People's War

[lordroel]

So has the East Germans gotten their hands on some new gear ore are they struggling to keep what they havd in 1990 in service.

[James G]

Aug 27, 2021 18:20:20 GMT lordroel said:

So has the East Germans gotten their hands on some new gear ore are they struggling to keep what they havd in 1990 in service.

They have some new stuff but not much.
MiG-29s (grade A ones, not hand-me-downs) with helmet-mounted sights and AA-11 Archers. T-72 tanks. SA-10 surface-to-air missiles. SS-21 short-range and SS-23 medium-range ballistic missiles.
Those are magic bullets though, only a few. Mostly it is MiG-21s / -23s, T-55s & older SAMs. East Germany is damn well armed but it isn't the Soviet Union.

[James G]

Four – At it again


No wreckage of the aircraft nor remains of those aboard were found following the Gulf of Sirte air crash in August 1994. There had been two notable passengers aboard but also thirteen others who vanished with them along with the East German Air Force’s Tu-154. Like magic, every trace of the passengers and mode of transport had disappeared.

Mielke’s apparent death had a big impact on the future of East Germany with a lot of attention paid to that. However, Uday Hussein was the second notable passenger aboard the VIP transport jet that had been flying from Iraq to the DDR via Libya. He was Saddam’s eldest son. He was also quite the incarnation of the devil. Thoroughly evil in every way, few tears would ever be shed over his demise. Saddam had had many disputes with Uday, violent ones at that, but he was still his son and heir-apparent. Libya’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, a fellow Arab strongman dynamically opposed to the West, had no answers for what had occurred. All he could say was that the aircraft never reached Tripoli where it was supposed to refuel for an onwards flight to East Berlin. That response didn’t satisfy Saddam. He became insanely suspicious that Libya had something to do with the aircraft disappearing and his son vanishing like that. Elsewhere, there were allegations that maybe the Americans, the Israelis even the East Germans themselves had had something to do with it all. Saddam’s mind imagined Libyan complicity though. Qusay Hussein, younger sibling of Uday, expressed doubt to that effect: it made more sense to him to have been either the work of the devious West or Margot Honecker where she secured her position as the new leader without Mielke to stop that. Nonetheless, Saddam wouldn’t be swayed especially when Gaddafi refused to allow Iraqi investigators to fly to Libya. He did let the East Germans send some people but claimed that Libya wouldn’t violate its sovereignty by allowing Iraqis to come an investigate. In the minds of uninformed outsiders, Iraq and Libya were thought to be close in many ways with regard to their shared hostility towards Israel, the United States and the Western-accommodating Gulf Arabs. That wasn’t the case at all though. There was a long-standing clash of personalities between Gaddafi and Saddam meaning that their countries were at odds because each man considered their countries to be no more than an extension of themselves. Both were involved with the East German’s illegal overseas activities through the early Nineties yet had worked to cheat and undercut each other. Mielke had been involved in trying to bring them together to help the DDR yet the only effect had actually been to strain tensions. A married niece of Gaddafi’s had been in East Berlin at a cultural event where Uday had been a guest like she & her husband. Uday had subjected her to a violent sexual assault just like he had done hundreds, maybe thousands of women. Saddam remembered Gaddafi’s fury at that just as he recalled Libya’s history with attacks against aircraft (Lockerbie) and mysterious disappearances (Musa al-Sadr).

The following month, an armed kidnapping occurred in Geneva. That Swiss city was somewhere that foreigners in Europe often visited and among them Arab princelings: royal or those of dictatorial families. The nineteen year-old Mutassim Gaddafi was snatched from outside his hotel with his bodyguards roughed up but left alive to later face the ire of Libya’s ruler. The mercenary team who took the fourth-born son of Gaddafi flew him via a light aircraft to Slovenia after they left Swiss territory for France. From that small, new European country which had not long beforehand been part of Yugoslavia, Mutassim was then put on a larger aircraft by Iraqi agents who took him to Baghdad. Gaddafi had other sons but Saddam was certain that Mutassim would be missed by his father. After a week, contact was made with the Libyans. Saddam used a Lebanese intermediary to send a message to Gaddafi. A trade was demanded: Mutassim for Uday. Gaddafi was unable to make that trade. Furthermore, he was just as enraged as Saddam had been when it came to the fate of one of his sons. That middleman, a notorious arms dealer who had been working with Iraq, Libya & East Germany for some time, was punished for his agency for Saddam with Gaddafi having him shot dead. An Iraqi diplomat working down in the Sudan, in contact with a rich Saudi exile who set himself up a base of operations in that African country, was likewise murdered at Gaddafi’s express orders to show the long reach of Libya. Directly, Saddam was told to return Mutassim or the killings would continue.

Mielke’s successor Schwanitz was aghast at all that happened. The violent spat between those two Arab dictators was unwelcome in countless ways. Both nations were working with the DDR in efforts to ensure the security of his country where weapons and technology were shared illegally all in violation of international law. Those killings took place in other countries where there was no way of controlling the news. Western intelligence agencies were aware of what was going on and, while examining the Iraqi-Libya spat, were able to see all of the connections between it all. Schwanitz met with Tariq Aziz. No longer Iraq’s foreign minister, Aziz was still an important figure in Saddam’s regime. Schwanitz urged Aziz for Iraq to release Mutassim. There were no evidence at all that Libya was complicit in the death of Uday. It looked like an accident as far as East Germany was concerned. His country had lost its minister of security, Iraq had lost a ‘beloved son of the revolution’ and Schwanitz didn’t want to see Libya’s leader lose a child over what was all one big misunderstanding. What was happening with the foreign spooks all over everything was too brought up with Schwanitz focusing Aziz’s attention on that. Iraq needed to keep open those channels of embargoed goods flowing just as East Germany and Libya did too. Mutassim was released before the end of September following three weeks in Iraqi custody. Saddam let him go right at a time when he was engaged in another foreign crisis, one of far more significance that the violent dispute with Libya’s leader.


In 1991, the US-led Operation Desert Storm had smashed Iraq apart and thrown Saddam out of Kuwait. Bush had ordered air strikes against Iraq in the final days of his presidency and then Cuomo had struck extensively with his own wave of air & missile attacks following the post-presidential assassination of Bush. The twin ‘93 American attacks against Iraq hadn’t been as devastating as those two years earlier yet they had still hurt the regime. Cuomo had kept Operation Southern Watch in-place during his presidency where US aircraft flew operations through Iraqi airspace denying Iraq the ability to fly above their own country. Incidents occurred on and off over Iraq. Days before he released Mutassim, in something that would afterwards be pointed to as a factor in that decision so that Saddam would by some goodwill aboard among friends, a SAM battery lofted a pair of missiles to bring down an American jet. One of those SAMs struck a US Air Force F-16 with the pilot ejecting. Iraqi troops tried to locate him and so too did American special forces too. Instead of locating the pilot, they engaged each other in a deadly firefight which left several dead: the pilot himself wandered the desert and would be overcome by the elements leading to his demise. Four Americans – plus the pilot whose fate wasn’t revealed for some time – died in that deadly September 26th incident. Cuomo wouldn’t, couldn’t do nothing in response to it all. There was just no way that he would be able to not make a reply Southern Watch was a UN-backed operation to maintain no-fly zones across Iraq to stop Saddam from committing genocide against his own people. While taking part in that internationally authorised operation, American forces had been deliberately attacked. He addressed the American people and made that justification for taking action against Iraq in response.

Cuomo wasn’t a supporter of foreign intervention. He had inherited the Iraqi mess from Bush. Those attacks he had made to avenge his predecessor’s death had been something that had to be done after Saddam had murdered Bush – a killing that Saddam had never taken responsibility for, claiming repeatedly that Iraq had been framed – and the air missions flown over Iraq since were an issue that he regarded himself as being forced into continuing. During much of ‘94, the 42nd President had in fact been overseeing a wind-down of American commitment to Southern Watch. His personal fears, expressed to his vice president, were that the United States would be eventually drawn into a proper conflict with Iraq in the end should the overflights carry on for good. It wasn’t just with Iraq where Cuomo was weary of getting involved in. Members of his administration, plus an influential bloc in Congress, oh and throughout much of the US Intelligence Community as well, there was a push for US military intervention in Bosnia and to also act against East Germany as well. Yet, the role of ‘world policeman’ wasn’t one which he wanted to play. When it came to responding to the September ‘94 incident, once more Cuomo didn’t see that he had a choice though. American lives had been lost and that came alongside ongoing Iraqi efforts to acquire long-range missiles along with maybe weapons of mass destruction to arm them. He authorised a deployment of forces to the Gulf to build-up strength ahead of an attack being made against Saddam’s regime.

Iraqi tanks started moving first though. To placate the East Germans and cease Libyan aggressive actions, Mutassim was released right before a good portion of the Republican Guard started rolling southwards towards the Kuwaiti border. It would be many years later when defectors from the Iraqi regime claimed that there had actually been a plan afoot before that F-16 was shot down for Kuwait to be re-invaded come late ‘94 with Saddam determined to do it as he watched Cuomo wind-down Southern Watch. The unwillingness of Cuomo to fight a continuation of what some in the West called ‘Bush’s war’ was taken note of in Baghdad with Saddam eyeing taking another shot at Kuwait. How true any of that actually really was was debatable. Most US forces were in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or out in the Gulf but there were still some boots on the ground in Kuwait. The tank columns which Saddam had moved southwards ready to make that final drive down towards the Kuwaiti border had gone into jumping off points during July. SAM cover had escorted them and it was one of the supporting batteries which started the shooting. Those facts gave credence to the belief that Saddam was going to invade, though detractors of such a theory stated that it was all about posturing. Whatever the truth, the Republican Guard closed up upon the Kuwaiti frontier with a trio of tank-heavy divisions faster than the Americans could get their forces into place. Everyone held their breath waiting for them to go over the line in the sand which was the frontier and once more storm Kuwait. Should they had, there would have been quite the fight indeed with the Americans. Soldiers and marines had been flown to the Middle East to meet up with pre-positioned equipment while airmen were also deploying with their aircraft too. Operation Desert Knight was a major US deployment that involved carrier groups likewise racing full steam ahead towards the region. The Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs hit the panic button and made an urgent mobilisation. American allies outside of the Middle East signalled their intent to support the mission too. Saddam looked like he was at it again with designs on conquering his neighbour. Differences of opinion with Washington over Southern Watch were put aside with the possibility that Iraq would once more seek to overrun Kuwait.

The Republican Guard moved into defensive positions though. They didn’t cross into Kuwait but rather deployed to guard against an attack coming out of Kuwait to violate Iraqi soil. Saddam got them in-place fast and their arrangement was supported by later arriving lighter infantry units who deployed to protect against an amphibious landing. He also spread out armed units across the desert far back from the border to have soldiers on-hand to fight against further American heli-borne employments of attackers as well. The whole thing was ultimately defensive. Those who said in later years that he had been planning to invade Kuwait at that time would claim that at the last minute he changed the battle plan to a defensive one: again, the detractors of such theory would point to there being no evidence of any invasion really planned. It all might have been defensive, yet Desert Knight continued. The Americans moved significant forces into the region and then Cuomo ordered the start of an aerial bombardment come October 4th. Bombs and cruise missiles slammed into Iraq with a focus against air defences throughout the south of the country. Baghdad wasn’t hit and neither were the Republican Guard. Just as Saddam didn’t seem intent to take the final step and send his tanks over the border, Cuomo would eventually settle for not making a full-on assault against Iraq as it had been first believed he might do. Domestic political opponents back home weren’t happy. Cuomo was accused of cowardice, of not wanting to truly punish Iraq for what it had done.

When the three days of American attacks came to an end, that wasn’t the end of Desert Knight nor, ultimately, Southern Watch too. Saddam kept his army in the field deployed where it was right next to Kuwait. If it had gone back home, Cuomo would have wanted to see US forces slowly withdrawn back to pre-crisis levels even if he couldn’t manage a complete disengagement from the whole matter as he had started the year on course to possibly pull off. American troops stayed in Kuwait throughout the rest of the year with there being no indication of when a later withdraw could be made. Saddam had his army seemingly ready to strike the moment that they might leave, which would result in a long-term expensive and resource-committing deployment there.

[James G]

Five – Informants


In the middle of 1994, the IRA came very close to declaring a ceasefire. Its armed opposition to the British Government was almost brought to a temporary cessation due to the ongoing political dialogue between Northern Irish politicians and London. There had been a change in leadership in London where Heseltine replaced Major yet still the likelihood of an end to the shootings and bombing was widely believed to be on the cards. It never came about though. There was foreign interference which made sure that the terrorism would continue and, with that, a British military response. Throughout ‘94 and into ‘95, the IRA carried on waging war against military and economic targets despite the best efforts of diplomats and politicians to finally bring it all to a conclusion.

Devastating bombs had hit the City of London – the financial district – in 1992 and ‘93 with the IRA then mortaring Heathrow Airport three times over five days early in ‘94. Those attacks were economically damaging to Britain, more than any of the violence which took place across in Ulster. The Army Council had agreed to that strategy of making ‘spectacular’ attacks on mainland Britain at the urging of one of the independent entities which made up the whole organisation. The IRA was never fully united at any level with significant power in the hands of leading figures from regional areas who had seats on the Army Council. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most lethal and active forces within the IRA and was responsible for a great deal of the violence within Ulster. There was too the South Armagh Brigade which, while active within Ulster, had plentiful experience in striking within mainland Britain too. Both of them were rather independent-minded, more so than other IRA component parts with leaders who weren’t willing at all to go along with the peace process that the politicians were pushing for. In June ‘94, each of those two brigades received separate foreign shipments of arms. Those came not from America nor Libya, from where many previous shipments had been sent, but instead from the East Germans. There was a lot to be doled out, all free of charge. None of the weaponry was traceable direct to the DDR itself and all of it was in fact stolen from overseas where former Soviet Army stocks down in the Ukraine had been raided by arms dealers. There were a few complaints that some of what was sent wasn’t up to the best of standards yet it was all free. The rifles worked, the explosives would do. Infused with those stockpiles, the dissents who were opposed to the notion of a ceasefire with the British felt confident enough to defy those seeking a temporary end to the armed campaign: they were flush with weapons which would bring support towards them so that others wouldn’t dare challenge them. Open criticism was made of the progress of talks with London – nit-picking to be honest – and a push was made for the fight to continue. Outvoted, those who had been seeking a ceasefire were forced to accept that it wasn’t going to happen at that time. As to the political leadership, they got wind of some of what was going on behind the scenes yet didn’t grasp the full picture. Moreover, there was no understanding that East Germany had sent those weapons nor what was desired by those in East Berlin to be seen done with all of it.

Across the middle of Ulster, through August and September there were multiple shootings and explosions. The security forces, Loyalists and commercial targets came under attack. The clatter of AKs and explosions of both bombs & RPG rounds made it all seem like a real war zone. The British Army fought back and there was an increasing role for the SAS there too where they took the fight right back to volunteers with the East Tyrone Brigade. Intelligence operations caught wind of the scale of the weapons stockpile that the IRA had to make use of though were unsure of its origins. What they did know was that a lot had come in and a lot was being used up. It was quite the summer of violence and at once destroyed the process of ongoing dialogue between those seeking peace. In early October, when the British Government was in the midst of making a (limited) military deployment to the Gulf to support the American-led Operation Desert Knight, London faced a bombing campaign directed against it. Two huge blasts rocked the capital on subsequent Sunday evenings. The headquarters of the Met. Police at New Scotland Yard was targeted first by a truck bomb on Broadway. Half a dozen lives were lost including that of one of the team of bombers who was shot by armed officers making his escape. Seconds after he was gunned down, the bomb went off. Major damage was done and Met. Police operations were severely disrupted in the aftermath. The next target was a financial one where the South Armagh Brigade used a near identical truck bomb to blast a target to the east. It was Canary Wharf which they struck, detonating a bomb next to the building where a light rail train station ran above ground. Only one death occurred but the damage done was just as severe as it was over at New Scotland Yard. The Canary Wharf project was not the success for the developers of it that they had foreseen yet there was economic growth there picking up. The extensive damage caused by the IRA bombing at once set all of that back. Hitting out there in the London Docklands had been a less-preferable target for the IRA that the City of London. The ‘ring of steel’ which the UK security forces had put around there following the Baltic Exchange & Bishopsgate bombings of previous years made striking there too risky though. Canary Wharf was chosen for its high-profile image where more damage could be done visually rather than with more effective as it would be back over in the City.

November and December saw other bombs strike across the mainland. London was targeted with smaller blasts than those October ones and the IRA moved outside of the capital as well. Over in Ulster, before the year was out there was a continuation of the violence through the central portions of that province but also down in Armagh as well. There were comments made that the situation in Ulster was starting to look like guerrilla warfare with remarks made that it was ‘Britain’s Tet’. That was overblown hyperbole. IRA gunmen had the conflict taken right back towards them as Heseltine and his Cabinet responded strongly. Troops flooded Ulster with emergency deployments made – stretching the British Army – and there also was an expansion of intelligence operations. The latter paid off where a bomb attempt to strike at the West End, hitting theatre-land right before Christmas, was thwarted and there was also the raiding of a safe-house in South London where a trio of terrorists were caught when asleep. They had a further bomb ready, one to be used before ‘94 was out against Victoria Coach Station. Back over in Ulster, the SAS engaged a team of gunmen travelling in a van to strike against a fortified police station at Cookstown. All five inside the vehicle lost their lives during an ambush and that struck quite the blow against East Tyrone Brigade operations as much as what happened in London to South Armagh Brigade operatives. Police announcements and comments from government ministers claimed that diligent police work was behind the successes had before the year was out against IRA operations. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it was the work of informants within the IRA who provided the security forces with information. Tip-offs came and counteraction was taken. Those who passed on what they knew did so for a variety of reasons. There was dissatisfaction with the wave of extreme violence from those who felt that an opportunity for peace had been lost earlier in the year. A revulsion to it all was in others. Internal feuds and power-plays were also at work. British agents also had blackmailed another informant.

Three of those informants died during January 1995 with a fourth coming damn close to suddenly losing his life. The killings took place in both Ulster and on the mainland. The IRA kidnapped those informants and set about torturing them during ‘debriefings’ before murder occurred. Police officers rescued the fourth but couldn’t save the other three. Further informants, including ones not involved in the recent British operations, found themselves suddenly swept up and taken away for their own safety. That blew the cover of many of them meaning that they were useless in the future and their lives would forever be in danger. It saved them from being snatched from their homes and dying horribly though. The IRA did have their names on-hand. In one of the most significant and damaging security breaches that British operations in Ulster had ever suffered, the identities (and activities too) of almost all of their undercover agents – working for the police, the military and MI-5 – were revealed to the IRA. A list was provided to them and it was extensive. MI-5 became aware late on that the identities of informants had been revealed yet coordinated the response, on prime ministerial instruction, to take away from danger all of those at risk. Counter-arguments were made that that might not be the best idea but Downing Street overruled hesitation: the idea of leaving those people to die rubbed Heseltine the wrong way once he fully understood the scale of the leak. Of course, he, like so many others, wanted to know who had leaked that information. Collating the various names from several sources, bypassing security, was something that would have taken a lot to do. The hunt was on for the perpetrators. It would take a few months but the ultimate outcome of the investigation would be the revelation that the HVA was behind it all. That was East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, part of the Stasi. They had operatives in the UK who spied on Britain and were working with the IRA.

East German–IRA cooperation went back a good few years. The Soviets had never worked with the IRA – they did have contact with the smaller INLA though – but the East Germans had started to during 1991. There was no ideological connection between the two. IRA volunteers, the men and women who made up its ranks, knew nothing of the cooperation with the East Germans. It was leadership figures and key mid-ranking people in intelligence & logistics roles who were involved on the Irish end know knew the truth about where weapons stocks (smaller ones before the big ‘94 transfers) came from. From out of East Berlin, there weren’t any declarations of real support for the IRA. Comments were made in official statements about them and other terrorist organisations – ETA in Spain and various Middle Eastern entities – where there was a fight against ‘Imperialists and capitalists’, but it was never regarded as a big deal. In the background it was though. Honecker, his wife, Mielke and Schwanitz all approved of it all. Britain had been one of the foremost post-’89 opponents of the DDR and it was judged to be worth it in a strategic sense for there to be a distraction for the UK at home. There was too the emotional connection with regard to the IRA and many in the United States who had a romantic idea of Irish terrorism. British crackdowns caused problems in trans-Atlantic relations, which benefited East Germany in seeing opponents at each other’s throats. It also cost the DDR very little for it wasn’t like they brought those weapons they passed onwards.


What was sent to the IRA was miniscule in terms of what East Germany managed to extract from the former Eastern Bloc and the once component parts of the Soviet Union. There was a marked increase starting mid-1994 when governmental cooperation began in earnest yet before then, Stasi agents were working with illegal arms smugglers to commit wholescale thefts. Security at arms depots was in many places non-existent. Paper-work was fudged where inspections on stockpiles were made. On a few occasions, the missing stocks were noticed and inquiries were made. There were no East German fingerprints over the operations though, at least not at source. Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia all had leaders come ‘94 who were willing to work with the DDR to make things more official. Costs did go up though not to a level where it was unaffordable. Moreover, what military equipment was sent to East Germany was of better quality and in larger shipments than beforehand. There was additionally a level of legitimacy to that too. Western sanctions upon East Germany weren’t levelled by nations showing a friendly face to the Margot Honecker regime. They did what they wanted, what was in their interest to do, and the West could go do one!

East Germany didn’t gain new tank fleets nor large numbers of combat aircraft during the two separate stages of its Nineties armaments transfers. The shipments made either undercover or openly weren’t about that. Smuggling like that was impossible and so too was paying for it all either. The DDR would have liked to have improved it military in such a way but that wasn’t practical. What was mainly brought was ammunition and supporting equipment for systems in-place. The entire East German Armed Forces was composed of Soviet or Eastern Bloc produced equipment. The DDR had a small organic arms production set-up but nowhere near what was necessary to maintain the required force level that was deemed necessary to deter any future military action by the West. Missiles and rockets were brought into the country to provide stockpiles for existing launch platforms. High-tech sensors, aircraft engines, spare parts for tank fire-control systems… that was what East Germany got their hands upon. That said, East Germany did make the purchase come late ‘94 of a dozen Moldovan MiG-29 fighters (not the monkey-models, but the very best versions) and also twenty more OTR-21 short-range ballistic missile launchers. They already had such weapons in-service and paid for more of them to reinforce their fleets. Yet, Russia refused to see further sales of the longer-range OTR-23 ballistic missile of which the DDR only had a few but wanted more of: the range of them caused too much concern in Moscow. Even when there were official transfers, there was still some good old fashioned illegal smuggling though and that included a lot of what went to the IRA and various terror groups down in the Middle East. It was with that that a lot of those involved personally enriched themselves beyond what went on the state balance sheets. Chernomyrdin in Moscow, Belarus’ new dictator and the Bulgarian leadership that was infiltrated by the powerful mafia in that Balkan nation wanted to get rich. Several East Germans too found themselves making sure that their own Swiss bank accounts were bulging. Weapons were moved on to various external customers after the East Germans got their hands upon them where wars down in Africa would be fought with stolen weaponry that the Stasi had had its hand involved in seeing moved about.

Due to the East German links with both Libya and Iraq where there were exchanges of missile technology and also help from the each where all three were involved in various sanction busting, attention was shone on all of that through late ‘94 and into ‘95. Britain, France, Israel and the United States all had their intelligence services active. The two Arab countries were of most concern though the more East German involvement uncovered led to greater attention being paid to the DDR in what it was up to. There were informants who provided information in addition to what spies and communications intercepts could detect. The Israelis paid more attention to East German activity where they looked at the missile programmes of that country’s allies and saw danger. A team of Kazakh & Ukrainian missile engineers – skilled men who had lost their livelihoods when the Soviet Union fell – had been contracted by the DDR to work on a joint missile programme with the Libyans hosting the effort, Iraqi cash paying for a lot of it and the East Germans providing many of the components. That was interrupted by the Gaddafi-Saddam spat but then continued in ‘95.

Mossad got a man down into the depths of the Libyan Desert to have a look up close at what had been seen from afar through observation and what an informant had told Israel in secret. The missile programme was far more advanced than thought. Libya and Iraq would have regional strike capabilities, while the East Germans would get themselves a Europe-wide weapon themselves at the end of it all. The discovery was important in many ways down the line.

[lordroel]

Aug 29, 2021 17:33:26 GMT James G said:

Five – Informants


In the middle of 1994, the IRA came very close to declaring a ceasefire. Its armed opposition to the British Government was almost brought to a temporary cessation due to the ongoing political dialogue between Northern Irish politicians and London. There had been a change in leadership in London where Heseltine replaced Major yet still the likelihood of an end to the shootings and bombing was widely believed to be on the cards. It never came about though. There was foreign interference which made sure that the terrorism would continue and, with that, a British military response. Throughout ‘94 and into ‘95, the IRA carried on waging war against military and economic targets despite the best efforts of diplomats and politicians to finally bring it all to a conclusion.

Devastating bombs had hit the City of London – the financial district – in 1992 and ‘93 with the IRA then mortaring Heathrow Airport three times over five days early in ‘94. Those attacks were economically damaging to Britain, more than any of the violence which took place across in Ulster. The Army Council had agreed to that strategy of making ‘spectacular’ attacks on mainland Britain at the urging of one of the independent entities which made up the whole organisation. The IRA was never fully united at any level with significant power in the hands of leading figures from regional areas who had seats on the Army Council. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most lethal and active forces within the IRA and was responsible for a great deal of the violence within Ulster. There was too the South Armagh Brigade which, while active within Ulster, had plentiful experience in striking within mainland Britain too. Both of them were rather independent-minded, more so than other IRA component parts with leaders who weren’t willing at all to go along with the peace process that the politicians were pushing for. In June ‘94, each of those two brigades received separate foreign shipments of arms. Those came not from America nor Libya, from where many previous shipments had been sent, but instead from the East Germans. There was a lot to be doled out, all free of charge. None of the weaponry was traceable direct to the DDR itself and all of it was in fact stolen from overseas where former Soviet Army stocks down in the Ukraine had been raided by arms dealers. There were a few complaints that some of what was sent wasn’t up to the best of standards yet it was all free. The rifles worked, the explosives would do. Infused with those stockpiles, the dissents who were opposed to the notion of a ceasefire with the British felt confident enough to defy those seeking a temporary end to the armed campaign: they were flush with weapons which would bring support towards them so that others wouldn’t dare challenge them. Open criticism was made of the progress of talks with London – nit-picking to be honest – and a push was made for the fight to continue. Outvoted, those who had been seeking a ceasefire were forced to accept that it wasn’t going to happen at that time. As to the political leadership, they got wind of some of what was going on behind the scenes yet didn’t grasp the full picture. Moreover, there was no understanding that East Germany had sent those weapons nor what was desired by those in East Berlin to be seen done with all of it.

Across the middle of Ulster, through August and September there were multiple shootings and explosions. The security forces, Loyalists and commercial targets came under attack. The clatter of AKs and explosions of both bombs & RPG rounds made it all seem like a real war zone. The British Army fought back and there was an increasing role for the SAS there too where they took the fight right back to volunteers with the East Tyrone Brigade. Intelligence operations caught wind of the scale of the weapons stockpile that the IRA had to make use of though were unsure of its origins. What they did know was that a lot had come in and a lot was being used up. It was quite the summer of violence and at once destroyed the process of ongoing dialogue between those seeking peace. In early October, when the British Government was in the midst of making a (limited) military deployment to the Gulf to support the American-led Operation Desert Knight, London faced a bombing campaign directed against it. Two huge blasts rocked the capital on subsequent Sunday evenings. The headquarters of the Met. Police at New Scotland Yard was targeted first by a truck bomb on Broadway. Half a dozen lives were lost including that of one of the team of bombers who was shot by armed officers making his escape. Seconds after he was gunned down, the bomb went off. Major damage was done and Met. Police operations were severely disrupted in the aftermath. The next target was a financial one where the South Armagh Brigade used a near identical truck bomb to blast a target to the east. It was Canary Wharf which they struck, detonating a bomb next to the building where a light rail train station ran above ground. Only one death occurred but the damage done was just as severe as it was over at New Scotland Yard. The Canary Wharf project was not the success for the developers of it that they had foreseen yet there was economic growth there picking up. The extensive damage caused by the IRA bombing at once set all of that back. Hitting out there in the London Docklands had been a less-preferable target for the IRA that the City of London. The ‘ring of steel’ which the UK security forces had put around there following the Baltic Exchange & Bishopsgate bombings of previous years made striking there too risky though. Canary Wharf was chosen for its high-profile image where more damage could be done visually rather than with more effective as it would be back over in the City.

November and December saw other bombs strike across the mainland. London was targeted with smaller blasts than those October ones and the IRA moved outside of the capital as well. Over in Ulster, before the year was out there was a continuation of the violence through the central portions of that province but also down in Armagh as well. There were comments made that the situation in Ulster was starting to look like guerrilla warfare with remarks made that it was ‘Britain’s Tet’. That was overblown hyperbole. IRA gunmen had the conflict taken right back towards them as Heseltine and his Cabinet responded strongly. Troops flooded Ulster with emergency deployments made – stretching the British Army – and there also was an expansion of intelligence operations. The latter paid off where a bomb attempt to strike at the West End, hitting theatre-land right before Christmas, was thwarted and there was also the raiding of a safe-house in South London where a trio of terrorists were caught when asleep. They had a further bomb ready, one to be used before ‘94 was out against Victoria Coach Station. Back over in Ulster, the SAS engaged a team of gunmen travelling in a van to strike against a fortified police station at Cookstown. All five inside the vehicle lost their lives during an ambush and that struck quite the blow against East Tyrone Brigade operations as much as what happened in London to South Armagh Brigade operatives. Police announcements and comments from government ministers claimed that diligent police work was behind the successes had before the year was out against IRA operations. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it was the work of informants within the IRA who provided the security forces with information. Tip-offs came and counteraction was taken. Those who passed on what they knew did so for a variety of reasons. There was dissatisfaction with the wave of extreme violence from those who felt that an opportunity for peace had been lost earlier in the year. A revulsion to it all was in others. Internal feuds and power-plays were also at work. British agents also had blackmailed another informant.

Three of those informants died during January 1995 with a fourth coming damn close to suddenly losing his life. The killings took place in both Ulster and on the mainland. The IRA kidnapped those informants and set about torturing them during ‘debriefings’ before murder occurred. Police officers rescued the fourth but couldn’t save the other three. Further informants, including ones not involved in the recent British operations, found themselves suddenly swept up and taken away for their own safety. That blew the cover of many of them meaning that they were useless in the future and their lives would forever be in danger. It saved them from being snatched from their homes and dying horribly though. The IRA did have their names on-hand. In one of the most significant and damaging security breaches that British operations in Ulster had ever suffered, the identities (and activities too) of almost all of their undercover agents – working for the police, the military and MI-5 – were revealed to the IRA. A list was provided to them and it was extensive. MI-5 became aware late on that the identities of informants had been revealed yet coordinated the response, on prime ministerial instruction, to take away from danger all of those at risk. Counter-arguments were made that that might not be the best idea but Downing Street overruled hesitation: the idea of leaving those people to die rubbed Heseltine the wrong way once he fully understood the scale of the leak. Of course, he, like so many others, wanted to know who had leaked that information. Collating the various names from several sources, bypassing security, was something that would have taken a lot to do. The hunt was on for the perpetrators. It would take a few months but the ultimate outcome of the investigation would be the revelation that the HVA was behind it all. That was East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, part of the Stasi. They had operatives in the UK who spied on Britain and were working with the IRA.

East German–IRA cooperation went back a good few years. The Soviets had never worked with the IRA – they did have contact with the smaller INLA though – but the East Germans had started to during 1991. There was no ideological connection between the two. IRA volunteers, the men and women who made up its ranks, knew nothing of the cooperation with the East Germans. It was leadership figures and key mid-ranking people in intelligence & logistics roles who were involved on the Irish end know knew the truth about where weapons stocks (smaller ones before the big ‘94 transfers) came from. From out of East Berlin, there weren’t any declarations of real support for the IRA. Comments were made in official statements about them and other terrorist organisations – ETA in Spain and various Middle Eastern entities – where there was a fight against ‘Imperialists and capitalists’, but it was never regarded as a big deal. In the background it was though. Honecker, his wife, Mielke and Schwanitz all approved of it all. Britain had been one of the foremost post-’89 opponents of the DDR and it was judged to be worth it in a strategic sense for there to be a distraction for the UK at home. There was too the emotional connection with regard to the IRA and many in the United States who had a romantic idea of Irish terrorism. British crackdowns caused problems in trans-Atlantic relations, which benefited East Germany in seeing opponents at each other’s throats. It also cost the DDR very little for it wasn’t like they brought those weapons they passed onwards.


What was sent to the IRA was miniscule in terms of what East Germany managed to extract from the former Eastern Bloc and the once component parts of the Soviet Union. There was a marked increase starting mid-1994 when governmental cooperation began in earnest yet before then, Stasi agents were working with illegal arms smugglers to commit wholescale thefts. Security at arms depots was in many places non-existent. Paper-work was fudged where inspections on stockpiles were made. On a few occasions, the missing stocks were noticed and inquiries were made. There were no East German fingerprints over the operations though, at least not at source. Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia all had leaders come ‘94 who were willing to work with the DDR to make things more official. Costs did go up though not to a level where it was unaffordable. Moreover, what military equipment was sent to East Germany was of better quality and in larger shipments than beforehand. There was additionally a level of legitimacy to that too. Western sanctions upon East Germany weren’t levelled by nations showing a friendly face to the Margot Honecker regime. They did what they wanted, what was in their interest to do, and the West could go do one!

East Germany didn’t gain new tank fleets nor large numbers of combat aircraft during the two separate stages of its Nineties armaments transfers. The shipments made either undercover or openly weren’t about that. Smuggling like that was impossible and so too was paying for it all either. The DDR would have liked to have improved it military in such a way but that wasn’t practical. What was mainly brought was ammunition and supporting equipment for systems in-place. The entire East German Armed Forces was composed of Soviet or Eastern Bloc produced equipment. The DDR had a small organic arms production set-up but nowhere near what was necessary to maintain the required force level that was deemed necessary to deter any future military action by the West. Missiles and rockets were brought into the country to provide stockpiles for existing launch platforms. High-tech sensors, aircraft engines, spare parts for tank fire-control systems… that was what East Germany got their hands upon. That said, East Germany did make the purchase come late ‘94 of a dozen Moldovan MiG-29 fighters (not the monkey-models, but the very best versions) and also twenty more OTR-21 short-range ballistic missile launchers. They already had such weapons in-service and paid for more of them to reinforce their fleets. Yet, Russia refused to see further sales of the longer-range OTR-23 ballistic missile of which the DDR only had a few but wanted more of: the range of them caused too much concern in Moscow. Even when there were official transfers, there was still some good old fashioned illegal smuggling though and that included a lot of what went to the IRA and various terror groups down in the Middle East. It was with that that a lot of those involved personally enriched themselves beyond what went on the state balance sheets. Chernomyrdin in Moscow, Belarus’ new dictator and the Bulgarian leadership that was infiltrated by the powerful mafia in that Balkan nation wanted to get rich. Several East Germans too found themselves making sure that their own Swiss bank accounts were bulging. Weapons were moved on to various external customers after the East Germans got their hands upon them where wars down in Africa would be fought with stolen weaponry that the Stasi had had its hand involved in seeing moved about.

Due to the East German links with both Libya and Iraq where there were exchanges of missile technology and also help from the each where all three were involved in various sanction busting, attention was shone on all of that through late ‘94 and into ‘95. Britain, France, Israel and the United States all had their intelligence services active. The two Arab countries were of most concern though the more East German involvement uncovered led to greater attention being paid to the DDR in what it was up to. There were informants who provided information in addition to what spies and communications intercepts could detect. The Israelis paid more attention to East German activity where they looked at the missile programmes of that country’s allies and saw danger. A team of Kazakh & Ukrainian missile engineers – skilled men who had lost their livelihoods when the Soviet Union fell – had been contracted by the DDR to work on a joint missile programme with the Libyans hosting the effort, Iraqi cash paying for a lot of it and the East Germans providing many of the components. That was interrupted by the Gaddafi-Saddam spat but then continued in ‘95.

Mossad got a man down into the depths of the Libyan Desert to have a look up close at what had been seen from afar through observation and what an informant had told Israel in secret. The missile programme was far more advanced than thought. Libya and Iraq would have regional strike capabilities, while the East Germans would get themselves a Europe-wide weapon themselves at the end of it all. The discovery was important in many ways down the line.

Good update James G,

Doubt the East German rocket program will be as succesvol as a previous German rocket program, it will but their enemies but not defeat them.

[stevep]

   Somewhat off topic but I did read back, about this period of time that many IRA informants were obtained by judicious use of terror.  The target would be contacted by some council officer or someone like that, possibly with regard to some compensation for some issue and would meet up and often receive some money.  Shortly afterward he would receive a visit by someone from the security services with pictures of the meeting and information that the guy was actually also a security operative.  So they would either work as an informant or their 'colleagues' in the IRA would be informed of the contact.  Since this would very likely mean their torture and death this successfully turned many into informants. Great to use the savagely and paranoia of such a terrorist group against them.

[stevep]

Aug 29, 2021 17:48:26 GMT lordroel said:

Aug 29, 2021 17:33:26 GMT James G said:

Five – Informants


In the middle of 1994, the IRA came very close to declaring a ceasefire. Its armed opposition to the British Government was almost brought to a temporary cessation due to the ongoing political dialogue between Northern Irish politicians and London. There had been a change in leadership in London where Heseltine replaced Major yet still the likelihood of an end to the shootings and bombing was widely believed to be on the cards. It never came about though. There was foreign interference which made sure that the terrorism would continue and, with that, a British military response. Throughout ‘94 and into ‘95, the IRA carried on waging war against military and economic targets despite the best efforts of diplomats and politicians to finally bring it all to a conclusion.

Devastating bombs had hit the City of London – the financial district – in 1992 and ‘93 with the IRA then mortaring Heathrow Airport three times over five days early in ‘94. Those attacks were economically damaging to Britain, more than any of the violence which took place across in Ulster. The Army Council had agreed to that strategy of making ‘spectacular’ attacks on mainland Britain at the urging of one of the independent entities which made up the whole organisation. The IRA was never fully united at any level with significant power in the hands of leading figures from regional areas who had seats on the Army Council. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most lethal and active forces within the IRA and was responsible for a great deal of the violence within Ulster. There was too the South Armagh Brigade which, while active within Ulster, had plentiful experience in striking within mainland Britain too. Both of them were rather independent-minded, more so than other IRA component parts with leaders who weren’t willing at all to go along with the peace process that the politicians were pushing for. In June ‘94, each of those two brigades received separate foreign shipments of arms. Those came not from America nor Libya, from where many previous shipments had been sent, but instead from the East Germans. There was a lot to be doled out, all free of charge. None of the weaponry was traceable direct to the DDR itself and all of it was in fact stolen from overseas where former Soviet Army stocks down in the Ukraine had been raided by arms dealers. There were a few complaints that some of what was sent wasn’t up to the best of standards yet it was all free. The rifles worked, the explosives would do. Infused with those stockpiles, the dissents who were opposed to the notion of a ceasefire with the British felt confident enough to defy those seeking a temporary end to the armed campaign: they were flush with weapons which would bring support towards them so that others wouldn’t dare challenge them. Open criticism was made of the progress of talks with London – nit-picking to be honest – and a push was made for the fight to continue. Outvoted, those who had been seeking a ceasefire were forced to accept that it wasn’t going to happen at that time. As to the political leadership, they got wind of some of what was going on behind the scenes yet didn’t grasp the full picture. Moreover, there was no understanding that East Germany had sent those weapons nor what was desired by those in East Berlin to be seen done with all of it.

Across the middle of Ulster, through August and September there were multiple shootings and explosions. The security forces, Loyalists and commercial targets came under attack. The clatter of AKs and explosions of both bombs & RPG rounds made it all seem like a real war zone. The British Army fought back and there was an increasing role for the SAS there too where they took the fight right back to volunteers with the East Tyrone Brigade. Intelligence operations caught wind of the scale of the weapons stockpile that the IRA had to make use of though were unsure of its origins. What they did know was that a lot had come in and a lot was being used up. It was quite the summer of violence and at once destroyed the process of ongoing dialogue between those seeking peace. In early October, when the British Government was in the midst of making a (limited) military deployment to the Gulf to support the American-led Operation Desert Knight, London faced a bombing campaign directed against it. Two huge blasts rocked the capital on subsequent Sunday evenings. The headquarters of the Met. Police at New Scotland Yard was targeted first by a truck bomb on Broadway. Half a dozen lives were lost including that of one of the team of bombers who was shot by armed officers making his escape. Seconds after he was gunned down, the bomb went off. Major damage was done and Met. Police operations were severely disrupted in the aftermath. The next target was a financial one where the South Armagh Brigade used a near identical truck bomb to blast a target to the east. It was Canary Wharf which they struck, detonating a bomb next to the building where a light rail train station ran above ground. Only one death occurred but the damage done was just as severe as it was over at New Scotland Yard. The Canary Wharf project was not the success for the developers of it that they had foreseen yet there was economic growth there picking up. The extensive damage caused by the IRA bombing at once set all of that back. Hitting out there in the London Docklands had been a less-preferable target for the IRA that the City of London. The ‘ring of steel’ which the UK security forces had put around there following the Baltic Exchange & Bishopsgate bombings of previous years made striking there too risky though. Canary Wharf was chosen for its high-profile image where more damage could be done visually rather than with more effective as it would be back over in the City.

November and December saw other bombs strike across the mainland. London was targeted with smaller blasts than those October ones and the IRA moved outside of the capital as well. Over in Ulster, before the year was out there was a continuation of the violence through the central portions of that province but also down in Armagh as well. There were comments made that the situation in Ulster was starting to look like guerrilla warfare with remarks made that it was ‘Britain’s Tet’. That was overblown hyperbole. IRA gunmen had the conflict taken right back towards them as Heseltine and his Cabinet responded strongly. Troops flooded Ulster with emergency deployments made – stretching the British Army – and there also was an expansion of intelligence operations. The latter paid off where a bomb attempt to strike at the West End, hitting theatre-land right before Christmas, was thwarted and there was also the raiding of a safe-house in South London where a trio of terrorists were caught when asleep. They had a further bomb ready, one to be used before ‘94 was out against Victoria Coach Station. Back over in Ulster, the SAS engaged a team of gunmen travelling in a van to strike against a fortified police station at Cookstown. All five inside the vehicle lost their lives during an ambush and that struck quite the blow against East Tyrone Brigade operations as much as what happened in London to South Armagh Brigade operatives. Police announcements and comments from government ministers claimed that diligent police work was behind the successes had before the year was out against IRA operations. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it was the work of informants within the IRA who provided the security forces with information. Tip-offs came and counteraction was taken. Those who passed on what they knew did so for a variety of reasons. There was dissatisfaction with the wave of extreme violence from those who felt that an opportunity for peace had been lost earlier in the year. A revulsion to it all was in others. Internal feuds and power-plays were also at work. British agents also had blackmailed another informant.

Three of those informants died during January 1995 with a fourth coming damn close to suddenly losing his life. The killings took place in both Ulster and on the mainland. The IRA kidnapped those informants and set about torturing them during ‘debriefings’ before murder occurred. Police officers rescued the fourth but couldn’t save the other three. Further informants, including ones not involved in the recent British operations, found themselves suddenly swept up and taken away for their own safety. That blew the cover of many of them meaning that they were useless in the future and their lives would forever be in danger. It saved them from being snatched from their homes and dying horribly though. The IRA did have their names on-hand. In one of the most significant and damaging security breaches that British operations in Ulster had ever suffered, the identities (and activities too) of almost all of their undercover agents – working for the police, the military and MI-5 – were revealed to the IRA. A list was provided to them and it was extensive. MI-5 became aware late on that the identities of informants had been revealed yet coordinated the response, on prime ministerial instruction, to take away from danger all of those at risk. Counter-arguments were made that that might not be the best idea but Downing Street overruled hesitation: the idea of leaving those people to die rubbed Heseltine the wrong way once he fully understood the scale of the leak. Of course, he, like so many others, wanted to know who had leaked that information. Collating the various names from several sources, bypassing security, was something that would have taken a lot to do. The hunt was on for the perpetrators. It would take a few months but the ultimate outcome of the investigation would be the revelation that the HVA was behind it all. That was East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, part of the Stasi. They had operatives in the UK who spied on Britain and were working with the IRA.

East German–IRA cooperation went back a good few years. The Soviets had never worked with the IRA – they did have contact with the smaller INLA though – but the East Germans had started to during 1991. There was no ideological connection between the two. IRA volunteers, the men and women who made up its ranks, knew nothing of the cooperation with the East Germans. It was leadership figures and key mid-ranking people in intelligence & logistics roles who were involved on the Irish end know knew the truth about where weapons stocks (smaller ones before the big ‘94 transfers) came from. From out of East Berlin, there weren’t any declarations of real support for the IRA. Comments were made in official statements about them and other terrorist organisations – ETA in Spain and various Middle Eastern entities – where there was a fight against ‘Imperialists and capitalists’, but it was never regarded as a big deal. In the background it was though. Honecker, his wife, Mielke and Schwanitz all approved of it all. Britain had been one of the foremost post-’89 opponents of the DDR and it was judged to be worth it in a strategic sense for there to be a distraction for the UK at home. There was too the emotional connection with regard to the IRA and many in the United States who had a romantic idea of Irish terrorism. British crackdowns caused problems in trans-Atlantic relations, which benefited East Germany in seeing opponents at each other’s throats. It also cost the DDR very little for it wasn’t like they brought those weapons they passed onwards.


What was sent to the IRA was miniscule in terms of what East Germany managed to extract from the former Eastern Bloc and the once component parts of the Soviet Union. There was a marked increase starting mid-1994 when governmental cooperation began in earnest yet before then, Stasi agents were working with illegal arms smugglers to commit wholescale thefts. Security at arms depots was in many places non-existent. Paper-work was fudged where inspections on stockpiles were made. On a few occasions, the missing stocks were noticed and inquiries were made. There were no East German fingerprints over the operations though, at least not at source. Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia all had leaders come ‘94 who were willing to work with the DDR to make things more official. Costs did go up though not to a level where it was unaffordable. Moreover, what military equipment was sent to East Germany was of better quality and in larger shipments than beforehand. There was additionally a level of legitimacy to that too. Western sanctions upon East Germany weren’t levelled by nations showing a friendly face to the Margot Honecker regime. They did what they wanted, what was in their interest to do, and the West could go do one!

East Germany didn’t gain new tank fleets nor large numbers of combat aircraft during the two separate stages of its Nineties armaments transfers. The shipments made either undercover or openly weren’t about that. Smuggling like that was impossible and so too was paying for it all either. The DDR would have liked to have improved it military in such a way but that wasn’t practical. What was mainly brought was ammunition and supporting equipment for systems in-place. The entire East German Armed Forces was composed of Soviet or Eastern Bloc produced equipment. The DDR had a small organic arms production set-up but nowhere near what was necessary to maintain the required force level that was deemed necessary to deter any future military action by the West. Missiles and rockets were brought into the country to provide stockpiles for existing launch platforms. High-tech sensors, aircraft engines, spare parts for tank fire-control systems… that was what East Germany got their hands upon. That said, East Germany did make the purchase come late ‘94 of a dozen Moldovan MiG-29 fighters (not the monkey-models, but the very best versions) and also twenty more OTR-21 short-range ballistic missile launchers. They already had such weapons in-service and paid for more of them to reinforce their fleets. Yet, Russia refused to see further sales of the longer-range OTR-23 ballistic missile of which the DDR only had a few but wanted more of: the range of them caused too much concern in Moscow. Even when there were official transfers, there was still some good old fashioned illegal smuggling though and that included a lot of what went to the IRA and various terror groups down in the Middle East. It was with that that a lot of those involved personally enriched themselves beyond what went on the state balance sheets. Chernomyrdin in Moscow, Belarus’ new dictator and the Bulgarian leadership that was infiltrated by the powerful mafia in that Balkan nation wanted to get rich. Several East Germans too found themselves making sure that their own Swiss bank accounts were bulging. Weapons were moved on to various external customers after the East Germans got their hands upon them where wars down in Africa would be fought with stolen weaponry that the Stasi had had its hand involved in seeing moved about.

Due to the East German links with both Libya and Iraq where there were exchanges of missile technology and also help from the each where all three were involved in various sanction busting, attention was shone on all of that through late ‘94 and into ‘95. Britain, France, Israel and the United States all had their intelligence services active. The two Arab countries were of most concern though the more East German involvement uncovered led to greater attention being paid to the DDR in what it was up to. There were informants who provided information in addition to what spies and communications intercepts could detect. The Israelis paid more attention to East German activity where they looked at the missile programmes of that country’s allies and saw danger. A team of Kazakh & Ukrainian missile engineers – skilled men who had lost their livelihoods when the Soviet Union fell – had been contracted by the DDR to work on a joint missile programme with the Libyans hosting the effort, Iraqi cash paying for a lot of it and the East Germans providing many of the components. That was interrupted by the Gaddafi-Saddam spat but then continued in ‘95.

Mossad got a man down into the depths of the Libyan Desert to have a look up close at what had been seen from afar through observation and what an informant had told Israel in secret. The missile programme was far more advanced than thought. Libya and Iraq would have regional strike capabilities, while the East Germans would get themselves a Europe-wide weapon themselves at the end of it all. The discovery was important in many ways down the line.

Good update James G ,

Doubt the East German rocket program will be as succesvol as a previous German rocket program, it will but their enemies but not defeat them.

  I suspect it will given the more advanced technology involved and the fact they have two collaborators.  However I'm more concerned with what payloads they might end up with.  Nukes are hopefully not an option, although many such weapons in the former USSR were often poorly guarded in this period but chemical weapons, which should be well within the capacity of the DDR would be bloody nasty and in a scenario where the regime is going down I fear the sort of egomaniacs involved here will not want to go quietly.

[lordroel]

Aug 29, 2021 17:53:37 GMT stevep said:

Aug 29, 2021 17:48:26 GMT lordroel said:

Good update James G ,

Doubt the East German rocket program will be as succesvol as a previous German rocket program, it will but their enemies but not defeat them.

  I suspect it will given the more advanced technology involved and the fact they have two collaborators.  However I'm more concerned with what payloads they might end up with.  Nukes are hopefully not an option, although many such weapons in the former USSR were often poorly guarded in this period but chemical weapons, which should be well within the capacity of the DDR would be bloody nasty and in a scenario where the regime is going down I fear the sort of egomaniacs involved here will not want to go quietly.

And this time there are three of them working together.

[gillan1220]

Subbed!

[James G]

Aug 29, 2021 17:48:26 GMT lordroel said:

Aug 29, 2021 17:33:26 GMT James G said:

Five – Informants


In the middle of 1994, the IRA came very close to declaring a ceasefire. Its armed opposition to the British Government was almost brought to a temporary cessation due to the ongoing political dialogue between Northern Irish politicians and London. There had been a change in leadership in London where Heseltine replaced Major yet still the likelihood of an end to the shootings and bombing was widely believed to be on the cards. It never came about though. There was foreign interference which made sure that the terrorism would continue and, with that, a British military response. Throughout ‘94 and into ‘95, the IRA carried on waging war against military and economic targets despite the best efforts of diplomats and politicians to finally bring it all to a conclusion.

Devastating bombs had hit the City of London – the financial district – in 1992 and ‘93 with the IRA then mortaring Heathrow Airport three times over five days early in ‘94. Those attacks were economically damaging to Britain, more than any of the violence which took place across in Ulster. The Army Council had agreed to that strategy of making ‘spectacular’ attacks on mainland Britain at the urging of one of the independent entities which made up the whole organisation. The IRA was never fully united at any level with significant power in the hands of leading figures from regional areas who had seats on the Army Council. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most lethal and active forces within the IRA and was responsible for a great deal of the violence within Ulster. There was too the South Armagh Brigade which, while active within Ulster, had plentiful experience in striking within mainland Britain too. Both of them were rather independent-minded, more so than other IRA component parts with leaders who weren’t willing at all to go along with the peace process that the politicians were pushing for. In June ‘94, each of those two brigades received separate foreign shipments of arms. Those came not from America nor Libya, from where many previous shipments had been sent, but instead from the East Germans. There was a lot to be doled out, all free of charge. None of the weaponry was traceable direct to the DDR itself and all of it was in fact stolen from overseas where former Soviet Army stocks down in the Ukraine had been raided by arms dealers. There were a few complaints that some of what was sent wasn’t up to the best of standards yet it was all free. The rifles worked, the explosives would do. Infused with those stockpiles, the dissents who were opposed to the notion of a ceasefire with the British felt confident enough to defy those seeking a temporary end to the armed campaign: they were flush with weapons which would bring support towards them so that others wouldn’t dare challenge them. Open criticism was made of the progress of talks with London – nit-picking to be honest – and a push was made for the fight to continue. Outvoted, those who had been seeking a ceasefire were forced to accept that it wasn’t going to happen at that time. As to the political leadership, they got wind of some of what was going on behind the scenes yet didn’t grasp the full picture. Moreover, there was no understanding that East Germany had sent those weapons nor what was desired by those in East Berlin to be seen done with all of it.

Across the middle of Ulster, through August and September there were multiple shootings and explosions. The security forces, Loyalists and commercial targets came under attack. The clatter of AKs and explosions of both bombs & RPG rounds made it all seem like a real war zone. The British Army fought back and there was an increasing role for the SAS there too where they took the fight right back to volunteers with the East Tyrone Brigade. Intelligence operations caught wind of the scale of the weapons stockpile that the IRA had to make use of though were unsure of its origins. What they did know was that a lot had come in and a lot was being used up. It was quite the summer of violence and at once destroyed the process of ongoing dialogue between those seeking peace. In early October, when the British Government was in the midst of making a (limited) military deployment to the Gulf to support the American-led Operation Desert Knight, London faced a bombing campaign directed against it. Two huge blasts rocked the capital on subsequent Sunday evenings. The headquarters of the Met. Police at New Scotland Yard was targeted first by a truck bomb on Broadway. Half a dozen lives were lost including that of one of the team of bombers who was shot by armed officers making his escape. Seconds after he was gunned down, the bomb went off. Major damage was done and Met. Police operations were severely disrupted in the aftermath. The next target was a financial one where the South Armagh Brigade used a near identical truck bomb to blast a target to the east. It was Canary Wharf which they struck, detonating a bomb next to the building where a light rail train station ran above ground. Only one death occurred but the damage done was just as severe as it was over at New Scotland Yard. The Canary Wharf project was not the success for the developers of it that they had foreseen yet there was economic growth there picking up. The extensive damage caused by the IRA bombing at once set all of that back. Hitting out there in the London Docklands had been a less-preferable target for the IRA that the City of London. The ‘ring of steel’ which the UK security forces had put around there following the Baltic Exchange & Bishopsgate bombings of previous years made striking there too risky though. Canary Wharf was chosen for its high-profile image where more damage could be done visually rather than with more effective as it would be back over in the City.

November and December saw other bombs strike across the mainland. London was targeted with smaller blasts than those October ones and the IRA moved outside of the capital as well. Over in Ulster, before the year was out there was a continuation of the violence through the central portions of that province but also down in Armagh as well. There were comments made that the situation in Ulster was starting to look like guerrilla warfare with remarks made that it was ‘Britain’s Tet’. That was overblown hyperbole. IRA gunmen had the conflict taken right back towards them as Heseltine and his Cabinet responded strongly. Troops flooded Ulster with emergency deployments made – stretching the British Army – and there also was an expansion of intelligence operations. The latter paid off where a bomb attempt to strike at the West End, hitting theatre-land right before Christmas, was thwarted and there was also the raiding of a safe-house in South London where a trio of terrorists were caught when asleep. They had a further bomb ready, one to be used before ‘94 was out against Victoria Coach Station. Back over in Ulster, the SAS engaged a team of gunmen travelling in a van to strike against a fortified police station at Cookstown. All five inside the vehicle lost their lives during an ambush and that struck quite the blow against East Tyrone Brigade operations as much as what happened in London to South Armagh Brigade operatives. Police announcements and comments from government ministers claimed that diligent police work was behind the successes had before the year was out against IRA operations. That wasn’t the case. Instead, it was the work of informants within the IRA who provided the security forces with information. Tip-offs came and counteraction was taken. Those who passed on what they knew did so for a variety of reasons. There was dissatisfaction with the wave of extreme violence from those who felt that an opportunity for peace had been lost earlier in the year. A revulsion to it all was in others. Internal feuds and power-plays were also at work. British agents also had blackmailed another informant.

Three of those informants died during January 1995 with a fourth coming damn close to suddenly losing his life. The killings took place in both Ulster and on the mainland. The IRA kidnapped those informants and set about torturing them during ‘debriefings’ before murder occurred. Police officers rescued the fourth but couldn’t save the other three. Further informants, including ones not involved in the recent British operations, found themselves suddenly swept up and taken away for their own safety. That blew the cover of many of them meaning that they were useless in the future and their lives would forever be in danger. It saved them from being snatched from their homes and dying horribly though. The IRA did have their names on-hand. In one of the most significant and damaging security breaches that British operations in Ulster had ever suffered, the identities (and activities too) of almost all of their undercover agents – working for the police, the military and MI-5 – were revealed to the IRA. A list was provided to them and it was extensive. MI-5 became aware late on that the identities of informants had been revealed yet coordinated the response, on prime ministerial instruction, to take away from danger all of those at risk. Counter-arguments were made that that might not be the best idea but Downing Street overruled hesitation: the idea of leaving those people to die rubbed Heseltine the wrong way once he fully understood the scale of the leak. Of course, he, like so many others, wanted to know who had leaked that information. Collating the various names from several sources, bypassing security, was something that would have taken a lot to do. The hunt was on for the perpetrators. It would take a few months but the ultimate outcome of the investigation would be the revelation that the HVA was behind it all. That was East Germany’s foreign intelligence arm, part of the Stasi. They had operatives in the UK who spied on Britain and were working with the IRA.

East German–IRA cooperation went back a good few years. The Soviets had never worked with the IRA – they did have contact with the smaller INLA though – but the East Germans had started to during 1991. There was no ideological connection between the two. IRA volunteers, the men and women who made up its ranks, knew nothing of the cooperation with the East Germans. It was leadership figures and key mid-ranking people in intelligence & logistics roles who were involved on the Irish end know knew the truth about where weapons stocks (smaller ones before the big ‘94 transfers) came from. From out of East Berlin, there weren’t any declarations of real support for the IRA. Comments were made in official statements about them and other terrorist organisations – ETA in Spain and various Middle Eastern entities – where there was a fight against ‘Imperialists and capitalists’, but it was never regarded as a big deal. In the background it was though. Honecker, his wife, Mielke and Schwanitz all approved of it all. Britain had been one of the foremost post-’89 opponents of the DDR and it was judged to be worth it in a strategic sense for there to be a distraction for the UK at home. There was too the emotional connection with regard to the IRA and many in the United States who had a romantic idea of Irish terrorism. British crackdowns caused problems in trans-Atlantic relations, which benefited East Germany in seeing opponents at each other’s throats. It also cost the DDR very little for it wasn’t like they brought those weapons they passed onwards.


What was sent to the IRA was miniscule in terms of what East Germany managed to extract from the former Eastern Bloc and the once component parts of the Soviet Union. There was a marked increase starting mid-1994 when governmental cooperation began in earnest yet before then, Stasi agents were working with illegal arms smugglers to commit wholescale thefts. Security at arms depots was in many places non-existent. Paper-work was fudged where inspections on stockpiles were made. On a few occasions, the missing stocks were noticed and inquiries were made. There were no East German fingerprints over the operations though, at least not at source. Belarus, Bulgaria and Russia all had leaders come ‘94 who were willing to work with the DDR to make things more official. Costs did go up though not to a level where it was unaffordable. Moreover, what military equipment was sent to East Germany was of better quality and in larger shipments than beforehand. There was additionally a level of legitimacy to that too. Western sanctions upon East Germany weren’t levelled by nations showing a friendly face to the Margot Honecker regime. They did what they wanted, what was in their interest to do, and the West could go do one!

East Germany didn’t gain new tank fleets nor large numbers of combat aircraft during the two separate stages of its Nineties armaments transfers. The shipments made either undercover or openly weren’t about that. Smuggling like that was impossible and so too was paying for it all either. The DDR would have liked to have improved it military in such a way but that wasn’t practical. What was mainly brought was ammunition and supporting equipment for systems in-place. The entire East German Armed Forces was composed of Soviet or Eastern Bloc produced equipment. The DDR had a small organic arms production set-up but nowhere near what was necessary to maintain the required force level that was deemed necessary to deter any future military action by the West. Missiles and rockets were brought into the country to provide stockpiles for existing launch platforms. High-tech sensors, aircraft engines, spare parts for tank fire-control systems… that was what East Germany got their hands upon. That said, East Germany did make the purchase come late ‘94 of a dozen Moldovan MiG-29 fighters (not the monkey-models, but the very best versions) and also twenty more OTR-21 short-range ballistic missile launchers. They already had such weapons in-service and paid for more of them to reinforce their fleets. Yet, Russia refused to see further sales of the longer-range OTR-23 ballistic missile of which the DDR only had a few but wanted more of: the range of them caused too much concern in Moscow. Even when there were official transfers, there was still some good old fashioned illegal smuggling though and that included a lot of what went to the IRA and various terror groups down in the Middle East. It was with that that a lot of those involved personally enriched themselves beyond what went on the state balance sheets. Chernomyrdin in Moscow, Belarus’ new dictator and the Bulgarian leadership that was infiltrated by the powerful mafia in that Balkan nation wanted to get rich. Several East Germans too found themselves making sure that their own Swiss bank accounts were bulging. Weapons were moved on to various external customers after the East Germans got their hands upon them where wars down in Africa would be fought with stolen weaponry that the Stasi had had its hand involved in seeing moved about.

Due to the East German links with both Libya and Iraq where there were exchanges of missile technology and also help from the each where all three were involved in various sanction busting, attention was shone on all of that through late ‘94 and into ‘95. Britain, France, Israel and the United States all had their intelligence services active. The two Arab countries were of most concern though the more East German involvement uncovered led to greater attention being paid to the DDR in what it was up to. There were informants who provided information in addition to what spies and communications intercepts could detect. The Israelis paid more attention to East German activity where they looked at the missile programmes of that country’s allies and saw danger. A team of Kazakh & Ukrainian missile engineers – skilled men who had lost their livelihoods when the Soviet Union fell – had been contracted by the DDR to work on a joint missile programme with the Libyans hosting the effort, Iraqi cash paying for a lot of it and the East Germans providing many of the components. That was interrupted by the Gaddafi-Saddam spat but then continued in ‘95.

Mossad got a man down into the depths of the Libyan Desert to have a look up close at what had been seen from afar through observation and what an informant had told Israel in secret. The missile programme was far more advanced than thought. Libya and Iraq would have regional strike capabilities, while the East Germans would get themselves a Europe-wide weapon themselves at the end of it all. The discovery was important in many ways down the line.

Good update James G ,

Doubt the East German rocket program will be as succesvol as a previous German rocket program, it will but their enemies but not defeat them.

Thank you.
They inherited plentiful Soviet-era missile - so many Scuds and a few newer types - but are thinking long-term with the joint Arab programme. Western governments are now aware though and will want to react.

Aug 29, 2021 17:50:53 GMT stevep said:

   Somewhat off topic but I did read back, about this period of time that many IRA informants were obtained by judicious use of terror.  The target would be contacted by some council officer or someone like that, possibly with regard to some compensation for some issue and would meet up and often receive some money.  Shortly afterward he would receive a visit by someone from the security services with pictures of the meeting and information that the guy was actually also a security operative.  So they would either work as an informant or their 'colleagues' in the IRA would be informed of the contact.  Since this would very likely mean their torture and death this successfully turned many into informants. Great to use the savagely and paranoia of such a terrorist group against them.

Nasty, but sounds very plausible. No laws broken and a whole bunch of rotten people get stuck in the sticky stuff.
What's not to like!?

Aug 29, 2021 17:53:37 GMT stevep said:

  I suspect it will given the more advanced technology involved and the fact they have two collaborators.  However I'm more concerned with what payloads they might end up with.  Nukes are hopefully not an option, although many such weapons in the former USSR were often poorly guarded in this period but chemical weapons, which should be well within the capacity of the DDR would be bloody nasty and in a scenario where the regime is going down I fear the sort of egomaniacs involved here will not want to go quietly.

Neither Iraq nor Libya will settle for a missile just with a big bang. They'll be desiring more.
East Germany's WMD programme is in an upcoming update. They'll have the tech and the knowledge, but will need the materials. How the West deals with that, along with everything else, will be the casus belli. 

[James G]

Six – Candidate X


The dissent playwright Václav Havel had been instrumental in bringing down the Czechoslovakian communist regime at the end of 1989. It had been no easy process, one that had seen bloodshed when Havel was one of those who sought to make it violence free, yet it wasn’t on the scale of Romania and the streets of Prague hadn’t run red. Working with the deposed reformer Alexander Dubček (who’d been removed by the Soviets during the Prague Spring twenty-plus years beforehand), the leadership of the union that then was Czechoslovakia had given in to the street protests and general strike which Havel had worked so hard to see succeed. Dubček’s favour with the people had floundered yet Havel’s had only grown. He became the Czechoslovak president and had then succeeded in securing a peaceful dissolution to the union into two separate states. The Czech Republic had been born at the start of ‘93 with Havel once more in the presidency. He was the head of state for the country though the founding constitution of the nation gave more governmental domestic power to the nation’s prime minister. With the passage of time, the popularity of Havel had diminished somewhat – making him in many ways more popular outside of the country – yet he was still regarded by the majority of Czechs as the founder of their modern nation. Throughout his presidency, leading from the historic Prague Castle, Havel was an enemy of those up in East Berlin.

Right from the start, when he was Czechoslovak federal president, Havel hadn’t just turned his back upon East German extensions of ties but thrown them right back in the face of Honecker and the Politburo. He wanted nothing to do with the DDR. East Germany sought economic links with its neighbour to mitigate the financial distress which each country was in when the Eastern Bloc collapsed. Havel would have none of that: he sought ties with the West. He travelled throughout Western Europe, even across the ocean to America, publicly savaging the continued rule of the DDR by the surviving regime. At every opportunity, he reminded influential foreign audiences that freedom might have been gained in his country but that up in East Germany, the communists were still in power. He urged for overseas forces to bring down the DDR regime… using any means possible too. Havel worked to defend his country against Stasi efforts turns Czechs traitors against their own nation and found spies within the security forces. His government turfed out those who loyalties were with the old regime and whom had new links to the East Germans. When during 1993 there was that domestic propaganda campaign within the DDR to try and accuse the Czech Republic of working to bring down the state, Havel make public his agreement with that goal though decried the lies told about ‘active measures’ taken by supposed ‘Czech agents’. No one took that story seriously but it really upset Havel. He knew the truth of the matter was that the destabilisation was done the other way. East Germany sought to maintain links with the Czech Republic against the will of him and his government where they used his country as a conduit for their sanction busting & illegal dealings. When she took over in East Berlin in the summer of ‘94, Margot Honecker gave permission for the state’s security service to continue, even expand if possible, ongoing activities inside the Czech Republic. The Czech leadership was more of an enemy than anyone else close by and with a leader whose seemingly one goal was to smash the DDR.

The Czech Republic hadn’t emerged from independence as the promised land that many of its citizens had hoped it would. Havel’s domestic popularity suffered due to economic constraints and also matters such as an immense crime wave. Criminals locked up under the communist regime had been freed en masse and the lax internal security powers that state organs had post-’89 allowed for foreign criminal groups to flourish inside the country. The Russian mafia organisations which East Germany had ties to did a lot of business within the Czech Republic. At times, their actions gave the outwards impression that the country was turning into a gangster state: there were shootings, they flaunted their wealth & untouchability and they corrupted politicians. Havel reversed track on his distrust of police and intelligence organisations – so many of them full of those who’d worked for the Czechoslovakian regime – but it wasn’t enough. In Parliament, the growing opposition to him battled with him to take charge of the fightback against criminality and also that foreign interference that East Germany was behind. Yet, during early-’95, Havel went on the offensive when faced with parliamentary displeasure that was bleeding over into the public. He saw to it that smuggling across into the DDR was impeded via arrests and prosecutions while also having soldiers from the new-born Army of the Czech Republic sent to the border on patrol. Bank accounts in the ‘Wild West’ atmosphere of Czech banking that had sprung up as capitalism flourished were frozen. Those domestic measures were followed up by overseas activities. To Paris, London, Bonn then New York he travelled and everywhere he spoke out against the East German regime with its rampant international criminality. Everyone who listened to him was given a patient, evidence-backed explanation of what was going on. Havel went to Poland to meet with President Bogdan Borusewicz. He and Borusewicz struck a deal, an unofficial alliance between their two countries. Not relying upon the West, though committed to ask for help if the situation ever arose, they agreed that should East Germany make an attack upon one of them, then the other would come to their aid. It wasn’t a fool-proof, legally-binding alliance but it was a commitment made that Havel wanted to see done. He had done so much work in his early presidency to help demolish the last remains of communist influence across Eastern Europe and wanted to finish that off by seeing an end put to the actions of East Germany. Should he hurt them financially, diplomatically too by extension, he aimed to see that regime finally fall. He did it for his own country but also for Europe as well.

None of that went unnoticed. So much of Havel’s actions were public, in the face of the Margot Honecker regime. She turned to her trusted ally in the Politburo to deal with the issue. Stasi chief Schwanitz agreed completely that Havel needed to be stopped with his leader putting her trust in him to do that while not asking for all of the details. There was much faith she had in him and other securocrats, faith that hadn’t disappointed her beforehand. Schwanitz got to the issue and worked with foreign contacts. There were trans-national criminal elements whose interests Havel hurt by what he did and so too figures in the Russian government all the way up as high as President Chernomyrdin in Moscow too. There were lots of different ways that Schwanitz could have gotten rid of the problem. He chose the ‘long-term’ option though. Mafia chiefs weren’t privy to what exactly was planned though Chernomyrdin’s security people were though. There was no opposition to the Stasi’s operation… just as long as Russia was kept uninvolved and thus ‘innocent’.


Havel went to West Berlin at the beginning of May. He made a speech there in front of the Berlin Wall, bringing out his inner Reagan with a call almost of ‘tear down this wall’. In Bonn, they were unimpressed at that suggestion. West Berliners, especially the political establishment there who were at odds with Chancellor Schäuble over whether possible reunification was in Germany’s best interest, applauded him though. He got back on a flight to take him home, though one which had to travel via West Germany rather than direct to the Czech Republic. Havel fell ill on that flight. He was rapidly overcome by crippling stomach pains before he fainted. An aircraft divert saw medical attention directed towards him once he was on the ground and he ended up in a West German hospital. Havel was unconscious and soon at death’s door. Poison was at once suspected though the Czech authorities, plus the West Germans and other interested parties, were unable to pin down what was causing him to slowly lose his battle to live. The days progressed and his health got worse. Havel had major internal organ failure and the spread of the death ravaging his body moved at a rapid rate. Four days after that flight from West Berlin, he died without ever regaining consciousness.

The Czech Republic had a vacancy for the office of president.

Presidential succession in that country was written into the constitution so that should the office fall vacant, it wouldn’t be immediately directly replaced. There was no vice president waiting by. Instead, the prime minister and the parliamentary speaker were due to share the duties of the office pending an emergency election. That wouldn’t take long to come about because it wasn’t a popular vote which had put Havel in power but instead one among parliamentarians where a majority was needed. Václav Klaus was the Czech prime minister in May 1994. A growing political opponent of Havel’s leadership, he should have been a shoo-in for the role. Klaus had public support and there would have been enough votes among colleagues to get him there. However, on the second day that Havel was in that West German hospital – there had been an intention to bring him home but his situation had deteriorated so fast that moving him was deemed unwise – a young female secretary working for Klaus was found dead in his personal office. She was discovered naked and had been strangled. No public announcement of that was made, not when the Czech Republic’s leadership was in crisis mode with a president poisoned when overseas and clinging to life. There was no direct evidence to tie Klaus to that young woman’s apparent murder. He had been in the same building though, down the hall meeting with media strategists at the time. Both of them swore that he had been with them the whole time. Rumours swirled around among parliamentarians as to what that was all about. There was information fed indirectly to them from outside sources that Klaus did have something to do with it all, that his aides were lying about his complete non-involvement.

The Czech Police, so distrusted by Havel, even Klaus too in many ways, investigated alongside the state intelligence service which the president had been castrating for his fears over East German links. Just as Havel had feared, infiltration by the Stasi to buy traitors there paid off. All sorts of evidence was seemingly conjured up to implicate Klaus. Then there were the leaks which saw to it that the news about that secretary’s death became public. At first, the story came to the attention of the West German media who broadcast it and afterwards sections of the Czech media did as well. There were some shadowy owners of the domestic media inside the country and Havel had been seeking to take on yet he had never gotten around to do that, impeded by parliamentarians bought off. Klaus had been thought to have been favoured by them but he was suddenly in the negative spotlight. No clear allegations were made that he was intimately involved with that young woman nor had seen to it that she was killed yet there were a whole load of innuendos put about. Havel’s death was not long afterwards announced. That knocked the Klaus story out of the way. However, there was no time for allies of the prime minister to present evidence to disprove the wild allegations: people only heard them, not the demolishing of such silliness as the country’s head of government being involved in anything like that which came afterwards.

Candidate X moved to take the presidency while Klaus was beset by scandal and distrust. The codename was what Schwanitz and those with him up in East Berlin called their preferred choice to replace Havel instead of Klaus. They had long-term connections with him and had helped build him a support base within parliament. If they could get him into the office of the presidency, even with the issue of that young woman’s death going away for the prime minister, the entire future of Czech-DDR relations could be changed. An extraordinary Stasi effort was made to see Candidate X be considered by those parliamentarians and then to have them vote for him too. The gamble was massive but the pay offs were considered to be worth it if the third, final phase of Schwanitz’s scheme would bring the result desired.

[lordroel]

Aug 31, 2021 17:49:09 GMT James G said:

Six – Candidate X


The dissent playwright Václav Havel had been instrumental in bringing down the Czechoslovakian communist regime at the end of 1989. It had been no easy process, one that had seen bloodshed when Havel was one of those who sought to make it violence free, yet it wasn’t on the scale of Romania and the streets of Prague hadn’t run red. Working with the deposed reformer Alexander Dubček (who’d been removed by the Soviets during the Prague Spring twenty-plus years beforehand), the leadership of the union that then was Czechoslovakia had given in to the street protests and general strike which Havel had worked so hard to see succeed. Dubček’s favour with the people had floundered yet Havel’s had only grown. He became the Czechoslovak president and had then succeeded in securing a peaceful dissolution to the union into two separate states. The Czech Republic had been born at the start of ‘93 with Havel once more in the presidency. He was the head of state for the country though the founding constitution of the nation gave more governmental domestic power to the nation’s prime minister. With the passage of time, the popularity of Havel had diminished somewhat – making him in many ways more popular outside of the country – yet he was still regarded by the majority of Czechs as the founder of their modern nation. Throughout his presidency, leading from the historic Prague Castle, Havel was an enemy of those up in East Berlin.

Right from the start, when he was Czechoslovak federal president, Havel hadn’t just turned his back upon East German extensions of ties but thrown them right back in the face of Honecker and the Politburo. He wanted nothing to do with the DDR. East Germany sought economic links with its neighbour to mitigate the financial distress which each country was in when the Eastern Bloc collapsed. Havel would have none of that: he sought ties with the West. He travelled throughout Western Europe, even across the ocean to America, publicly savaging the continued rule of the DDR by the surviving regime. At every opportunity, he reminded influential foreign audiences that freedom might have been gained in his country but that up in East Germany, the communists were still in power. He urged for overseas forces to bring down the DDR regime… using any means possible too. Havel worked to defend his country against Stasi efforts turns Czechs traitors against their own nation and found spies within the security forces. His government turfed out those who loyalties were with the old regime and whom had new links to the East Germans. When during 1993 there was that domestic propaganda campaign within the DDR to try and accuse the Czech Republic of working to bring down the state, Havel make public his agreement with that goal though decried the lies told about ‘active measures’ taken by supposed ‘Czech agents’. No one took that story seriously but it really upset Havel. He knew the truth of the matter was that the destabilisation was done the other way. East Germany sought to maintain links with the Czech Republic against the will of him and his government where they used his country as a conduit for their sanction busting & illegal dealings. When she took over in East Berlin in the summer of ‘94, Margot Honecker gave permission for the state’s security service to continue, even expand if possible, ongoing activities inside the Czech Republic. The Czech leadership was more of an enemy than anyone else close by and with a leader whose seemingly one goal was to smash the DDR.

The Czech Republic hadn’t emerged from independence as the promised land that many of its citizens had hoped it would. Havel’s domestic popularity suffered due to economic constraints and also matters such as an immense crime wave. Criminals locked up under the communist regime had been freed en masse and the lax internal security powers that state organs had post-’89 allowed for foreign criminal groups to flourish inside the country. The Russian mafia organisations which East Germany had ties to did a lot of business within the Czech Republic. At times, their actions gave the outwards impression that the country was turning into a gangster state: there were shootings, they flaunted their wealth & untouchability and they corrupted politicians. Havel reversed track on his distrust of police and intelligence organisations – so many of them full of those who’d worked for the Czechoslovakian regime – but it wasn’t enough. In Parliament, the growing opposition to him battled with him to take charge of the fightback against criminality and also that foreign interference that East Germany was behind. Yet, during early-’95, Havel went on the offensive when faced with parliamentary displeasure that was bleeding over into the public. He saw to it that smuggling across into the DDR was impeded via arrests and prosecutions while also having soldiers from the new-born Army of the Czech Republic sent to the border on patrol. Bank accounts in the ‘Wild West’ atmosphere of Czech banking that had sprung up as capitalism flourished were frozen. Those domestic measures were followed up by overseas activities. To Paris, London, Bonn then New York he travelled and everywhere he spoke out against the East German regime with its rampant international criminality. Everyone who listened to him was given a patient, evidence-backed explanation of what was going on. Havel went to Poland to meet with President Bogdan Borusewicz. He and Borusewicz struck a deal, an unofficial alliance between their two countries. Not relying upon the West, though committed to ask for help if the situation ever arose, they agreed that should East Germany make an attack upon one of them, then the other would come to their aid. It wasn’t a fool-proof, legally-binding alliance but it was a commitment made that Havel wanted to see done. He had done so much work in his early presidency to help demolish the last remains of communist influence across Eastern Europe and wanted to finish that off by seeing an end put to the actions of East Germany. Should he hurt them financially, diplomatically too by extension, he aimed to see that regime finally fall. He did it for his own country but also for Europe as well.

None of that went unnoticed. So much of Havel’s actions were public, in the face of the Margot Honecker regime. She turned to her trusted ally in the Politburo to deal with the issue. Stasi chief Schwanitz agreed completely that Havel needed to be stopped with his leader putting her trust in him to do that while not asking for all of the details. There was much faith she had in him and other securocrats, faith that hadn’t disappointed her beforehand. Schwanitz got to the issue and worked with foreign contacts. There were trans-national criminal elements whose interests Havel hurt by what he did and so too figures in the Russian government all the way up as high as President Chernomyrdin in Moscow too. There were lots of different ways that Schwanitz could have gotten rid of the problem. He chose the ‘long-term’ option though. Mafia chiefs weren’t privy to what exactly was planned though Chernomyrdin’s security people were though. There was no opposition to the Stasi’s operation… just as long as Russia was kept uninvolved and thus ‘innocent’.


Havel went to West Berlin at the beginning of May. He made a speech there in front of the Berlin Wall, bringing out his inner Reagan with a call almost of ‘tear down this wall’. In Bonn, they were unimpressed at that suggestion. West Berliners, especially the political establishment there who were at odds with Chancellor Schäuble over whether possible reunification was in Germany’s best interest, applauded him though. He got back on a flight to take him home, though one which had to travel via West Germany rather than direct to the Czech Republic. Havel fell ill on that flight. He was rapidly overcome by crippling stomach pains before he fainted. An aircraft divert saw medical attention directed towards him once he was on the ground and he ended up in a West German hospital. Havel was unconscious and soon at death’s door. Poison was at once suspected though the Czech authorities, plus the West Germans and other interested parties, were unable to pin down what was causing him to slowly lose his battle to live. The days progressed and his health got worse. Havel had major internal organ failure and the spread of the death ravaging his body moved at a rapid rate. Four days after that flight from West Berlin, he died without ever regaining consciousness.

The Czech Republic had a vacancy for the office of president.

Presidential succession in that country was written into the constitution so that should the office fall vacant, it wouldn’t be immediately directly replaced. There was no vice president waiting by. Instead, the prime minister and the parliamentary speaker were due to share the duties of the office pending an emergency election. That wouldn’t take long to come about because it wasn’t a popular vote which had put Havel in power but instead one among parliamentarians where a majority was needed. Václav Klaus was the Czech prime minister in May 1994. A growing political opponent of Havel’s leadership, he should have been a shoo-in for the role. Klaus had public support and there would have been enough votes among colleagues to get him there. However, on the second day that Havel was in that West German hospital – there had been an intention to bring him home but his situation had deteriorated so fast that moving him was deemed unwise – a young female secretary working for Klaus was found dead in his personal office. She was discovered naked and had been strangled. No public announcement of that was made, not when the Czech Republic’s leadership was in crisis mode with a president poisoned when overseas and clinging to life. There was no direct evidence to tie Klaus to that young woman’s apparent murder. He had been in the same building though, down the hall meeting with media strategists at the time. Both of them swore that he had been with them the whole time. Rumours swirled around among parliamentarians as to what that was all about. There was information fed indirectly to them from outside sources that Klaus did have something to do with it all, that his aides were lying about his complete non-involvement.

The Czech Police, so distrusted by Havel, even Klaus too in many ways, investigated alongside the state intelligence service which the president had been castrating for his fears over East German links. Just as Havel had feared, infiltration by the Stasi to buy traitors there paid off. All sorts of evidence was seemingly conjured up to implicate Klaus. Then there were the leaks which saw to it that the news about that secretary’s death became public. At first, the story came to the attention of the West German media who broadcast it and afterwards sections of the Czech media did as well. There were some shadowy owners of the domestic media inside the country and Havel had been seeking to take on yet he had never gotten around to do that, impeded by parliamentarians bought off. Klaus had been thought to have been favoured by them but he was suddenly in the negative spotlight. No clear allegations were made that he was intimately involved with that young woman nor had seen to it that she was killed yet there were a whole load of innuendos put about. Havel’s death was not long afterwards announced. That knocked the Klaus story out of the way. However, there was no time for allies of the prime minister to present evidence to disprove the wild allegations: people only heard them, not the demolishing of such silliness as the country’s head of government being involved in anything like that which came afterwards.

Candidate X moved to take the presidency while Klaus was beset by scandal and distrust. The codename was what Schwanitz and those with him up in East Berlin called their preferred choice to replace Havel instead of Klaus. They had long-term connections with him and had helped build him a support base within parliament. If they could get him into the office of the presidency, even with the issue of that young woman’s death going away for the prime minister, the entire future of Czech-DDR relations could be changed. An extraordinary Stasi effort was made to see Candidate X be considered by those parliamentarians and then to have them vote for him too. The gamble was massive but the pay offs were considered to be worth it if the third, final phase of Schwanitz’s scheme would bring the result desired.

Why do i have the feeling that the East German operation will backfire seriously.

[kyuzoaoi]

I think you should rename the story into "Volkskrieg-People's War"; you don't want them to confuse it with a Chinese story.

[gillan1220]

How will this affect the Hong Kong and Macau handover by the end of the decade?

[lordroel]

Sept 1, 2021 6:47:42 GMT gillan1220 said:

How will this affect the Hong Kong and Macau handover by the end of the decade?

The treaty to handover Hong Kong was made in 1984, several years before the POD of this TL, thus I do not think it is going to be effected, unless something happens with China.