The Romeos
“One is easily fooled by that which one loves.” Jean Baptiste Moliere
Following the close of the hostilities at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet empire had expanded to cover nearly a sixth of the surface area of the planet.
What began as the “liberation” of the territories in the east that had been conquered by the Third Reich turned into an ugly and repressive Soviet occupation. The Iron Curtain was about to fall, and the Soviet high command began to export it’s home-grown brand of political control to all of its new satellites.
Before the KGB had even been formed, its forerunner, the Министерство государственной безопасности, (Ministry for State Security) of the USSR was charged with maintaining the political supremacy of the party within the expansive boundaries of Mother Russia.
Throughout the 1950s, after the borders had been closed and Germany divided, the primary front of the Cold War raged in East Germany. Western powers struggled both overtly and covertly to undermine the spread of Stalinist ideals anywhere they could, but the two biggest hotbeds of contention were Bonn, the capital of Western-occupied Germany and Berlin, the divided former capital.
It’s often said that governments don’t have friends, only interests and needs.
The Soviets had an interest in getting access to secure lines of communication that were flowing under the wall from west to east through the new “administrative” offices on the other side of the wall.
They also had the need to stamp out the political ambitions of former Nazis and political opponents as they feigned “democratic” elections to “legitimize” the party’s authority.
Germany, like all of the rest of the Soviet satellites would need it’s own Ministry of State security to achieve the intelligence objectives of Moscow and prevent political threats to the state from becoming viable threats.
On February 8th, 1950, the headquarters of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit or Ministry for State Security of the German Democratic Republic – commonly known as the “Stasi” – opened its doors for the first time in East Berlin. The organization was a near carbon copy of the Soviet MGB and it showed.
By quickly developing and sourcing a vast network of informants, agents and military-trained secret police, the Stasi began their work at a sprint’s pace.
Less than a few months after the Ministry’s inception, state-run businesses, educational institutions, social groups, and political organizations all were all riddled with Stasi agents. Estimates vary as to the depth to which the East German population participated in the activities of the Stasi from anywhere as low as one in seven to one in sixty-three citizens that regularly provided the Stasi with information.
What cannot be disputed, however, is the fact that the Stasi succeeded so fantastically in supporting the mission of the KGB that they outpaced every other satellite intelligence organization operating throughout the USSR.
One of the most fruitful of the contributions made by the Stasi in gathering information of intelligence value from their closely watched western neighbors was the network of “Romeos”.
Early on in the Cold War, the KGB perfected the art of blackmailing foreign embassy staff in Moscow with information about their peculiar sexual proclivities. They targeted mostly men who had strayed from their wives, or were closeted homosexuals, and the KGB achieved marginal success.
With this in mind, a young Stasi foreign intelligence officer named Markus Wolf turned his eyes to Bonn, the West German capital, and saw a target of opportunity.
Following the suspension of hostilities, because of the forced service and ultimate annihilation of so many of the Reich’s foot soldiers, the quantity and quality of healthy, eligible young German bachelors had significantly decreased.
Plainly put, the young women who were staffing the secretaries’ desks and managing the telegraph rooms of every target he could not penetrate had access to more information than he could hope to imagine.
The girls needed work, and a western magistrate or major official acquire the luxuries and comforts he needed on his new foreign post.
Adapting the KGB embassy tactics to the postwar landscape, Markus Wolf built the ultimate cadre of seducers and he unleashed them to charm the messages, microfiche and classified cables of western intelligence actions right out of the hands of the girls who made the coffee and filed the paperwork of the west’s most prolific spy handlers.
Before being fielded, “Romeo” agents were trained to romance, seduce and magnify the affections of young women in such positions. Whether alone, or working in teams, what they achieved amounted to what can commonly be considered the most successful HUMINT collection effort of their time.
As he stated in his autobiography, Wolf ”…had no idea what a harvest it would bring.”
The Romeo tactics, techniques and operational doctrine have not been lost to history.
They’ve been reverse-engineered, distilled through the lens of techniques employed by the superior British and American OSS, updated to keep pace with the best practices applied to modern fieldcraft and packaged here. Purely for your entertainment. And, if you so choose, for the exponential improvement of your career, as well as your love life.
There’s a lifestyle and a way of moving through the world that is now presently beyond your imagination.
From socially engineering your way into the areas behind life’s velvet ropes, to neutralizing the unpleasantness of the adult world’s bullies, to enjoying the pleasure of beautiful women’s company (and having them thank you for it), it’s all here.
All you need do, is have the audacity to play the game. And like any game, this game has a set of unbreakable rules.
