an exceptionally valuable asset for the British. As fears mounted
regarding German nuclear development during World War II, Ros-
baud was able to convey well-founded assurances that the program
had not progressed beyond the research stage. Most of his messages
reached London through the French resistance network and the secret
Norwegian intelligence service XU. At the end of the war, Rosbaud
resettled in Great Britain, continuing his scientific writing and pub-
lishing but modestly taking no credit for his clandestine anti-Nazi
efforts and even destroying many of his personal papers. He died of
leukemia in London on 28 January 1963. In 2006, because of many
still unanswered questions surrounding his wartime espionage, the
Rosbaud family initiated legal action against MI6 to release all rel-
evant files.ROSE. The closely guarded plan to erect a physical barrier between the
two sectors of Berlin and around the periphery of the city, Operation
Rose was implemented on 13 August 1961 and required 300 tons of
barbed wire to cover the entire distance. This plan reflected the ur-
gent desire of Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the German Democratic
Republic (GDR), to stem the increasing exodus of East German citi-
zens to the West as well as the flow of Western goods into the coun-
try. Once the approval of Moscow had been secured, a mere hand-
ful of GDR officials learned of the operation in its totality. Within
the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) only its head, Erich
Mielke, participated in the major planning sessions, and it was not
until 11 August that certain senior officials were briefed by Mielke.
The deliberate exclusion of Markus Wolf of the Hauptverwaltung
Aufklärung caused him to react with “pure professional fury,” as no
consideration had been given to the difficulties that his agents and
couriers would encounter at the newly sealed border.
While 4,500 armed MfS operatives stood by on combat alert along
with members of the GDR and Soviet armies, the construction work
and the closing of the streets and railway lines that straddled the
border were carried out by police teams, border troops, and factory
paramilitary units. Only 13 designated crossing places between East
and West Berlin were exempted. Afterward, Security Secretary Erich
Honecker, who had supervised the details of the operation, termed
it “a defeat for Western intelligence,” which generally believed that
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