Qaddafi’s security guard in Libya, Hans Dieter Raethjen served
in a parachute regiment in the Bundeswehr. Transferred at his
own request, Raethjen (code name haton) worked in the illegal
arms and Near Eastern divisions of the BND from 1968 to 1974.
According to his later sworn testimony, a telephone call in 1978
from his former superior, Cornelius Hausleiter, convinced him to
take on a special training assignment with the unit responsible for
Qaddafi’s personal protection. Resigning from the Bundeswehr,
Raethjen established a sham munitions firm in Munich named
Telemit and recruited a team of 13 specialists. Despite a number
of complications, coupled with the reluctance of the BND to pro-
vide any assistance, the training of Libyan troops continued under
Raethjen’s direction until February 1983. Afterward, he resettled
in Sweden. Even though media attention led to a Bundestag in-
quiry in 1995, the government disclaimed responsibility, and no
prosecutions resulted.RAKOW, WERNER (1893–1937). A senior German communist
functionary and Soviet agent, Werner Rakow was born in Latvia,
trained as a banker in Hanover, and found employment in St. Pe-
tersburg prior to World War I. After being interned as a citizen of
an alien country, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and returned to
Germany with Karl Radek the following year. Rakow’s main re-
sponsibilities were to serve as a liaison between the newly founded
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD) and the Comintern and
to direct the KPD’s secret apparatus. He also began to employ the
pseudonyms Felix Wolf and Vladimir Inkov. An assignment in 1922
with Department IV (intelligence) of the Red Army took him briefly
to Vienna and the Balkans.
His career began to falter after the failure of the 1923 communist
insurrection in Germany. Following his posting as a Comintern Il-
legaler (covert operative) in the United States between 1925 and
1927, Rakow was recalled to Moscow as a suspected Trotskyist
and expelled from the party. Although he later regained admittance
and was given a position in a German-language publishing house,
the Stalinist purges resulted in his arrest and execution on 14 Sep-
tember 1937. Rakow’s two brothers, Paul and Nikolai, met with the
same fate.
RAKOW, WERNER • 359