Germany’s Most Successful Secret Agent

Wochenspiegel, 12.07.2000

Werner Mauss: Germany’s most successful secret agent …
30 years in active service for Hunsrück agent

Werner Mauss, the man from the Hunsrück region, is Germany’s most successful secret agent. According to his own statistics his collaborations with the police have resulted in more than 2000 arrests over the past 30 years.

It was back in the sixties that Mauss began infiltrating criminal and terrorist gangs; to insiders at that time he was respectfully referred to as “Institution M”. In 1970, the Federal Criminal Police Office assigned Mauss to the task of tracking down the police murderers Lecki and Derks. A short time later they were arrested.

In 1976, Mauss tracked down Red Army Faction terrorist Rolf Pohle in Greece and succeeded in recovering the stolen Cologne Cathedral treasures, the thieves were arrested here too.

In 1983, it was Mauss who found out the whereabouts of the missing toxic chemical barrels from Seveso. In 1986, on an assignment for the German government, he succeeded in obtaining the releases of hostages Rudolf Cordes and Alfred Schmidt from Lebanon. For his own protection he was always provided with cover stories and backed up by the highest-level security and intelligence services while on assignments.

After the René Düe case, the first picture of Mauss, who was until then unknown, appeared in the press. Much more damaging, as far as Mauss was concerned, than the “blurred photograph” was his arrest during a mission in Colombia engineered by the machinations of an English security firm.

This was in 1996 when he was arrested, accused of ransoming hostages without the knowledge of the Colombian government. Following months of detention in Bogotá, Mauss and his wife were finally released on May 20 1998, acquitted of all charges.

The court decided that he had not violated any Colombian laws and that the arrest had been illegal.

Today Mauss is still mediating between the guerrilla ELN and the government. A Munich doctor who spent months as a hostage found himself in a position to appreciate this fact when he was freed in January 1999, without the payment of any ransom.

By courtesy of the Wochenspiegel SW publishers www.wochenspiegellive.de