Military Liaison Missions in Germany During the Cold War

Before getting too close to the wrong guard of a new model Soviet tank in March of 1985, US Major Arthur D. Nicholson was one of the most daring and successful Military Liaison Officers around town, this town being none other than good old West-Berlin. And technically speaking, he actually worked at the United States Military Mission in Potsdam, located right in the heart of communist East Germany. In other words, Nicholson was very good at spying. But something went wrong that day in Ludwigslust. Later on it came out that an American double agent had tipped off the Soviets concerning Nicholson's earlier adventures and, although all the facts concerning the matter have never been cleared up completely, a Soviet guard who discovered him taking photos panicked and fired and Major Nicholson bled to death while Soviet soldiers forbade his driver to come to his assistance.

These Military Liaison Missions or MLMs were originally established with the intention of avoiding such "misunderstandings" and keeping the four victorious Allied victors on the same sheet of music during their occupation of Germany immediately following World War II (Article II of the London Accord, November 14, 1944). The MLMs went into operation in 1946 and 1947, with 31 British, 18 French and 14 American personnel taking up residence in three spacious Potsdam villas. The Soviets took up shop in Frankfurt, Baden-Baden and Bad Salzuflen in West Germany. All of these soldiers were allowed to move freely, accept in restricted military zones, of course, and although they were originally supposed to enforce the guidelines set out in the Potsdam Accords of 1945, this quickly changed. Once the Berlin Airlift started and the Cold War got colder, and up until their final closure in 1990, these missions transformed into active centers for military espionage on both sides of the Iron Curtain. And literally tons of information was gathered, in both directions, during their relatively short, forty-year history.

All of these Military Missions were continually under surveillance by the other side, of course, so various methods were used to gather information, some of them quite subtle in the beginning. Word has it that British MLM personnel leaving unexpectedly in the middle of the night with a different vehicle than the one with which they arrived could be very effective in shaking off those shadowing them. And the Americans were also known to openly invite their Soviet counterparts to extravagant parties and furnish them with generous amounts of whiskey in the hopes that these good old boys might just start talking shop on their own.

But this type of tactic could only go so far. In the days before spy satellites, on-the-ground espionage was all the more important and the MLMs couldn't be in a better position to gather information about the other side. Traveling from West-Berlin over the city's famous Glienicke Bridge into East Germany for reconnaissance missions lasting up to three days at a time, and despite having what one could call near-diplomatic status, the first thing MLM personnel normally tried to do once crossing over to Potsdam was to shake off the East German guards who were waiting there to follow them. This usually succeeded and was relatively easy due to superior horsepower and helpful special devices reminiscent of those seen in old James Bond films (double-sized gas tanks, a second set of headlights which mimicked those of East German cars, night-vision glasses and other infrared devices).

Once free of their pursuers, Allied MLM personnel then did whatever they could to gather all that they could about Soviet and East German military capability, troop movement, and military planning. In those days, a surprise attack by the Soviet Union could never be ruled out completely and it was essential for NATO forces to know what was going on in East Germany at all times. And gather information they did. It has been estimated that American personnel alone took an average of 500,000 photos a year throughout the 70s. The British and French MLMs were just as hard-working in East Germany, as were the Soviet personnel who were active in the three MLMs they operated in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Another interesting phenomenon of the era was the Soviet "smell-um" of West-Berlin. No, these weren't strange smelling Russian soldiers. The "smell-um" officers, sighted regularly, was the American soldier's pronunciation of the acronym SMLM, which stood for Soviet Military Liaison Mission. These Soviet spies in uniform driving through the streets of West-Berlin were about as inconspicuous as the Berlin Wall itself. They stuck out like sore thumbs, in other words, and the cat-and-mouse game they played with their Allied counterparts this side of the city limits sometimes took on a grotesque character. After all, espionage like this could hardly be expected to work well in a walled-in city like West-Berlin because these spies were simply just too visible to be effective. And to make matters worse, they usually drove around in noisy Volga sedans, four men to a car, wearing monstrously large Soviet hats and talking loudly to their Headquarters in Karlshorst using large, low-tech radios.

Whenever Allied military personnel in West-Berlin spotted them, which was on a regular basis, they reported them immediately to their respective Military Police Office. Allied police then tailed and harassed the smell-ums accordingly, depending upon the given Cold War climate. For instance, large American "five tons" (huge trucks transporting mobile offices) on convoy on the AVUS autobahn were known on occasion to actually block and lock-in smell-ums into tight little areas along that thoroughfare until the American MPs could arrive and take over from there.

But that was then and this is now. And as the fatal cases of Major Nicholson and French Liaison officer Philippe Mariotti shows, the only two Allied Liaison men known to have died during the MLM era, military espionage in Germany during the Cold War was anything but fun and games.

The good old Cold War days? Hardly. But thinking back to the era before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I sometimes can't help but believe that my memory must be playing tricks on me and that some of these more bizarre episodes of that bizarre era must have actually taken place in a cheap B movie and not here, in real world, on the very real streets in and around Berlin.