Over the Wall: A BRIXMIS Intelligence Officer Behind the Iron Curtain

‘A gripping account of the cloak and dagger game played in Berlin and beyond by Britain’s shadow warriors. A knife-edge Cold War showdown. A game of secrets, masterfully told.’ – Damien Lewis, Sunday Times No. 1 Bestselling Author

The British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany, better known as BRIXMIS, was arguably the most successful and enduring intelligence organisation of the Cold War. Its three-man teams maintained a permanent presence behind the Iron Curtain, patrolling East Germany daily from 1946 until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In this new and updated edition, Will Britten, a career military intelligence officer, offers a fresh, hard-hitting account of his experience as one of the last generations of Cold War warriors. Britten recounts reconnaissance missions deep inside the DDR, encounters with Stasi surveillance teams and remarkable personal contacts with ‘the enemy’. He also puts forward the shocking proposition that Moscow had almost certainly compromised BRIXMIS through agents operating within the wider US military system.

Providing a rare insight into the GRU-staffed Soviet military teams deployed reciprocally in West Germany, Over the Wall ultimately poses an intriguing question: in the final balance, whose missions were operationally more effective?

WILL BRITTEN served in the British Army from 1978 to 2005 and was a senior officer in the Intelligence Corps. He operated as a HUMINT officer in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Cyprus and Iraq. He was part of the BRIXMIS unit, a unique liaison unit, in East Germany and witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. He subsequently operated as a Military Intelligence Liaison Officer in some of the world’s hotspots, including Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Angola, and directed the UK military’s covert intelligence training at the Specialist Intelligence Wing, in Ashford, Kent.