and tax evasion, Ludwig-Holger Pfahls completed his legal studies
at Freiburg in 1971. After serving as an aide to Bavarian politician
Franz-Josef Strauss, he headed the BfV from August 1985 through
March 1987. His appointment as a junior defense minister from 1987
to 1992 was followed by a career as a lobbyist for private firms.
When an international arrest warrant was issued in 1999, Pfahls
went underground and eluded authorities for five years. Captured by
French police in Paris on 13 July 2004 and extradited to Germany,
Pfahls admitted that he had received 3.8 million DM in bribes from
Canadian-German dealer Karlheinz Schreiber for arms sales to Saudi
Arabia in 1991 and had failed to declare this income. In August 2005,
a court in Augsburg sentenced him to two years and three months in
prison.PFAUS, OSKAR KARL. The most significant Abwehr liaison to
the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prior to World War II, Oskar Karl
Pfaus was raised in Illingen (Baden-Württemberg). After immigrat-
ing to the United States in the 1920s, he became a founder of the
German-American Bund and a worker for the Deutscher Fichte-
Bund, an organization that distributed Nazi propaganda worldwide.
Following his return to Germany in 1938, his fluency in English at-
tracted Abwehr officials in Hamburg, and Pfaus (code name stier)
was assigned to meet with IRA officials to discuss possible coopera-
tion. In February 1939, posing as a correspondent for the Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung, he arrived in Dublin and made contact with the
IRA command staff, which agreed to hold further talks. In Paris in
November 1943, Pfaus attempted to locate Irish nationals who had
information regarding Allied military preparations for the invasion of
continental Europe. But his main contact, Father Kenneth Monaghan,
a priest at Chapelle Saint-Joseph, was also a British army chaplain
with ties to MI6. As a result, nothing of consequence materialized.
PFEIL. The second and largest of the three major “concentrated blows”
against suspected Western intelligence operatives in the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), Operation pfeil (Arrow) took place
in August 1954 and was supervised by KGB and East German of-
ficials, including Ernst Wollweber and Erich Mielke. Of the 547
spies arrested, 277 belonged to the Organisation Gehlen, 176 to the
PFEIL • 347