2000-05-03
Central Intelligence Agency
Director
Washington, D.C. 20505
U.S.A.
Sir,
I politely ask for the help of your authority; although in a case of German citizens having lived at Cairo, Egypt, in 1974/75, it nevertheless also is a case of common interest of USA and the West. May I please bother you with a short recapitulation of this case:
As since 1999 openly admitted, the Bonn government in the time of the "carnation revolution" with American consent gave covered financial aid, via the channels of SPD and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, to Mario Soares' Socialist Party to help withstanding communism. This brutal, but necessary fact then had to be kept secret, but was more or less known in Bonn's Foreign Service, so also in its embassy at Cairo, Egypt. I had superficially discussed this matter with my collegue Peter Lazarek in the embassy. Without my knowledge he during his leave in Germany and France passed photocopies, about 20, of these secret documents to Germans of the SPD, some of them I already knew (since I then was member of the SPD) and some I not knew, in order to get them published.
He misused my name privately as recommendation. Some papers indeed were published (e.g. in Berliner Extra-Dienst, a communist-near little paper) with big resonance within the Soviet bloc. Immediately after publications the SPD (Chancellor Schmidt, Minister Wischnewski, etc.) and the FDP (Minister Genscher, state minister Mörsch, etc.) were naturally alarmed and quickly stated that the publications were based on falsifications.
When back in Cairo and there phonecalled from Germany, Lazarek was panicked. I recommended, not knowing the full amount of what he had done, Lazarek to see his superior Dr. B.C. Witte and to admit his action. He did so, but after investigation by W. he named me as his instigator. The same evening he committed suicide after having written a letter in which he, apparently drowsy, drew back his allegation against me. Nevertheless the top of the embassy - before posted in Cairo, the two officers had in Bonn collaborated with the Soviet Union officially in the negotiations on the KSZE-act - decided to put the blame on me. (I two days before had just been dismissed from foreign service since I again had in a letter critizised Chancellor Schmidt, after years before having constantly critizised Foreign Minister and then Chancellor Brandt for protecting criminal nazis and his Ostpolitik.) So these nazi-friendly collaborators with the Sovietbloc thought it conveniant to make me a forger, instigator and traitor. But the investigations by the Federal Criminal Authority BKA proved that, among others, that accusation of Lazarek was without sense; that his widow had been influenced to give false testimony by the top of the embassy (she had after learning of the suicide of her husband come to Cairo in the company of Genscher visiting Saudi-Arabia via Cairo, being naturally in a shock and accomodated not in a hotel, but in the flat of a man of the embassy); that important papers in Lazareks flat had been destroyed by embassy officers in the destruction-machine of the embassy; that L. had admitted high treason to another embassy officer, who gave his statement of this to the BKA, and more irregularities. German press, when reporting the affair, was silenced by threats by Minister Wischnewski personally, etc.
After four years of processes at industrial tribunals (Arbeitsgerichte Bonn and Cologne) - the BKA-investigations were halted for lack of evidence - and despite my legal successes, but the law suit going on on wish of the Bonn government - I finally resigned for lack of arguments against the governmental plot, for loss of nerves and money.
Only last year, hearing that East Germany's secret service MfS had killed deviators such as Bahro, Fuchs and others, I suspect a conspiracy of both West and East Germany with criminal means, since they at the time of the Portugal revolution had closely collaborated in the diplomatic and political process of the European Conference on Security and Cooperation KSZE (today OSZE). They had a strong common interest in destroying someone who had opposed the Ostpolitik and its successions. There are indeed indications to a double homicide of German citizens in Cairo in 1975 (by "suicide" of Lazarek and by "car accident" in the case of his so-called girl-friend Grahmann in the embassy of East Germany in Cairo).
Therefore in case that the CIA had collected informations on the two killings in Cairo, known as well in Germany as in Egypt, it would be more than helpful if these informations would be passed to me in my attempt to reopen the case of German-Soviet conspiracy against the West.
I can prove my opposition, since my youth in 1949, against Sovietism and against Ostpolitik since 1969; all my political papers now are given by me to the archives of Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford, California, which you could look through with my consent given herewith.
Hoping to again getting help from USA like in 1954/55 when I have been a Fulbright grantee at Kansas University, Lawrence, I am Yours sincerely
gez. T. E. Knapp
(T. Erich H. Knapp)