His Name is Mauss, Werner Mauss

Wochenspiegel 03.06.1998

The major WOCHENSPIEGEL series on the secret agent begins today

District/Bogotá (Cen). His Name is Mauss, Werner Mauss. His job: International investigator. He has clients all over the world. Among them German and international security services and private companies. The base of operations for the international super agent, whose name has now been officially cleared by the Colombian courts, is in rural German Hunsruck.

When asked what he does for a living, he calls himself an expert on crime. After qualifying as an agronomist, Mauss worked his way up to become Germany’s best-known agent. He was able to crack the criminal cases that reduced the officers restricted by the ponderous apparatus of regular policedom to despair. Mauss, alias “Tigel”, alias “Koch”, alias “Horst Faber”, alias “Eric” was a master of disguise and identity-change, working his way to the top as a “private” agent. Working for and with the backing of the Federal Criminal Police Office, even the most reticent of criminals could be made to talk when Mauss was on the job: mostly talking their way into prison.

According to his own figures he was behind the arrests of more than 2000 crooks. Once it was a wanted Red Army Faction terrorist whom Mauss tracked down in Greece, another time a successful recovery of the stolen treasures of Cologne Cathedral. Although in various criminal trials and parliamentary enquiries accusations arose that the success was down to the secret agent being allowed to operate in a grey zone on the borders of legality, these same successes meant that Mauss was not interfered with either by the Federal or state authorities or the Federal Intelligence Service. In our major series we take a close look at the exciting and controversial career of the Hunsruck secret agent and review his most spectacular successes.

By courtesy of the Wochenspiegel SW publishers