| 13.08.200910:17 (GMT) | The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to topple East German leader Erich Honecker in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall fell, daily Berliner Morgenpost reports. The government in Moscow sought out the then East German intelligence chief Markus Wolf, who had ties with the KGB, to plot the overthrow of Honecker, the paper writes. In March 1987, Wolf met in Dresden with then-Soviet KGB deputy chief Vladimir Kryuchkov and Hans Modrow, a high-ranking East German Socialist Union Party (SED; Communist) official who was designated as the most likely successor to Honecker. The only surviving eyewitness of the secret meeting in Dresden, Hans Modrow, confirmed the fact in an interview to the newspaper. „Itv was taking place on March 4, 1987 in the guesthouse of the SED party Dresden branch at Weissen Hirsch. Wolf and Kryuchkov were there“, Modrow marked.
At the same time Modrow, 81, says he does not remember whether there was discussion on a possible attempt of coup d’etat against Erich Honecker. Modrow recalls, however, that Kryuchkov in Dresden met also with the scientist Manfred von Ardenne who was closely connected with the USSR. His son Thomas told the Berliner Morgenpost that his father once said he had been directly asked by Kryuchkov whether he could imagine Modrow as successor of Honecker. The former Senior Lieutenant of Stasi and Wolf’s confident Günter Bohnsack recalls that Wolf had worked out plans for his personal role in the new political leadership of the GDR. However, Wolf failed to get the country’s security forces to back him, Berliner Morgenpost marks.
The attempts of Gorbachev to let substitute Stalinisten Honecker with politicians fond of reforms was known also to the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Hans-Georg Wieck, the BND head from 1985 to 1990, told Berliner Morgenpost that the secret service has data at that time that Wolf, Modrow and Dresden city mayor Wolfgang Berghofer had been seen in Moscow as eventual representatives of the new Soviet policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation) in the GDR.
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