In January 1990 Marcus Hess, Dirk Brescinsky, and Peter Kahl stood trial in Celle, in northern Germany. Clifford Stoll and Pengo were witnesses for the prosecution. The problem facing the court was establishing proof that anything of value had been sold to the KGB. That was compounded by the fact that the German police had neglected to apply for a judge's consent for the wiretapping of Hess. None of the material they had recorded "just in case" could be admitted in court.
Without concrete proof that espionage on any significant scale had actually occurred, the sentences were light. Hess received twenty months plus a fine of about $7,000, Brescinsky fourteen months and about $3,500, and Kahl two years and about $2,000. All the jail sentences were suspended and substituted with probation.
Steffen Wernery is now thirty, an intense, outspoken man. He is calm about the man whose activities caused him to spend sixty-six days in a French prison. His ire is reserved for the French authorities, who, he says, have "no regard for people's rights." His time in jail, he says, cost him $68,000 in lost income and legal fees--roughly what the Soviet hacker gang earned in total from the KGB. But he doesn't blame Koch, and he doesn't believe that he committed suicide either:
Suicide did not make sense. It was unbelievable. Karl Koch had disclosed himself to the authorities and had cooperated fully. He had provided them with some good information and they had found him accommodations and a job with the Christian Democratic party. He was also getting help with his drug dependency and seemed on his way to rehabilitation. Murder seemed much more likely than suicide. And there were many people who could have had a motive.
There was much speculation. He was murdered to prevent him testifying; it was a warning to other hackers not to disclose themselves; perhaps it was even to embarrass Gorbachev, who was due for a visit. Or perhaps to protect people in high places.
After the unification of Germany the authorities gained access to police files in what had been East Germany. According to Hans Gliss, who maintains close contacts with the intelligence services, there was "a strong whisper" that the Stasi--East Germany's secret service--was responsible for Koch's death. The motive remained a mystery, though there were any number of arcane theories: that the agency was jealous of Koch's ties to the KGB; that they were protecting the KGB from a source who was proving too talkative; that they wanted to embarrass the KGB; that they had also been getting information from Koch, and so on.
The Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, has acquired a formidable reputation. Its foreign service, led by the legendary Marcus Wolf, was reported to have planted thousands of agents in West Germany's top political and social circles, most notoriously Gunther Guillaume, who became private secretary to Chancellor Willy Brandt. The revelation caused the fall of the Brandt government.
The Stasi has become a convenient villain: since the collapse of East Germany the shadowy secret service's reputation for skulduggery has grown to mythic proportions. In mysterious cases, such as the death of Karl Koch, the sinister hand of Stasi will be detected by all those who want to see it.
Nonetheless, murder can't be ruled out. There is the evidence--the missing shoes, the controlled fire--that suggests that another party was involved in Koch's death. Then there is the motive. Koch had little reason to kill himself.
He had a job; he was getting treatment for his drug problem. He was in no danger of being prosecuted for his part in the "Soviet hacker" affair: like Pengo, he would have been a witness for the prosecution, protected from punishment by the terms of the amnesty provision. After the trial he would have resumed his life (like Pengo, who is now married and living in Vienna).
Some who knew Koch think the young hacker got in over his head. He, Pengo, and Hess were pawns in the espionage game, amateur spies recruited by the Soviets to break into Western computers. It is now thought possible that the Soviets were running other hackers at the same time, testing one gang against the other. For the KGB, it was low-risk espionage: they paid for programs, documents, and codes that would otherwise have been inaccessible--unless of course their own operatives were prepared to sit for days or even weeks in front of a computer, learning the rudiments of hacking.
