Koehler spent much of his later life as a
Cold War-era historian of espionage, while using the former East German
Stasi archives and his experiences and connections from his career in the
U.S. intelligence community to document and expose the formerly covert activities of
Soviet Bloc intelligence services and those who spied for them worldwide.
East Germany In February 1992, former
East German secret police chief
Erich Mielke was belatedly brought to trial for the 9 August 1931
first degree murders of
Berlin Police Captains
Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck as well as the
attempted murder of Senior Sergeant Max Willig. At the time he acted as one of two triggermen in the 1931 cop killings, Mielke had been a young street-fighter in the
Parteiselbstschutz, the
paramilitary wing of the
Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which bore strong similarities to the
Nazi stormtroopers. Mielke was acting under orders of his KPD superiors
Heinz Neumann,
Hans Kippenberger, and
Walter Ulbricht. The evidence for Mielke's guilt was drawn from the original police files, the transcripts from the 1934 trial of his co-conspirators, and a handwritten memoir in which Mielke revealed that his role in, "
the Bülowplatz Affair," had been his reason for fleeing to
Moscow from the
Weimar Republic in 1931. All had been found in Mielke's house safe during a police search in 1990. Mielke was believed to have kept the documents for the purpose of "blackmailing
Honecker and other East German leaders." Jack Koehler also testified as a witness for the prosecution that Mielke had boasted of his involvement in the 1931 Bülowplatz murders during a confrontation at
Leipzig in 1965. At the time of their conversation, Koehler was working covertly for the
U.S. Intelligence Community, while under journalistic cover at the
Associated Press. Erich Mielke was convicted of two counts of murder and one of attempted murder and, on 26 October 1993, a panel of three judges and two jurors handed down a sentence of six years' imprisonment. In his 1999 book-length history of the East German Stasi, Koehler documented the formerly covert domestic and foreign activities of East Germany's secret police, particularly under Mielke's 1957-1989 leadership. In the process, Koehler, knowing that a comparison of the GDR to
Nazi Germany would
really sting, termed the Stasi, "The Red
Gestapo". He particularly exposed the collusion of the GDR with
death squads run by
Libyan
diplomats and in the training and arming of
terrorist organizations dedicating to attacking
NATO,
United States military personnel in
Western Europe, and the
State of Israel. Koehler also accused Erich Mielke,
Markus Wolf, and the Stasi
military advisors they assigned to
Ethiopia to assist
Far Left dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam of
complicity in genocide. Furthermore, Koehler, as part of his research process, also interviewed
Holocaust survivor and
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who accused the Stasi of routinely using miles of secret files on unprosecuted
Nazi war crimes to
blackmail Nazi war criminals into spying for the GDR. Wiesenthal also told Koehler, "The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people. The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million."
Catholic Church and the Cold War Koehler's history of the decades long vendetta against the
Roman Catholic Church by the
Soviet secret police and
Soviet Bloc intelligence services was published in August 2009. Beginning with the execution of Monsignor
Konstanty Budkiewicz in the basement of
Moscow's
Lubyanka Prison on
Easter Sunday 1923, Koehler documented how the
religious persecution of the
Catholic Church in Russia began almost immediately after the
October Revolution. Citing documents in both the Polish and East German secret police archives, as well as sources in both Western and former Soviet Bloc intelligence, as well as the
Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, Koehler accused Fr.
Jerzy Dąbrowski (d. 1990), the late former bishop of
Gniezno, of spying for both the
Polish SB and the Soviet
KGB while studying art in Rome between 1961 and 1970. Fr. Dąbrowski was the source for highly valued information about the inner workings of the
Second Vatican Council, which Fr. Dąbrowski extracted, based on careful coaching from his
handlers behind the scenes, from the Polish delegation attending the council. As part of his research process, Koehler was able to acquire copies of Fr. Dąbrowski's spy reports on Vatican II from the
Stasi Records Agency. According to Fr. Dąbrowski's sources, the council had been called at the urging of anti-Communist Catholic clergy in
West Germany, with the intentions of both strengthening the Church internally and going upon the offense in response to the global rise of both
Marxism and
Communism. For example, the KGB station in Rome reported after debriefing Dąbrowski, "The majority of the council participants asserted the need to replace
Latin in services with
national languages, to adapt rites to local customs and traditions of the population. 'We need to meet the times and make the liturgy more accessible for the wide mass of believers who do not understand the Latin language', they said... 'The council must keep in mind missionary goals and the task of uniting the churches. The Latin language is an obstacle to this.' ...'Marxism is finding more and more supporters because it preaches in the local languages. In order to oppose Marxism, we must conduct the liturgy in national languages. If the people cannot understand the liturgy they will go over to the marxists.' In this way, under the external theological cover, it is not difficult to discern the political reality: the striving to increase the influence of religion and the church in the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, to counter the spreading of the ideas of communism, and to unite the efforts of the christian churches in the battle with
atheism and communism." Fr. Dąbrowski's reports on the council were considered so important that
Yuri Andropov was briefed upon them immediately after taking command of the KGB in 1967 and cited them as grounds to order a mass offensive against the Catholic Church beginning in 1969. Even though the Second Vatican Council had allegedly been called to strengthen the Church as an ally of the
Free World in the ongoing
Cold War, after its completion, according to Koehler, the KGB was easily able to recruit
moles inside every Department of the
Roman Curia. During the early 1970s, Koehler alleges that a highly placed mole inside the Vatican's
diplomatic service was secretly recording conversations between
Pope Paul VI and foreign dignitaries. In a particularly damaging case, a 22 February 1973 meeting between the Pope and an increasingly desperate
South Vietnamese Foreign Minister
Trần Văn Lắm was recorded, transcribed and shared with the
North Vietnamese
intelligence service. At the time, a north–south ceasefire was in effect, but Minister Trần was expressing to the Pope in vain the mounting terror of his Government about what was seen as South Vietnam's abandonment by its allies. According to Koehler, who found a transcript of the conversation in the East German archives and confirmed its authenticity, "when this transcript reached
Hanoi, the Communist leadership would not have harbored any doubts that their resumption of armed aggression would go unopposed by any Western Government." In a chapter-long critique of both West German and Vatican
Ostpolitik, Koehler documented how the
Czechoslovak StB was able in the early 1970s to successfully plant a ceramic statue of the
Blessed Virgin, which contained a covert listening device inside the office of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal
Agostino Casaroli. A second listening device was located very close to the statue and was concealed inside an
armoire. The operation was carried out with the assistance of the Cardinal's own nephew, Marco Torreta, who, according to Italian counterintelligence agents, had been an informant for the KGB since 1950. The intention was to compromise as much as possible the Cardinal's efforts to negotiate an end to the
religious persecution of Catholics behind the
Iron Curtain. Both listening devices proved extremely damaging, particularly due to the Cardinal's decades at his post. Both devices were only uncovered in 1990, as part of a massive investigation into the 1981 attempt on the life of
Pope John Paul II which had been ordered by Italian
investigative magistrate Rosario Priore. Both listening devices had still been transmitting all that time. Koehler also alleges, based on detailed documentary material in both Polish and Soviet archives, that the
1981 assassination attempt by
Mehmet Ali Ağca against
Pope John Paul II was a Soviet intelligence operation which had been unanimously voted upon in advance by the
Politburo, the ruling Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a document that still survives, all members of the Party Central Committee, including future Soviet Premier
Mikhail Gorbachev, co-signed the orders. == Death ==