explain the Rote Drei’s true sources.

ROMEO SPIES

Men employed for the purpose of seducing and recruiting women with access to useful information. The strategy became known primarily in West Germany during the Cold War when a series of spies was identified as having entered into relationships with East German agents, often directed by the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) chief, Markus Wolf, who established a reputation as a shrewd manipulator of vulnerable women, often secretaries working for the Federal Republic.
Wolf successfully  penetrated Konrad Adenauer’s chancellery with an agent code-named  FELIX, who pretended to be a sales representative marketing beauty products to hairdressers and seduced one of the chancellor’s less attractive secretaries. Their relationship lasted for years before the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) started to take an interest in FELIX and he was withdrawn to safety in East Berlin. As was typical, Wolf was able to exploit the situation by learning from FELIX of another potentially vulnerable secretary who worked for Hans Globke, Adenauer’s secretary of state. She was promptly targeted by Wolf’s star Romeo, Hans Stöhler, and proved to be an excellent source, to the point that she was herself recruited as a spy and code-named GUDRUN. She continued to supply valuable information until Stöhler, a former Luftwaffe pilot whose cover was that of a real estate agent, fell ill and was brought home to die. After his death, GUDRUN, who thought she had been working for the KGB, gave up espionage.
In a similar case, Gabrielle Gast, a  Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) analyst, fell for Karl-Heinz Schneider while she was completing her doctorate in Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1968. Under his guidance, she applied for a job with the BND at its headquarters in Pullach and by 1987 was deputy chief of the BND’s Soviet Bloc political branch and a dedicated convert to Communism. Three years later she was betrayed by a senior HVA officer anxious to ingratiate himself with the Federal Republic, who knew only that Wolf had been running a woman inside the BND for years and that she had adopted a handicapped child, but this was enough for the BfV to identify Gast and she was imprisoned.
Wolf also handled Dagmar Kahlig-Scheffler, a 27-year-old blonde divorcee and another of Stöhler’s conquests who in December 1975 went to work in Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s private office. She was caught a couple of years later when her HVA controller, Peter Goslar, came under BfV surveillance. When Goslar’s home was searched, the BfV found among his papers Schmidt’s notes of a conversation with British prime minister James Callaghan about his recent discussions with President Jimmy Carter. Goslar was then watched as he collected more information from Kahlig-Scheffler, who was brought in for interrogation. She revealed that she had fallen for Stöhler while on holiday in Bulgaria with her seven-year-old daughter, and she was subsequently sentenced to four years and five months’ imprisonment for espionage.
Helge Berger, a buxom secretary in the Foreign Ministry, believed that the handsome “Peter Krause” she had met in Bonn was a South African working for the British Secret Intelligence Service. This was a classic  false flag operation, complete with a senior “British” officer who flew into Frankfurt to debrief her. Actually, he was a former Wehrmacht prisoner of war who spoke fluent English.
He persuaded her to supply her boyfriend Krause with thousands of copies of classified documents over the next six years. She was arrested and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Wolf’s best false flag operator was Roland Gandt, who persuaded a German secretary at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, at Fontainebleau, that he was a Danish intelligence officer operating in France under journalistic cover. Accepting that Gandt was a national of another NATO country, Margerete fell for him in Vienna but, as a devout Roman Catholic, insisted that she confess her espionage to a priest. Ever the master of improvisation, Wolf arranged for a bogus priest to hear her confession at a remote Jutland church and give her an equally worthless absolution.
Dietmar Schumacher, another of Wolf’s stars, kept up the pretense of being a peace activist named Olaf for the 12 years of his relationship with an English secretary, Helen Anderson. Code-named MARY, she was persuaded by her lover Olaf to stay in Germany and obtain a job at a U.S. Army base in West Berlin, where she stole classified NATO documents for him. She was arrested only in March 1992 when Schumacher’s HVA controller, Karl-Heinz Michalek, confessed, compromising Olaf, who was revealed as Schumacher, a man with a wife and a son in East Germany. Because Anderson was able to demonstrate that she had no idea her lover had been a Communist spy, she was sentenced to just two weeks’ community service before she settled down in Arbroath; Schumacher received a suspended prison term of 12 months.
Another of Wolf’s Romeos, Herbert Schöter, started an affair with Gerda Osterreider, a slender 19-year-old student who was on a languages course at the Alliance Française in Paris. When she returned to Bonn in 1966, she got a job as a cipher clerk in the Foreign Office and gave her lover the original teletype tape on which incoming diplomatic telegrams were printed. Five years later she was posted to Warsaw where, in Schöter’s absence, she took up with a German  journalist to whom she had confessed her espionage, but he reported her and she was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.
In September 1972 Renate Lutze, a secretary in the Ministry of Defense married her Romeo, Lothar, and was arrested with him at their Bonn apartment in June 1976. She was sentenced to six years, he to 12, but later they were freed in an exchange negotiated by Wolf.
It was only when the HVA’s archives fell into Western hands, and Rainer Rupp was given 12 years in prison, that the scale of the HVA’s operation was fully grasped. Rupp’s English wife Ann, codenamed  TURQUOISE, had worked at NATO’s headquarters and had willingly spied for her husband, whose name had appeared in a file marked TOPAZ. She received a 22-month suspended prison sentence in 1994. Wolf’s other agents included Ingrid Garbe, a member of West Germany’s mission at NATO headquarters in Brussels; Ursel Lorenzen, who worked in NATO’s general secretariat; Imelda Verrept, a Belgian secretary in NATO; Inge Goliach, who had penetrated the Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Christel Broszey, secretary to the CDU’s deputy leader Kurt Biedenkopf; Helga Rödiger, a secretary in West Germany’s Ministry of Finance; and Ursula Höfs, a secretary in the Christian Democratic party. As a consequence of these security breaches, the new BfV president, Dr. Richard Meier, in 1979 belatedly introduced a new vetting procedure, code-named Operation REGISTRATION, to screen the partners of single women holding sensitive posts.

ROCKEFELLER COMMISSION

Headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and appointed by President Gerald Ford, the Rockefeller Commission investigated allegations of misconduct made against the Central Intelligence Agency in December 1974 by journalist Seymour Hersh. The commission concluded that the CIA had acted beyond its 1947 charter but it was overshadowed by the simultaneous congressional Pike and Church Committees. In contrast, the Rockefeller Commission took evidence in private, using the Vail Report prepared by Director of Central Intelligence William Colby, and reported directly to the president on 6 June 1975. Details of the report, including references to the assassination plots, leaked almost immediately.

RIMINGTON, STELLA

The first woman officer to be appointed director-general of the British Security Service, Rimington began to work for MI5 as a part-time secretary in Delhi when her husband was posted to the British High Commission and the local security liaison officer needed some clerical assistance. Upon her return to London, she joined the organization full-time and worked in every branch, making her an obvious choice to succeed Sir Patrick Walker upon his retirement in 1992. In 2001 she published her memoirs, Open Secret, in which she was fiercely critical of the male-dominated culture she had found in MI5 when she first joined.

REZIDENTURA

The  Russian or  Soviet intelligence organization headed by the rezident and responsible for security and intelligence operations conducted in a particular country. A typical rezidentura will include officers from the political, scientific and technical, counterintelligence, and illegal support lines. In addition there will be security personnel to monitor the local diplomatic community and specially protected cipher clerks to handle  communications. Information about the structure of rezidenturas has come from  defectors, supported by physical and technical surveillance.

REZIDENT

The title of the senior Russian or Soviet intelligence officer in a particular country, undertaking duties identical to a Central Intelligence Agency station chief or a Secret Intelligence Service station commander. Usually working under diplomatic cover, though necessarily at a rank that reflects his true status, the rezident will have a staff of subordinates and may call upon the assistance of cooptees.
During the Cold War, the senior  illegal in a given area was designated the illegal rezident and fulfilled much the same role as his legal counterpart but without diplomatic immunity.

RESETTLEMENT

The term applied to the process of assisting a defector to adopt a new life of political asylum. After some initial euphoria, during which an individual is the focus of intense attention from teams of debriefers, the novelty may wear off. Few defectors are allowed to remain in the intelligence community, receive security clearances, or have access to classified information, and they often experience difficulty in finding new occupations that satisfy them. A report by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation in 1982 highlighted the widespread dissatisfaction among defectors, who felt they had received inadequate preparation for an alien lifestyle and complained about the quality of their handlers after their direct operational usefulness had diminished.
Director of Central Intelligence William Casey acknowledged the immense value of defectors and the potential impact of allowing badly handled defectors to articulate their complaints publicly. He allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to publicize a $1 million bounty for KGB and GRU personnel with useful information and reversed an institutional caution of accepting Soviet defectors at face value in case they turned out to be career-jeopardizing provocations. One of the first to be attracted by Casey’s policy was Vitali Yurchenko, who defected in July 1985 and supplied sufficient information for the CIA to identify Edward Lee Howard and Ronald Pelton. He also revealed that Oleg Gordievsky was suspected of having spied for the British. However, having been thoroughly debriefed, his knowledge of Soviet operations exhausted, Yurchenko was entrusted to CIA security personnel who spoke no Russian and, increasingly disillusioned, he redefected when news of his collaboration with the CIA leaked.

REMOTE VIEWING

Research into the paranormal has been undertaken by several intelligence agencies, and there are reports that the Soviets invested heavily in acquiring an advantage by remote viewing and psychokinesis. The theory of remote viewing is that sheer mental application can enable a suitably trained or gifted individual to project his or her mind into another physical environment and take action as though he or she were actually present, such as by reading and memorizing document. Psychokinesis is the ability to influence or interact with a solid object, perhaps by moving it, by willpower alone. Both techniques, if practical, could be of considerable benefit to any intelligence collection agency, but despite lengthy experiments, no evidence has been found to justify continued investment in the research.

REFERENTURA

The Russian term for the secure accommodation inside diplomatic premises reserved for the exclusive use of intelligence personnel. Usually it includes an office for the rezident, a cipher room, and a soundproof vault in which conversations can be conducted without fear of eavesdropping.

REDEFECTOR

An individual who defects to an adversary and then undergoes a change of heart, for whatever reason, and returns home. Examples are limited, but the most notorious was the KGB’s Vitali Yurchenko, who unexpectedly defected to the Central Intelligence Agency in Rome in July 1985 and then three months later evaded his CIA escort and made his way to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., where he held a press conference to assert that he had been abducted and drugged. Other redefectors include Anatoli Cheboratev, a GRU officer who defected in Brussels in October 1971; Anton Sabotka, in  Canada in 1972; Nikolai Petrov, a GRU officer in Jakarta in June 1972; Lt. Artush Hovasenian of the KGB, in Turkey in July 1972; and Evgenni Sorokin in Vientiane in September 1972.

RASTVOROV, YURI

A defector from the NKVD in Japan in January 1954, Rastvorov approached a Secret Intelligence Service officer after he had taken English lessons from an elderly British lady in Tokyo and negotiated his  resettlement, but at the last moment he changed his mind and opted to go to the United States. Once in America, Rastvorov identified his contacts in Japan and gave his name to two articles published in Life magazine. He later married his Central Intelligence Agency debriefer, with whom he had two daughters, after being divorced by his wife in Moscow, a ballerina.
Under the name Martin Simons, he was an enthusiastic tennis player but an unsuccessful businessman and had to be bailed out financially by his CIAhandlers. Convinced his life was in danger, he always kept a gun handy. Rastvorov/Simons died in 2004 and his obituary, which made front-page news, was based largely on his CIA file, which was hastily declassified for the purpose by his lifelong friend, CIA counterintelligence expert Paul Redmond.

RAINBOW WARRIOR

In July 1985 the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) concluded a lengthy penetration of Greenpeace by sinking the environmental organization’s flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, which was in Auckland Harbor about to lead a flotilla of boats to protest French nuclear tests on Mururoa Atoll in Polynesia. The DGSE sent a team of saboteurs to New Zealand to place limpet mines on the ship’s hull, but after the first detonation, a Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, went back aboard to retrieve his cameras and was drowned. A murder investigation was launched and although most of the DGSE group, which had posed as holidaymakers on a white-water rafting vacation, were evacuated on a yacht to an offshore rendezvous with a  submarine, Dominique Prieur and Alain Maffart were questioned because their rented campervan had been reported acting suspiciously.
The two DGSE officers, posing as Swiss honeymooners named Sophie and Alain Turenge, were identified as intelligence personnel when it was learned that they had not shared a bed in their motel, which happened to belong to the prime minister, and that Maffart had forged an inflated total on his hotel bill even though he had insisted he was not claiming any expenses. The police realized he was on an official mission when his  monitored telephone call to Paris was to a number that Interpol insisted had not been allocated.
Maffart and Prieur pleaded guilty to manslaughter in November 1985 and were sentenced to 10 years in prison, but were released into French custody following a deal which compensated Pereira’s family and Greenpeace. The arrangement required the pair to be confined to a French military facility on Hao Atoll, but a clause covering medical emergencies was invoked in December 1987 to repatriate Maffart, and in May 1988 Prieur returned to France having become pregnant following a visit by her husband. The French government was later held by a United Nations adjudication to have breached the terms of the agreement with New Zealand and was fined a further $2 million.
Although the French government denied all knowledge of the operation and was absolved of responsibility by a supposed independent investigation conducted by senior civil servant Bernard Tricot, it became clear that the DGSE had been authorized by Minister of Defense Charles Hernu, who resigned, as did the DGSE director, Adm. Pierre Lacoste. The episode had caused a major diplomatic incident, but there was minimal political blowback in France about the DGSE’s tactics, although professionals were dismayed that Maffart had compromised his cover by padding his expenses.