This document is told from the perspective of me, and I offer it to the reader as a work of my experience in which some names have been changed. It is not comprehensive and may include misinformation and incorrect dates to allow "still classified" material to be included and protect living agents' identities.
However, the broad outlines are accurate, and I am a real person who was recruited by the West and did indeed travel to Cold War Berlin in 1971 to enter the world of multinational Cold War counterintelligence and intelligence gathering. Despite being British, I was assigned to a multinational unit and was housed in Roosevelt barracks (closed in 1992), home of the 6941st Guard Battalion, a predominantly German unit assigned to provide security to US installations, and other miscellaneous units. My initial training involved learning about covert investigation, interrogation, and examination of NATO resources, security, and facilities, and counterintelligence inside buildings whose true purpose was disguised by signs misinforming their true purpose.
The book is based on extensive first-hand eyewitness research over 50 years, including my discussions with many of the people I knew in both NATO and Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War. However, it is essential to remember that it is not an academic cited work, and so it should not be taken as a definitive account of my life, as I was once informed that were I to tell my "truth", my ability to renew my driving license, passport, or any other official document may be removed. As a result, I have taken some liberties with the truth to protect myself and others.
The role of military and soldier diplomats in the run-up to World War II has been understudied due to a lack of data and knowledge of significant players for security reasons, and I hope that this creates a wedge to prise open the container that holds the stories of the many unsung heroes that gave their lives for King, Queen, and country so that one day they receive the full recognition they deserve.
However, I hope it still provides an interesting account of pre-Cold War Germany's intelligence landscape and as much information as possible about the major European intelligence networks operating before that time. So as not to overstep the mark, I have only used freely available material and declassified it for those who know what questions to ask and where to look, and perhaps as a signpost of where to look further for academics.
The book points at the complex relationships and motivations of the organisations involved, hopefully making it captivating for anyone interested in espionage and Cold War intelligence community history. Due to the confidential and covert nature of the work, there has been a lack of research on intelligence and counterintelligence operations until now.
Although I do not doubt the loyalty and integrity of British intelligence or any other organisations in the Intelligence community, working for "the greater good" is the name of the game. Hence, being "burnt" was an occupational risk. All assignments were given with plausible deniability to soldier diplomats, so all assignments were accepted on the premise that the only backup was a "possible" extraction, and should that not be possible, then all knowledge of the mission or connection to the "intelligence gatherer" would be denied. Therefore, some views expressed here are those of the author and, for classified reasons, do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or any government. The text includes a list of abbreviations and acronyms regularly used by defence and intelligence organisation professionals, and where possible, I have expanded upon them.
This is the first of several books and mainly covers the period before the formation of the Soviet Union. I will pick up the chronology of the evolution of Intelligence in my next book.