“Operation Crystal”

Shortly before dawn on a bleak and rainy day in October 1985: A dirty white seven-ton truck with a Dutch license plate leaves the transit highway A2 at the exit Magdeburg Industrial Estate and continues southward on a bumpy cobblestone road. After just under seven hundred meters, the contours of a large warehouse can be made out on the left and the vehicle heads for it. The driver gives three short flashes of his lights, followed by two long ones, and the rust-colored roller shutter slides aside with a quiet creaking noise. A man aged about 45 in a light-blue tarpaulin-covered Russian GAZ truck is waiting inside the warehouse, which is crammed full of old agricultural machinery that has been taken out of service. The Dutch driver parks as closely to the truck as possible.

The two men get out, shake hands briefly and, without speaking, begin to load what seem to be heavy, grayish-brown sacks – around 50 in all – from the Dutch truck to the other. The transaction is finished after almost an hour. The Dutch driver receives a brown paper bag, takes a short look inside it, gets into his vehicle, which rumbles off and disappears into the still gray morning mist.

That is how what is probably the largest and most brazen seed theft in the history of sugarbeet breeding may have taken place. The first handover in the fall of 1985 was followed by many more such conspiratorial meetings in the region around Magdeburg up to 1989. A total of around four tons of sugarbeet seed, sometimes in large lots, sometimes in smaller ones, and detailed documentation on the quality and nature of the material were illegally transferred to the GDR. Where did the seed come from? Who was behind these risky transactions, and what was their purpose?

A contemporary witness from Klein Wanzleben

The impetus to investigate those questions came from Erhard Junghans. He worked at KWS in Klein Wanzleben until 2016 and is something like the memory man when it comes to KWS’ history in Klein Wanzleben. While visiting a traveling exhibition in Magdeburg in 2016, the sugar technologist came across a panel entitled “Secret Beet” revealing a few pieces of information on seed theft that the State Security Service apparently helped organize. His curiosity aroused, he notified KWS about the documentation, expressing his suspicion that the sugarbeet seed could have been stolen from KWS back then. Finally, after a lengthy application process, Wolfgang Joachim, who was head of KWS’ station in Klein Wanzleben from reunification to his retirement in 2016 and is currently in charge of KWS’ archive there, and the historian Betina Meißner were allowed to see the Stasi’s documents on “Operation Crystal” in May 2008.

That was the code name under which the State Security Service and the state enterprise “Saat- und Pflanzgut” organized the top-secret theft of the sugarbeet seed. While the GDR ensured that its own research at the Institute for Beet Breeding (IfR) was well-protected, the state did not shy away from purloining research results from non-socialist countries. Almost 1,000 pages of Stasi files on “Operation Crystal” prove who did what, where and when, although many doubtless revealing details and information relating to persons have been redacted for reasons of data privacy.

Secret sugarbeet operation

Sugarbeet breeding in the GDR came under constant criticism from the political leadership from the beginning of the 1980s on. The beet’s sugar content was too low and the sugar yield per hectare was in some cases just half that in the Federal Republic. That did not change, despite every effort to pinpoint the causes and make improvements. The orders from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and the Food Industry were clear: To catch up with the class enemy. And so the top brass sensed an opportunity when a Dutch seed dealer offered to supply illegally procured high-performance seed for the first time in April 1985.

Since “Operation Crystal” was top secret, only a small circle of people knew about this “mission.” The people in charge of keeping the transactions secret, and in some cases for organizing them, were employed in the State Security Service’s Main Section XVIII. It was tasked with safeguarding the GDR’s economy. All reports from unofficial collaborators on the status of this secret sugarbeet operation were received by its Subsection 6 and reported from there to ministerial level.

The main players and string-pullers in “Operation Crystal” were from the association of state-owned enterprises “VVB Saat- und Pflanzgut” in Quedlinburg and Berlin and at the Institute for Beet Research in Klein Wanzleben. There was a clear division of tasks. Only the “VVB Saat- und Pflanzgut” was allowed to trade with non-socialist countries in the field of plant breeding and it had the relevant contacts. Whereas the two unofficial collaborators “Moosdorf” and “Werner Schulze,” executive employees at the “VVB Saat- und Pflanzgut” in Quedlinburg and in the foreign trade organization “AHB Nahrung” in Berlin, were assigned to procure material and conceal its origin, the main responsibility for the desired breeding success as part of “Operation Crystal” lay with the unofficial collaborator “Heinz Oertel,” the head of breeding at the Institute for Beet Research (IfR).

“Heinz Oertel” regularly prepared pages of reports for his Stasi handler, assessing the quality of the material obtained and describing in detail how the valuable seed from the west had been used. “Heinz Oertel” and his supervisors, some of whom were initiated in the operation and all of whom acted as unofficial collaborators for the State Security Service, had to contend with various problems in making further use of the material. They were under heavy pressure to succeed and had to incorporate the seed that had appeared all of a sudden into their ongoing sugarbeet breeding work “unobtrusively.”

The raw goods were shipped via Quedlinburg and the official line was that the material came from an unknown monocarpic source “under bilateral cooperation with the Soviet Union.” The seed first had to be processed. The Stasi files clearly show that KWS was not the source of the stolen material. The seed smuggled to the GDR belonged to a Swedish breeding company and had been stolen from its trial areas in Holland.

Ensuring secrecy

16 employees from the Institute for Beet Research in Klein Wanzleben, including chemists, breeders and multipliers, worked on the seed from “Operation Crystal,” which was provided to them under the code name Gene Pool 2. In October 1985, when the operation was getting off the ground, unofficial collaborator “Markgraf” was tasked with screening all employees of the Institute for Beet Research in order to “ensure secrecy.” A total of 14 unofficial collaborators and 4 “GMSs” (a special category of informants who were particularly loyal to the socialist state and held prominent positions in public life) observed all activities at the institute and reported regularly to their handlers.

A more stringent and particularly cunning variant of everyday spying was “operational personal screening.” Erhard Junghans, who was responsible for chemical analyses of the breeding material at the Klein Wanzleben institute at the time, knows what that means. At the end of January 1986, the Stasi’s district office in Wanzleben initiated such screening of him at the suggestion of two of his fellow heads of department. He was suspected of falsifying the results of tests in the beet lab and so impeding or even completely preventing progress in breeding. A lot of effort was spent in the GDR in blaming individuals for what were failures by the state.

Quality for scientists

As Erhard Junghans learned from his Stasi file in 1997, five unofficial collaborators had spent 14 months prying into every corner of his life: his conduct at work, family and friends, attitude toward the socialist state and character, as well as what is did in his leisure time and the people he mixed with. The final report came to the conclusion that he was politically unreliable, but that all his work for the scientists was of a high quality.

The expectations and hopes pinned to the success of “Operation Crystal,” which was conducted at great cost and effort and with top-level backing, were great – very great. The files repeatedly contain “calculations” on the extent and level of the anticipated financial advantages to the GDR’s economy for all the years the operation ran.

In the short term, the mission was expected to cut research costs by 50 million East German marks and also generate around 34 million from higher white sugar yields. An expert report from April 1986 assessed the anticipated medium- to long-term economic and scientific gains from the “provided” seed as follows: “The benefits from this material for the period from 1993–2000 are estimated to be 150–300 million marks.”

Sugarbeet breeding with the illegally acquired gene pool

Akzenta, the first hybrid sugar variety bred from the obtained seed, was put on the market in the GDR in 1988. All sugarbeet breeding was now based on the illegally acquired Gene Pool 2. However, Akzenta and all the other varieties registered up to 1989 still lagged around ten percent behind Western European varieties in performance tests. “Operation Crystal” cost a lot of money: A total of 2.25 million marks was paid for the seed. On top of that were the unknown sums in bribes and bonuses to the go-betweens, as well as the hefty personnel costs spent on safeguarding secrecy.

The fall of the wall has also brought closure to this “operation.” The many years of testing conducted by KWS at great expense on the sugarbeet material available in Klein Wanzleben revealed that the results were no better than those of comparable KWS varieties in any single respect – which leaves only one conclusion: The GDR definitely did not obtain the high-performance seed it had been promised. It was ripped off. |