Hüseyin Yıldırım

Hüseyin Yıldırım (* 1932 ) is a former Turkish spy of the GDR foreign intelligence with the code name "Blitz" (Turkish: Yıldırım) in Berlin . He lives in Turkey .

Professional career

From the 1960s he worked as a guest worker in the Federal Republic of Germany . Initially a master at Mercedes-Benz , he moved to West Berlin in 1972 . There he became a master mechanic in the Auto Craft Shop , the self-help workshop for US soldiers in the Andrews Barracks in Berlin-Lichterfelde . In 1979 he offered his services to the GDR's foreign intelligence service.

He received top secret documents from US sergeant James W. Hall (alias Paul), who was active in the central station of the US telecommunications reconnaissance against the GDR in West Berlin, which he sent to the intelligence department of the Ministry of State Security for 300,000 $ passed on. In 1987 he left the service of the Americans and moved to the USA. By the GDR defector Manfred Severin , James W. Hall was betrayed to the US military secret service for a fee. In the course of the investigation, Yıldırım was exposed, arrested in the USA in 1988 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1989 in Savannah, Georgia . Yıldırım's judge expressly ruled out the possibility of early parole in his judgment. He served his term in the maximum security Pollock Prison in Louisiana .

After the fall of the Wall , Markus Wolf campaigned for Yıldırım in petitions to the American mercy attorney , as did the Turkish state . In 2003 he was transferred to Turkey to serve another sentence, where he was soon released from prison.

literature

• Friedrich-Wilhelm Schlomann : The moles. Universitas-Verlag, Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-800-41285-3

Web links

• Allied Museum Berlin ( Memento from November 7, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
• Image by Hüseyin Yıldırım
• Markus Thöss: The master. Hüseyin Yildirim was one of the most important spies in the GDR. The US sentenced him to life imprisonment. Now he's free. In: Berliner Zeitung. April 24, 2004, accessed June 12, 2018 .