Magazine Says 100 U.S. Spies In Germany Report Claims One Agent Ordered To Leave

About 100 American intelligence agents are operating undercover in Germany, Der Spiegel magazine said Saturday, in a report that also named an alleged agent recently ordered to leave the country.

U.S. and German officials declined to comment on the Spiegel report, or verify the name of Peyton K. Humphries, who the magazine said was being expelled.

The German Economics Ministry on Monday confirmed that a U.S. diplomat tried to recruit one of its department chiefs to spy for Washington, after Spiegel reported the affair two days earlier.

According to Spiegel’s latest report, the Economics Ministry informed Germany’s counterintelligence office in 1995 that a ministry department chief responsible for Iran had been meeting with American agents since 1994.

The counterintelligence office instructed the Economics Ministry employee to continue the meetings, in which the Americans were chiefly interested in getting a list of German companies that delivered high-technology supplies to Iran, Spiegel said.

The employee refused to supply such a list, the report said.

According to Spiegel, Americans asked about Iran’s connections with the so-called Mykonos case, in which federal prosecutors charge that Iranian intelligence directed the assassination of a Kurdish opposition leader and three aides at Berlin’s Mykonos Greek restaurant in 1992.

It said the Americans also wanted information about German government payment guarantees for Iranian exports, and a nuclear power plant built by the Siemens electronics company in Iran in the 1970s.

Contacted by telephone, a duty officer for the U.S. Embassy in Bonn said there would be no comment on the Spiegel report.