Time to turn on the Wayback Machine. 1983, West Germany. A radical leftwing cell has kidnapped a world-famous West German violinist and is holding him pending the release of all Communist prisoners held in WG jails (think all the Red Army Faction inmates, etc.). The Bonn government and all the state prison administrators have said, "No, and hell no." Publicly, at least. There may well be things going on undercover. My female MC, who is the violinist's ex-girlfriend, gets caught up in a private plot to free him. She is taken hostage too, and the cell is trying to get her husband, my male MC, in their custody as well. The cell members don't know that my MMC's mentor, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, is a top counter-terrorism expert at the Pentagon. He's a man with intimate knowledge of the situation in central Europe, a man who is known and liked by the people who matter on the ground and who is in a position to pull strings and get things done. Of course my MMC calls him in. When the BG shows up at my MMC's hotel in West Germany, he's with two big West German dudes in civilian clothes. As I have it so far, they're in the position to recognize the German guy who's hanging out in the lobby as one of the cell members the government is after. They invite him outside "for a quiet talk" and bundle him off to the police station. A little later, as they're driving my MMC to relative safety in another city, another of the cell members tries to run their car off the road. Bad guy's car ends up in the ditch. I need my mysterious German guys to be able to tip off the local authorities to pick the bad guy up, without having to hang around to answer questions. In other words, they have to Know People, too. So, who are they? Undercover agents with West German intelligence? Or maybe ditto for the state (Land) police? Military men in civvies? I'm writing from the POV of my civilian main character. I doubt his Army Intelligence friend will reveal who all is involved, but as the writer, I'd prefer to know. If you wanted to put together a covert mission in a foreign country (with plausible deniability from that nation's government), whom would you call on?
Perhaps double agents (moles) from the Stasi? ETA: From the West side though there is also the BND (I don't know how it was named in the 80's. Research it). They are in close cooperation with the CIA. Fron wiki: "From the early days of the Cold War the Gehlen Organization and later the BND had an intimate cooperation with the CIA, and often was the western intelligence community's only eyes and ears on the ground in the eastern bloc."
I'll look them up. Or are they so secret Google has never heard of them? EDIT-- Yeah, these look like the guys I need.
No, I can't afford any double agents at this stage of the story. It's too long as it is. And this is all happening in West Germany, so no need to mess with the eastern bloc. I'll look up the groups you mention anyway.
The BND is a West Germany intelligence agency. They had eyes everywhere. They were second only to the CIA, or so it says.
