The BRIXMIS Opel Senator Was the Ride of Real Secret Agents During the Cold War

Was anyone worse at their job than James Bond? He’s supposed to be a secret agent.

Bond: Okay, so I just tell the bad guy my real name, last name first?

No! Also, knock off all the drinking and high-stakes gambling. You’re supposed to be keeping a low profile.

Bond: No problem, I’ll just turn up in my Aston Martin wearing a tuxedo.

No, James, Low. Profile.

Bond: Sorry, been captured! Hopefully I get put in some kind of easily escapable situation like always.

Real secret agents live less glamorous lives, hiding in muddy ditches, shabbily dressed to throw off pursuers, hanging out with the riff-raff rather than the hoi-polloi while looking to eavesdrop. Also, they don’t drive Aston Martins, nor—and I’m looking at you here, Pierce Brosnan—BMW Z roadsters. The real intelligence agents of the Cold War drove General Motors products.

More precisely, they drove Opel Senators, Germany’s GM executive sedan. Equipped with a quick-for-its-day 3.0-liter inline-six and Ferguson four-wheel-drive, these specially customized, drab olive sedans were the workhorses of British intelligence gathering behind enemy lines during the height of the Cold War. They were required to shake off pursuers, creep into forbidden zones, and put up with being rammed off the road by the dreaded Stasi. Never mind shaken-not-stirred martinis, the stalwarts of the British Commanders’-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in Germany (or the less-of-a-mouthful BRIXMIS) secret operation were tough-as-nails four-door sedans that got the job done without the flash.

As you are no doubt aware from dimly-remembered history lessons (or Tom Clancy novels), the end of WWII saw Germany divided up by the victorious Allies. The Soviet forces took the East, and roughly half of Berlin, the capital, while France, America, and Britain divvied up the West into three slices. In order to foster cooperation between the forces, several military liaison efforts, including BRIXMIS, were launched in 1946.

On the surface, this was a reciprocal agreement that allowed a small force of uniformed British troops to cross the border into the communist-held DDR. Likewise, a handful of Soviet troops could travel into West Germany. The official business was pretty light fare: organizing a parade for Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday, traveling to important cultural sites, and maintaining friendly relations even as tensions between the two superpowers grew. The East German secret police, the Stasi, didn’t like the arrangement, but the agreement had been made in Moscow, so it was out of their hands.

The Stasi was right to be suspicious. As the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, BRIXMIS became one of the only ways for western agencies to operate on unfriendly territory with grudging official approval. Ostensibly traveling across the Glienicke Bridge—the Bridge of Spies made famous by prisoner of war exchanges and the Tom Hanks film—on innocuous business, the uniformed troops of the BRIXMIS were there to spy.

There were just over thirty people assigned to the mission, each specially trained in intelligence gathering. The teams would go out in threes: one officer, one NCO, and one driver. Carrying cameras and other necessary equipment, they would stay away from restricted areas when in view but try to shake off their tails and double back to keep tabs on military installations.

To be clear, this was not a covert operation, but an overt one. The British forces wore their proper uniforms and didn’t outwardly pretend to be East German troops or civilians. They weren’t even hiding in plain sight. The Stasi knew exactly what they were up to, and the East Germans were not happy about it.

BRIXMIS used many types of vehicles from the start, including venturing away from the car on foot so as to attract less suspicion. The Range Rover became a common tool, as it was capable of shaking off pursuit over rough terrain. These were equipped with a sliding canvas roof so that BRIXMIS agents could post up on the flight path to an airport to take pictures of overflying military aircraft. Later, when the Rovers proved less than reliable, early models of the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen were pressed into service.

The only problem with a Gelandewagen is that if you are East German secret police, you can easily spot it a mile away. Even camouflaged, the G-Wagens were quite obvious. BRIXMIS needed something less obvious, and quicker to boot.

Enter the Opel Senator. BRIXMIS forces had been using Opels since the 1950s, as the likes of the Kapitan were spacious enough for extended-range missions. Launched in 1978, the Senator was a full-sized car, big by European standards, and a solid choice for operations. What made it even better was the availability of a Ferguson viscous-coupling all-wheel-drive system, of the same sort that had been fitted to the Jensen FF. When equipped with the top-trim 3.0-liter six, these Senators had 60/40 AWD biased to the rear and just under 180 hp, and the British military further upgraded the suspension and added underbody protection. These Senators offered lukewarm performance by modern standards, perhaps, but when the enemy is plodding along behind in a Volga, you might as well be driving Colin McRae’s WRX.

As the 1980s progressed, things got more hostile between BRIXMIS and the Stasi. Besides taking thousands of photos of Soviet military equipment, the team had scored multiple coups, including recovering a Soviet fighter jet’s engine and radar after it crashed, stealing reactive armor off a tank, and, perhaps most cleverly, stuffing an apple into a then-new BMP-2’s main gun to measure the caliber.

As tensions escalated, the cat-and-mouse game got more vicious. Now, not only did BRIXMIS drivers have to shake off pursuers, but they also needed to avoid being run right off the road. On several occasions, Stasi-driven vehicles rammed right into the BRIXMIS cars, were buzzed by enemy aircraft (this just resulted in better surveillance photos), and were occasionally shot at. The main risk was also being caught in a restricted area, which would lead to arrest and sweating it out in an interrogation room until release. This last could result in having your border pass permanently revoked, at which point all your special training was for naught.

So no shark tanks or hollowed-out volcano hideouts or a man who throws his hat at you. The real intelligence gathering was grubby and dangerous, picking through trash and spying on troop movements. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, BRIXMIS stayed in effect officially for just one more year, with a handful of the team operating quietly for a few years after the reunification of Germany.

Several of the Rovers, G-Wagens, and Senators returned from the field, and are now on display in museums. The British National Army Museum has a 1985 BRIXMIS Senator in its collection. It is a homely thing, matte green and unremarkable in its four-doored mundanity. And yet it is a true Cold War warrior, a veteran of behind-the-lines operations that gained valuable intel on the enemy. Never mind the gadgets, Bond, this is the kind of tool to get the job done.