Gabriele Gast (born 2 March 1943) is a former double agent and East German spy. In 1973, Gast responded to a newspaper job advertisement purportedly placed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. On 1 November 1973, she started to work with the West German intelligence service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst/BND).
Background vetting undertaken by the BND had failed to identify that since 1968 Gast had been on the books of the East German HVA, the branch of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) concerned with "foreign" intelligence. For an unknown reason, it was not till 1990, when she was "betrayed by a defector", that the West German Intelligence Service became aware of her espionage activities.
Informants who passed information from the West to the East German intelligence services were often paid a fee. Gabriele Gast refused to accept payment and reportedly engaged in espionage for "love". It is theorised that after some time the "love" was matched and replaced as the driving force for her espionage work by a deep political commitment. Despite her changing circumstances, she never accepted payment from her East German spy chiefs. After the Cold War had ended with the fall of the USSR, and after she had served her sentence in West Germany, she presented herself as a spy "from conviction" ("aus Überzeugung").
A recent article from Sven Felix Kellerhoff ranked Gast as East Germany's fourth most damaging spy, one place ahead of Günter Guillaume.
Life Early years Gast was born in Remscheid during the Second World War, approximately three months before most of the town was destroyed in a firestorm caused by aerial bombing. Her father, who died while she was very young, was a driving instructor. The youngest of three siblings, she grew up in a conservative Catholic household in what became, in May 1949, the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Intelligent and diligent in her studies, she became politically engaged and inherited her parents' political conservatism, joining the Association of Christian Democratic (i.e. conservative) Students ("Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten" / RCDS) and the mainstream centre-right CDU (party). Like many people in western (and central) Europe, she was, according to her later testimony, opposed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. By that year she was working on a doctorate in political sciences, supervised by Klaus Mehnert at the university in Aachen. Her chosen topic focused on the role of women in the German Democratic Republic. Her dissertation was submitted and her doctorate was received in 1972.
Espionage In the summer of 1968, Gabriele Gast visited Plauen, in the extreme south of what was then the German Democratic Republic, to undertake research for her doctorate on "the political role of women in the German Democratic Republic". The necessary permissions had been obtained by cousins in Plauen whom she had contacted in order to organise the trip. By this time she had already been a card-carrying CDU member for three years, but it is nevertheless apparent that the local Stasi office had also been undertaking preparations of their own in anticipation of her visit. Sources are inconsistent regarding the sequence of events as to how and when Gast met Karl-Heinz Schneider, the man she came to know as Karl-Heinz Schmidt. She appears to have met him first in Karl-Marx-Stadt (as Chemnitz was known at this time), where she had travelled to interview members of the Democratic Women's League of Germany ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD). It would have been remarkable for her to have travelled unescorted under these circumstances, and she was indeed accompanied to Karl-Marx-Stadt by an MfS "minder" who introduced her to "Karl-Heinz Schmidt", who was also visiting the city. It turned out that he knew her MfS escort and, on learning that the man was planning to drive to nearby Dresden, asked if he could cadge a lift. Gast, as she testified many years later, had been planning to stay in Karl-Marx-Stadt that afternoon, presumably to write up notes of her meetings with the DFD ladies, but on learning that there was an afternoon trip to Dresden in the offing, she asked if she might come along. That evening, to thank him for including her in his little expedition, she bought Karl-Heinz a glass of wine at the "Kosmos Bar". "Karliszek", as he invited her to call him, was a good-looking fair-haired man of considerable charm, eight years her senior. He said he was a car mechanic. She liked him, although after sharing a glass of wine, it seems they went to their separate hotel rooms. Soon, she became aware that they had fallen in love.
Sources are silent over the extent of "Karliszek's" skills as a car mechanic. He was "tactful, charming, a good dancer, and jovial". He was a highly trained MfS agent: his task was to seduce women who might be persuaded to work for his employers. Karliszek's long-running relationship with Gabriele Gast would become – at least until 1990 – a textbook case of how these exercises could play out when everything went well, from the perspective of the spymasters.
Encouraged by her supervisor, Mehnert, Gast decided it would be helpful to return to Karl-Marx-Stadt a few months later to broaden the range of her contacts with politically active women. She conducted more interviews, visited libraries, and undertook further research in the region. She also met up again with "Karliszek". Realising that they needed to spend more time together, he suggested that they meet in the future in East Berlin, which she could visit on the train from the West using a simple "day visa". That idea connected well with Gast's study plans, which included visits to archive repositories in West Berlin. However, she could not undertake unlimited ad hoc visits across to East Berlin simply on the pretext of undertaking research or visiting relatives. Schmidt's reaction was both sympathetic and practical: he had a friend who might be able to help.
"Karl-Heinz Schmidt's" friend was introduced to her as "Gotthard Schiefer". In actuality, he was Gotthard Schramm, a department head with the Ministry for State Security in the Karl-Marx-Stadt region. The names by which they identified themselves to Gabriele Gast were false. In other respects, the two men were shockingly honest at a meeting held between the three of them at the "Hotel Unter den Linden" in East Berlin. "Karl-Heinz Schmidt" was not a car mechanic with abundant free time: they told her they both worked for the East German security services (Stasi) and that their bosses believed that Gabriele Gast had been sent by the West German intelligence services to report back on her friend, "Karl-Heinz Schmidt". The series of unexpected disclosures badly shook her, but she knew she loved "Schmidt". While she was taking it all in, "Schiefer" added that the Stasi suspicions might be tempered if she were able to display an "open-minded willingness to assist them" ("eine aufgeschlossene Bereitschaft zur Mithilfe gegenüber dem MfS"). It did not seem so terrible to her: "help us out, and you can go on seeing each other". What was involved seemed to be not treachery but a little cooperation, since as she was just a student she had no critical information to share. "Schiefer" asked for a few names of students who might be helpful or snippets of casual gossip on the professors back at the university in Aachen, and if she know anyone serving in the West German army.
After agreeing to help, Gast soon found herself sent on an intensive spycraft course, including hands-on training with the latest in covert communications equipment. She was given a Stasi code name, "Gisela", which came with a false passport and a new handbag, incorporating a well concealed secret compartment. Back home in Aachen, every Tuesday evening at the same time she tuned into a shortwave radio station from East Germany and carefully wrote down a long line of numbers, read out in a monotone, without further elaboration, by a "radio presenter". When she decrypted the messages from Schmidt she found some were instructions while others were simply encouraging love messages. An arrangement was set in place whereby she should visit East Berlin every three months. A more specific early assignment involved contacting a fellow student and getting him to meet up with a Stasi agent masquerading as a financial consultant. There is speculation that this seemingly inconsequential challenge was an early "test" which she passed.
In 1970, Gast and "Schmidt" became engaged. They celebrated in a Stasi hostelry. None of their parents knew. The only friend who participated in the celebration was "Gotthard Schiefer" (Gotthard Schramm). There was also a taped message of goodwill from the men's head of department in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Colonel Egon Lorenz. After her unmasking in 1990, Gast encountered evident incredulity from an investigating judge that she and her fiancé had never married, and asked why she had not obtained work in East Germany, married and had children with her man. Her emotionally charged reaction in court suggested that Gast would have loved to have done just that. Though Gast likely would not have experienced difficulty in obtaining work in East Germany, something always prevented a marriage from taking place. It could and was argued that Gast's own actions contributed to the indefinite deferral. After earning her doctorate, which marked the end of her time as a student, it was she who took a research job in Munich with the Forschungsinstitut für Sicherheit und internationale Zusammenarbeit e.V. ("Research Institute for Security and International Collaboration"), a right-wing political pressure group. It was a reasonable career move for an intellectual CDU member with a newly earned doctorate in political sciences, but it was not an obvious route to a life as an East German housewife. At the Research Institute, she solemnly photographed anything that could possibly be of interest to her HVA (ie Stasi) handlers, who organised the necessary "courier" arrangements. By the end of 1973 she had allowed herself to be headhunted for work in the West German intelligence service ("Federal Intelligence Service" / "Bundesnachrichtendienst" / BND), located at Pullach (still in the Munich area).
Upon joining the BND she was given an additional cover name to remember: for the BND she was Dr. Gabriele Leinfelder. Within a year she was assigned to the intelligence analysis section that dealt with the Soviet Union. She achieved steady promotion through surveying and analysing all the information that arrived in the department concerning Eastern Europe on behalf of her employers in both western and eastern intelligence.