Born: 30 October, 1925, in Lower Silesia.
Died: 21 August, 2008, in Bavaria, aged 82. WOLFGANG Vogel was a lawyer in communist East Germany who became a wealthy man in the Cold War by opening cracks in the Berlin Wall to swap
captured spies and release political prisoners.
For three decades before then, Vogel was an operator who could pull strings in Moscow as effectively as in Washington, useful to each side because he was trusted by the other. He was taken into the confidence of the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt in Bonn and of Erich Honecker, the Communist leader in East Berlin, who made Vogel join the Communist Party in 1981.
Vogel's first spy-swapping case began in 1959, when he represented an East German woman who said she was the wife of Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, a convicted Soviet master spy imprisoned in the United States. Three years later, negotiations led to the exchange of Mr Abel for the captured American U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers at the Glienicke Bridge outside Berlin. At the same moment, at Checkpoint Charlie, the East Germans released another client of Vogel they had arrested, an American PhD student named Frederic L Pryor.
In later years, Vogel often materialised out of the mists at German border crossing points, his wife at the wheel of their gold-coloured Mercedes, for spy swaps, releases of political prisoners – 33,755 in all – and family reunifications for 215,019 people, emigration bought from the Communists by the West German government under Vogel's auspices.
The trade brought in $2.4 billion in western currency, badly wanted in East Berlin; Vogel also received annual payments of more than $200,000 from the West Germans.
It was to Vogel that ordinary East German citizens would turn for permission to emigrate, obtainable, he told them, if they had private property to sell to buyers whom he would find, for a fee.
And in 1986, it was to Vogel that the United States turned to negotiate freedom for the imprisoned Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (later, as Natan Sharansky, a political leader in Israel). Included in an elaborately choreographed exchange of spies at the Glienicke Bridge because the Soviet authorities insisted that he was one, Mr Sharansky exuberantly jumped into West Berlin over the border line painted on the deck.
Vogel was waiting in the dark at the border at Herleshausen in 1981 for the secret release of Günter Guillaume, the East German spy whose unmasking in 1974 had brought down chancellor Willy Brandt.
"I'd figured on seeing you a lot sooner," Mr Guillaume told him.
Vogel saw himself as a humanitarian, and his last negotiations were to help thousands of East Germans who had fled to the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw as their own regime was collapsing. But all his influence in communist countries came from his connections with the East German Staatssicherheit, the Stasi security service, and his usefulness came to an end when the Stasi did.
After reunification, his Stasi links left him open to accusations of extortion, profiteering and tax evasion that culminated in his arrest and later conviction in a state court in Berlin in 1996 on five counts of blackmail. He appealed; Germany's highest court found in his favour in 1998 on two of the cases, and prosecutors agreed to drop the others. But he and his lawyers agreed not to contest a separate conviction for perjury and falsely swearing to an affidavit, and his legal career was over.
Wolfgang Vogel grew up in the village of Wilhelmsthal, Silesia. After the Vogel family fled to the Soviet zone of occupation when their homeland became Polish territory in 1945, he studied law at Jena University.
After marrying Eva Anlauf, a nursery teacher from Leipzig, he finished his studies in the city, at what under communism had been renamed Karl Marx University. They had their first child, Manfred, in August 1947. Wolfgang and Eva Vogel divorced in 1967, after she moved with his help to West Berlin with their son and their daughter, Lilo. His second wife, Helga, came from West Germany and worked as his assistant.
When he passed the equivalent of the bar exam in 1949, Vogel was apprenticed to a senior judge and followed him to the East German justice ministry in Berlin in 1952. But when the judge fled to West Berlin after the anti-communist uprisings of 1953 and sent Vogel a message asking him to join him, the Stasi intercepted the message and ensnared the young lawyer in its coils.
He went along as a collaborator, but soon his ambitious Stasi controller, Heinz Volpert, saw that this ingratiating young man could serve larger state interests if he was allowed to set up as an independent lawyer who could work in East and West Berlin. Captain (later Colonel) Volpert closed Vogel's "secret collaborator" file in 1957, but the personal and professional relationship remained close until Colonel Volpert's death in 1986.
Vogel's Stasi connections continued after 1957, though he always maintained he never again was a secret informer.
"My paths were not white and not black; they had to be grey," he told the court during his appeal.
The full article contains 878 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
