Hüseyin Yıldırım (born March 10, 1928) is a Turkish-American auto mechanic who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for his courier role in the espionage activities of U.S. serviceman James Hall III during the Cold War era.
[5][6][7][8] He was nicknamed "Der Meister" (the Master) by the servicemen and servicewomen stationed in the unit,[5][6] and was regarded as a "colorful, well-liked, outgoing low-life character".
[6][9] Among the Americans, whom Yıldırım met during his work in West Berlin, two people played an important role in his life: James Hall III and Peggy Bie.
James Hall III, from Sharon Springs, New York, entered the U.S. Army in 1976[6][10] and was trained as a sergeant in signals intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic warfare (EW).
[9] Following graduation in February 1988, he was promoted to the rank of warrant officer and was assigned to intelligence staff (G-2) at the 24th Infantry Division in Fort Stewart, west of Savannah, Georgia.
[5] While working in Stuttgart, Yıldırım applied in 1978 to East Germany's Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi, offering his spying services.
He was welcomed by the organization, though it took some time for him to be registered as an unofficial staff member (Stasi jargon German: Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, IM) under the code name "Blitz", which took place on May 12, 1980.
[14] Sergeant James Hall III, among about 1,300 service personnel stationed at Teufelsberg, was granted the highest security clearance for access to sensitive compartmental information.
[8][9] The U.S. Field Station Teufelsberg (literally: Devil's Mountain) was a highly-sensitive installation atop a 90 m (300 ft) high hill, which was formed from rubble of buildings in the city destroyed during World War II by Allied airstrikes and Soviet artillery.
[9] Thanks to its elevation, the location in an otherwise flat landscape was ideal for monitoring military and civilian communications originating from East Germany and other Iron Curtain countries.
[9] Yıldırım arranged secret meetings for Hall, code-named "Paul", with Stasi agents in East Berlin, where he was prohibited to go officially due to his sensitive position.
[4][8] Hall received payments totalling to US$100,000,[19] – according to other sources, US$300,000[8] – for his service to Eastern Bloc over a period of six years, disclosing data on the eavesdropping systems and information about wartime plans of NATO,[15] far reaching into the 21st century.
[8] On August 22, 1988, Manfred Severin, a professor of English and foreign languages at the Humboldt University of Berlin in East Germany, who was serving as a spy under the code name "Hagen" for the American intelligence service for the previous two years, defected to the West, and was taken to the United States.
[5][6][20] Severin revealed to FCA agents that he had served as an interpreter for a spying American soldier code-named "Paul" at an East Berlin safe house in January and July 1988.
[5][6][8] Severin's information triggered an Army investigation into an espionage activity,[6][8] which resulted in the identification of James Hall III as the traitor.
[8] A two-hour-long videotape showed Hall identifying Yıldırım as his middleman with the secret service of East Germany while he was telling about his spying to an FBI agent acting a Soviet diplomat.
[16] The court charged Yıldırım with selling to Eastern Bloc countries confidential information that he had obtained from Hall during the latter's assignments in Germany and New Jersey between 1983 and 1988.
[8] Documents were found in a cemetery buried in a plastic jerrycan next to a casket; in a railroad embankment; in a suitcase in the storage room of an apartment building; and in a paint bucket beneath the Berlin Wall.
[19] For five years, Bie tried to stick by Yıldırım, the "round, soft, sly, sometimes funny, mostly sad, always hopeful little grandfather", as he was described, sitting in her motor home outside the federal prisons in Memphis, Tennessee, Pollock, Louisiana and Lompoc, California, where he was incarcerated.
[4][5] In an interview with the Los Angeles Times Life & Style in March 1997, Yıldırım expressed his desire to be pardoned after eight years in prison so that he could return to his homeland, Turkey, and to Germany, where his family lives.
[4][24] Paul Wong, a Santa Barbara, California-based attorney, represented Yıldırım on a pro bono basis for three years to obtain his release from the U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc.
[4][24] His contacts with Hall in prison, FBI agent Kate Alleman who was responsible for Yıldırım, and ex-spymasters of the Stasi during his visit in Berlin, did not bring any progress in his clemency petition efforts.
[1][2] After a visit to a hospital due to heart disease symptoms, Yıldırım went home to meet his wife, his physician daughter, and engineer son, who all came from Germany to see him.