Deadly secret of an amateur spy

Press, 21 May 1982, Page 13

Deadly secret of an amateur spy

By

GWYNNE ROBERTS,

who is eo-

author, with Clive Freeman, of “The Coldest War,” published last month by Ullstein, in West Germany.

The growing alarm expressed by the United States Government that Russia is building up a massive superiority in weapons of chemical warfare has not so far been backed by precise intelligence on the ground. Few western undercover agents have succeeded in penetrating the curtain of secrecy surrounding this highly classified subject in Warsaw Pact countries, and much of the American information is hopelessly out of date.

But on two spectacular occasions there has been a breakthrough. The first is well known — in the early 1960 s the Soviet military intelligence colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, was able to give the West the first real indication that Moscow had embarked on a major chemical warfare programme. (He was caught and executed in 1963.) The second has, until recently, remained a secret. It was carried out by an East German professor who worked from a shabby former hospital building in East Berlin’s Noeldner Platz — Professor Adolf-Henning Frucht, a scientist who had almost by chance stumbled (2A chemical warfare secrets so startling he felt he simply had to warn the West.

Frucht was not a professional agent, but, like Penkovsky, he was apprehended.

He managed to escape the death sentence and was given a life term instead. Arrested in 1967, he spent five years of his sentence in solitary confinement in Bautzen maximum security prison near the Czech frontier. He was exchanged in 1977 for Jorge Montes, the former Chilean communist senator who was jailed by the Pinochet regime in 1974.

The Montes case was well documented, but few people had ever heard of Frucht. All that was known was that he was a former director of the East Berlin Institute for Applied Physiology who was sentenced for crimes . committed “on behalf of imperialist powers.” For years, he was the prisoner nobody sawface to face, yet his importance was unmistakeable.

Four governments, including those in Washington and Moscow, were involved in the negotiations which led to his exchange for Montes. In Britain, the press speculated he had been an atom-spy working under Klaus Fuchs, the man who betrayed western nuclear secrets to Russia. In Germany, newspapers said he had been involved in biological warfare research. But they were all off the mark.

In fact, Frucht had gained access-to some of the Warsaw Pact’s most closelyguarded chemical warfare secrets, arid had passed them

to American intelligence operatives in West Berlin. He used a relative whom the Americans had trained at a spy school on West Berlin’s Bundesaliee to ferry. information across the Wall. Frucht, aged 68, a' slim, grey-haired figure with the air of the Prussian aristo-crat-scholar, was one of the eastern bloc’s leading physiologists. He was well acquainted with scientists of the calibre of Manfred von Ardenne, Peter-Adolf Thiessen, and Gustav Hertz, who had all participated in the development of the Soviet atom bomb. Indeed, as far as the Americans were concerned, he was well placed to give them an across-the-board view of scientific developments in East Germany, and the Iron Curtain countries as a whole. At his institute his work ranged from research into sleep, to the use of microorganisms to purify low-level radioactive waste. Research into sport was given a high priority, under Frucht, and he is said to have helped East Germany lay the foundations

for a remarkable breakthrough in sport in the early 19605, particularly in rowing. But one of the scientist’s pet projects concerned industrial toxicology. Frucht and his colleagues had devised a means of detecting and measuring highly toxic industrial waste by’ using luminous bacteria. For years Warsaw Pact and N.A.T.O. scientists had sought for an effective means of tracing and identifying lethal nerve gases, which are odourless anti colourless, and so potent that a speck the size of a pinhead can kill in minutes. They attack the nervous system, causing vomiting and convulsions. In the early 1960 s detection was primitive and inefficient. Frucht’s experiments opened up new possibilities, and soon it was suggested that he test his detection device on Warsaw Pact war gases. As a result he came in regular contact with the army, and through scientists there, learned that East Germany had developed a new chemical weapon which he was convinced was fa>- more

toxic than anything in the western arsenal. “This ghastly stuff could cut through leather or even rubber like a knife through butter,” he said. The poison was so deadly that its lethality was measured in millionths of a gram, according to Frucht. Frucht learned that the chemical warfare agent in question was an adaptation of the standard American nerve gas — VX — which had been “sharpened” by changing its molecular components, and modified to remain active in arctic temperatures. Frucht decided he had to tell the West. One of his more startling disclosures came in late 1962 when the world was poised on the brink of a nuclear war over the Cuban missile crisis. Frucht claims he warned the Americans that the Russians were contemplating using this “cold weather” chemical weapon in a strike against the United States early warning radar defences in Alaska, an act that would have left America wide open to nuclear attack.

combining a quite new technical device with a brilliant military concept. It was all so terrifyingly simple.” Frucht provided the C.I.A. with a breakdown of all aspects of this research he could lay his hands on — from storage and manufacture to war code-names and chemical warfare agents stockpiled in the East. He handed the Americans details of his own detection device, as well as the formulae of the new agent (which his courier smuggled across hidden in a sock). His disclosures appear to have had a considerable impact. In 1962, the United States Army initiated a massive chemical and biological warfare test programme in Alaska. Scientists conducted open-air experiments on the nerve gas Sarin and XV, the chemical weapon adapted by the East for use in cold weather. Details of this work are still classified. Frucht did not go unrewarded. A few months after his arrival in the West, the scientist was driven by C.I.A. representatives to an underground garage in Munich where they handed over a black briefcase containing 320,000 deutschmarks (about $170,000) in new notes. It was his “compensation" for the deprivation he had suffered. Frucht now lives in West Berlin. — “Sunday Times,” London.

"War is suicide if you don’t have a substantial military advantage,” says Professor Frucht. “The ’ two superpowers just can’t afford to wage one in which both begin with the same potential. What alarmed me here was that the Russians were