The first woman to graduate from French Commando school

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Maura McCormick was posted to Berlin as a Signals Intelligence voice interceptor (Russian). Her workplace was the Teufelsberg  U.S. listening station,  aka Field Station Berlin.

Maura shares her early impressions of Berlin and working at the Tberg. She talks about her impressions of the infamous James Hall,  a United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.

Maura also recounts a close call with Hüseyin Yıldırım, a Turkish-American auto mechanic who was a Stasi courier for the espionage activities of James Hall.

Maura often visited East Berlin where she tells of an unusually close encounter with a chimney sweep that almost resulted in an international incident.

In West Berlin, Maura became the first woman to graduate from French Commando school. The commandant had a nightly call to Paris to confirm that she had survived the day’s training…

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I am delighted to welcome Maura McCormick to our Cold War conversation…

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