Chapter Ten
SPIES AND CZECH MATES
From Big Brother to Big Sister:
The Metamorphosis
'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.'
--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979
In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.
Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.
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| The poster for the movie based on the book by Peter Norden |
Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.
In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.
As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.
Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.
As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.
'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.
The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.
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| Wolf after the Cold War |
In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.
'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'
Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.
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