The Third Man’s Third Man

File ref. AUS/82/3814. The target was one Alois Gföllner, a mid-level functionary in the Austrian Interior Ministry with a taste for American cigarettes and a mistress whose rent was—by our estimate—1,700 schillings above his pay grade. The CIA’s Vienna station, bored witless by the city’s glacial neutrality, decided Gföllner was ripe for a classic bit of fun.

The plan was textbook, which is to say, stupid. A woman, codenamed ‘Darlene’, would approach Gföllner at the Café Hawelka, feigning a shared passion for strudel and a sudden, inexplicable lust for balding men with security clearances. The hook would be set, photographs would be taken, and Gföllner would be flipped. The cost of the operation was budgeted at $12,500, most of which appears to have been spent on Darlene’s truly atrocious fur coat.

The problem began when Gföllner’s wife had the bad manners to fall ill. He cancelled his usual coffee. Darlene, an ambitious contractor out of Langley, decided not to waste the coat. She approached the next man who fit the station’s vague description: “looks like a bureaucrat”. This man was Franz Eichler. Eichler did not work for the Austrian government. He worked for the Stasi’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, and his job was running a network of assets *inside* the Austrian government. Gföllner was one of his.

Eichler, a professional, recognised the approach for what it was. A clumsy one. He played along, not out of weakness, but out of sheer professional curiosity to see how badly they would screw it up. The answer was: spectacularly. When the blackmail photos arrived, he didn’t panic. He mailed them to his own case officer in East Berlin with a note: “CIA looking to recruit. I seem to be me. Advise.” The HVA, possessing a sense of humour drier than Andropov’s liver, advised him to accept. For the next three years, Eichler worked as a supposed CIA asset, feeding Langley a curated diet of useless, unverifiable, and profoundly embarrassing information about his own Stasi colleagues, while systematically exposing every *real* Austrian source the CIA had cultivated. It was a masterclass in bureaucratic arson.

The whole mess only came to light in 1985 when a real defector, one of Eichler’s own underlings, brought the files with him to the Americans, presumably to stop the weekly embarrassment of seeing his own name in CIA reports misspelled in yet another creative way. Langley closed the file. The Vienna station chief was reassigned to a listening post in Antarctica. Eichler, it is said, received a bonus of 40,000 East German marks and a new Trabant. Alois Gföllner’s mistress left him.