On the Scene

ON November 17, three Germans were apprehended at Medellin airport in Colombia as they tried to board a small plane bound for Venezuela. One of them, Brigitte Schoene, was released immediately: she was the wife of the chief executive in Colombia of BASF, the giant German chemical company, and she had been kidnapped three months before by the ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional), the Marxist guerrilla group led by a former priest, Manuel Pérez.

The identities of the other two, a man and a woman, were rather more difficult to establish. The man, it transpired, had 18 aliases and was carrying 6 different German passports, all issued officially and none of them forged. He turned out to be Werner Mauss, a former policeman and private detective turned secret agent whose photograph the German courts had forbidden newspapers in Germany to publish, to protect his identity on his secret missions.

About the Author

Anthony Daniels

Mr. Daniels, a retired doctor who worked in several parts of the world, is the author of Mass Listeria, a book about health scares.

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ON November 17, three Germans were apprehended at Medellin airport in Colombia as they tried to board a small plane bound for Venezuela. One of them, Brigitte Schoene, was released immediately: she was the wife of the chief executive in Colombia of BASF, the giant German chemical company, and she had been kidnapped three months before by the ELN (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional), the Marxist guerrilla group led by a former priest, Manuel Pérez.

The identities of the other two, a man and a woman, were rather more difficult to establish. The man, it transpired, had 18 aliases and was carrying 6 different German passports, all issued officially and none of them forged. He turned out to be Werner Mauss, a former policeman and private detective turned secret agent whose photograph the German courts had forbidden newspapers in Germany to publish, to protect his identity on his secret missions.