His family, in an announcement printed in the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, said he died after a brief illness.
Mr. Bachmann, who held the rank of colonel, brought dash and panache to Swiss spy craft in his relatively brief but highly eventful leadership of Swiss military intelligence. A Communist in his younger days, he became a hard-line cold warrior after the 1968 Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, which he regarded as the dress rehearsal for a full-scale invasion of Western Europe.
After being appointed to run Swiss intelligence in 1976, he created Project 26, a secret army of 2,000 resistance fighters trained to wage guerrilla warfare against Soviet troops in the event of an invasion.
To ensure the survival of the Swiss state, he bought Liss Ard, a 200-acre estate near Cork, to serve as a refuge and headquarters for a government in exile and, in the basement of one of its two Georgian houses, a vault for Switzerland’s gold reserves.
Loyalists regarded Colonel Bachmann as a fearless visionary. Others agreed with the intelligence agent who dismissed his former boss as “a glorified Boy Scout who saw evil everywhere and believed that he alone possessed the absolute truth about national defense.”
Colonel Bachmann came to grief after sending one of his operatives, a management consultant named Kurt Schilling, to spy on Austrian troops carrying out maneuvers near the town of St. P?lten in November 1979.
The need for cloak-and-dagger secrecy was unclear, since the Austrian government had invited observers from all over the Eastern bloc to watch the operations. Mr. Schilling, equipped with maps, binoculars and a notebook, nevertheless spent several days snooping around military barracks and command posts before the Austrian police pounced.
Called “the spy who came in from the Emmentaler,” a reference to Switzerland’s most famous cheese, Mr. Schiller was put on trial for espionage. His mission, he told the court, was to gauge the ability of the Austrian Army to resist a Soviet attack.
The affair proved deeply embarrassing to Switzerland, and Colonel Bachmann was suspended. Further investigation into his activities exposed Project 26 and related initiatives.
All were a complete surprise to the Swiss defense minister, Georges-André Chevallaz, who found them so outlandish that their architect was briefly suspected of being a double agent.
Colonel Bachmann was soon forced to resign, bringing down the curtain on one of the more intriguing chapters in the history of the cold war.
Project 26 lingered, under various names, until it was dissolved in 1990 after the Swiss government declared it to be a clandestine organization operating outside parliamentary or governmental control.
Albert Bachmann, known as Bert, was born on Nov. 26, 1929, in Albisrieden, now part of Zurich, where his father was a housepainter. He entered the printing trade and joined the Freie Jugend, the youth organization of the Swiss Labor Party, whose politics were communist.
After taking a sharp right turn politically, he performed his compulsory military service and found the army to his liking. He rose through the ranks of the intelligence service, despite his lack of formal education and polish. He was fond of saying that he was the only general staff officer with a mustache and a forearm tattoo.
In 1969 he created a stir as the principal author of “Civil Defense,” a primer on popular resistance in case of invasion; 2.6 million copies were printed and distributed throughout Switzerland. Its red cover, and its identification of leftists and intellectuals as internal enemies, earned it sneering comparisons to Mao’s Little Red Book.
Undeterred, he headed off on a secret mission of his own to Biafra, then struggling to secede from Nigeria. There, for obscure reasons, he operated under cover as an upper-class Englishman named Henry Peel, one of several colorful code names he favored in his spy work. To the German intelligence services, with whom the Swiss shared information, he was Black Hand.
After being promoted to colonel and named as chief of military intelligence, Colonel Bachmann assumed oversight of Bureau Ha, an unofficial intelligence service created during World War II, and Special Service D, a so-called stay-behind resistance force, similar to secret units created in many NATO countries, which was trained to harry an occupying army. It provided the inspiration for Project 26.
With energy and imagination — perhaps too much of the latter — Colonel Bachmann trained his special agents in the arts of bomb-making, sharpshooting, encryption, assassination and, in a nod to his onetime profession, the printing of pamphlets. Mountain guides were entrusted with the task of shepherding important officials across the Alps.
After being forced into retirement in 1980, Colonel Bachmann moved to Cork, where he dealt successfully in real estate.
“He was an amazing character with a great sense of humor — but a lot of people thought he was a retired banker and not an intelligence officer,” a local resident told The Irish Independent.
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