Blum made no deep imprint on the BND, exercising a light hand and
retiring on 31 July 1985. He died in Stuttgart on 9 July 2003.BOHEMIA. The first major counterintelligence success of the Organi-
sation Gehlen, Operation bohemia involved the defection of two
key Czech military intelligence officers to the West. Ottokar Feifar,
who became head of the department dealing with the Allied occupa-
tion zones of Germany on 1 April 1948, agreed to abandon his post
and make a full disclosure in exchange for resettlement in the United
States. Feifar also persuaded his colleague, Vojtech Jarabek, to ac-
company him. On 8 November, the two men traveled by car from
Karlovy Vary to a point near the Bavarian border and then crossed
undetected on foot. More than 40 men and women were promptly
apprehended by U.S. Military Police and placed on trial as a result
of information they provided. The most important agent, Joromir
Koska, received a sentence of 20 years, and the Czech military ser-
vice had considerable difficulty in recovering from the collapse of
this network.
BÖHME, IBRAHIM (1944–1999). An informer for the Ministerium
für Staatssicherheit (MfS) in the ranks of the East German dissi-
dents, Ibrahim (originally Manfred) Böhme was born in Leipzig on
18 November 1944 and raised as an orphan. Trained as a mason, he
later was a teacher until his brief arrest in 1965 owing to a lecture on
Robert Havemann. After joining the Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands in 1967, he was recruited by the MfS as an informer
(code names maximilian, paul bonkarz, and dr. rohloff).
Böhme’s reputation as a critic of the regime grew, as he took issue
with the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and
opposed the expulsion of Wolf Biermann from the German Demo-
cratic Republic in 1976. Besides losing his party membership, he
was held in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen for 15 months in 1976–1977
for “subversive agitation.” His subsequent support for Solidarity in
Poland resulted in a second occupation ban, forcing him to take a
series of odd jobs.
In November 1989, Böhme, a talented organizer and speaker,
emerged as a prominent member of citizens’ movement and was
one of the founders of the East German Sozialdemokratische Partei
44 • BOHEMIA