conviction of the Sütterlins. Heinz Sütterlin received a six-year
sentence but escaped to Dresden via Yugoslavia in 1971; Leonore
Sütterlin committed suicide in her detention cell on 15 October
1967 after hearing the confession of her spouse. The repercussions
within the KGB included letters of reprimand to all officers con-
nected to the Runge case.RUPP, RAINER (1945– ). A highly productive spy for the Haupt-
verwaltung Aufklärung based at the North Atlantic Treaty Orga-
nization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels, Rainer Rupp was born
in Saarlouis (Saar). In 1968, while an economics student at the Uni-
versity of Mainz, an East German intelligence officer named Kurt
helped persuade him to work for the HVA as a spy. After completing
his academic studies with distinction in Brussels, Rupp (code name
mosel) obtained a research position at the Institute for Applied Eco-
nomics and soon started working at NATO headquarters. In 1972 he
married Ann-Christine Bowen, a secretary with the British military
mission at NATO, and convinced her to spy as well. Both received
basic espionage instruction in East Berlin.
Under the code name türkis, Ann-Christine smuggled highly
classified material from the NATO Integrated Systems Manage-
ment Agency, although the birth of their first child in 1977 brought
an end to her activity. Rupp, known as topas after 1979, continued
his resolute espionage career until the collapse of the GDR in 1989.
Thousands of pages of photographed documents found their way to
East Berlin and later Moscow, evoking effusive praise from HVA
chief Markus Wolf and KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov. This ma-
terial included plans for the use of nuclear weapons in time of war,
catalogues of troop strengths and armament levels, reports on mili-
tary exercises, descriptions of NATO alarm systems, and information
about the Strategic Defense Initiative. According to Wolf, a prime
asset of Rupp was his ability to summarize and make accessible the
often-arcane language of the official reports. While Rupp later main-
tained that he worked completely for idealistic aims and received
no monetary compensation, evidence pointed to payments totaling
550,000 DM.
As a result of information conveyed to the Bundesnachrichten-
dienst in 1990 by Heinz Busch, a former military analyst in the
384 • RUPP, RAINER