Spy war heating up

It is nine years since the Berlin Wall was torn down. Yet Germany's counter-intelligence services are still fighting battles straight out of Europe's Cold War past.

Earlier this year the military security service, known by the German acronym MAD, stumbled across a spy in the army's own ranks, selling sensitive information to the Russians. Using sophisticated, computer-aided decoding techniques to perform an operation most civilian radio audiences would recognise as twiddling the short-wave dial at random, a MAD officer picked up a message from Moscow.

It was a series of instructions telling the agent where to leave his documents. When the spy turned up as instructed, MAD was there to arrest him.

Most of Europe's cloak-and-dagger stories are more prosaic. Industrial, not military, espionage is the name of the game. And Germany, especially the former Cold War battleground of Berlin, is still the central target for the Russian secret services - not to mention the American, French, Middle Eastern and even Chinese espionage agencies, which are all snooping on Europe's biggest industrial power.

Late last month, Berlin interior ministry secretary Kuno Boese warned that foreign agencies were stepping up their work ahead of next year's transfer of the federal capital and all the foreign embassies from Bonn to Berlin.

Claiming the city's status as a centre for commerce and scientific research made it a prime target for East European and Middle Eastern spies, he said countries such as Syria, Iran and Iraq were as determined to get a foothold in the new capital and exercise influence over their own nationals working here as they were to gather sensitive information.