military government. Telephone lines were used for several months
before the construction of two transmitters, first in Berlin-Britz, then
in Hof (Bavaria). Although RIAS had no official intelligence status,
its popular broadcasts in German reached a large East German popu-
lation, thus prompting repeated demands by the Soviets to close the
facility.
Determined to expose RIAS as the “espionage headquarters of
the American secret service,” the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
launched Operation enten (Ducks) in the spring of 1955. Because
their names appeared in a RIAS employee’s notebook stolen by an
East German informer, 49 people of widely different backgrounds
were arrested in the GDR for their presumed contacts with the radio
station. Five of them—Joachim Wiebach, Richard Baier, Günther
Krause, Willi Gast, and Manfred Vogt—were placed on trial for the
“fabrication and circulation of rumors that put peace at risk.” On 27
June 1955, Wiebach was condemned to death by guillotine (at the
insistence of GDR leader Walter Ulbricht), while the others received
sentences ranging from eight years to life imprisonment. The radio
station continued to broadcast throughout the Cold War. Although
the West German government assumed the bulk of its funding dur-
ing the 1960s, general supervision of RIAS remained with the United
States Information Agency until a new agreement was concluded
after German reunification.RICHTER, URSULA (1933–2002). An agent of the Ministerium für
Staatssicherheit (MfS) active in the Federal Republic of Germany,
Ursula Richter was the main secretary of the Bund der Vertriebenen
(League of Expellees), having been infiltrated from the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1964. Richter came to the atten-
tion of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz in the early 1980s,
although it turned out that she was purposely used to divert attention
from Klaus Kuron, a key MfS agent within the counterintelligence
agency. On 17 August 1985, she returned to the GDR with one of
her recruited agents, Lorenz Betzing, a Bundeswehr aide based in
Bonn.
RINTELEN, FRANZ (1878–1949). A spy who infiltrated the United
States during World War I, Franz Rintelen was born in Frankfurt an
368 • RICHTER, URSULA