Great Spies of the 20th Century

by Patrick Pesnot

  Chapter 16

  The Guillaume Affair: A Conspiracy against Brandt

  It is a story that could have been dreamt up by John Le Carre. All the ingredients are there: the period of the Cold War; the setting of post-war Germany; even the characters who inspired the British author, such as ‘Karla', the Machiavellian head of Eastern Intelligence, who in reality was the infamous Markus Wolf.85 The man without a face, as he was known for a long time, and who after the reunification of Germany, sank quietly into the background before dying peacefully.

  So what was the Guillaume Affair about? It was also known as the Brandt Affair, due to the fact that the main consequence of this amazing spy story was the resignation of Willy Brandt in May 1974. Was there a conspiracy? If so, who would have benefitted from Brandt's departure? A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and a pioneer in creating good relations with the East? Could it be something in his past, even though he was one of the few people in his country to flee Germany in order to fight the Nazis? Or was it all part of a wider operation to infiltrate the main major establishments in West Germany?

  There are so many questions that still remain unanswered, even though parts of the Stasi and KGB archives have been made available. It is a story whose roots can be found in the murky world of wartime espionage!

  This is how the case was reported in the newspapers. In Spring 1974, an eastern spy was revealed to have been operating within Chancellor Willy Brandt's entourage. The man, Gunter Guillaume, was one of his advisors and also worked as his secretary. Claiming that he would take full responsibility for what had happened, Brandt resigned and his post as chancellor was taken over by Helmut Schmidt, who had previously held the role of Finance Minister. Schmidt was one of the key figures in the German Socialist Party (SPD), and was also a challenger to Brandt for its leadership, who despite his resignation, remained the party chairman. The assumption that Schmidt had something to do with the affair in order to push Brandt out, consequently does not work. Indeed, some socialist leaders tried to deter Brandt from resigning his position as Chancellor. Excepting Brandt's sense of honour, he was under no other obligation to leave his post, especially as he had just been triumphantly re-elected.

  It is true that the German chancellor seemed tired, but he was still one of the most prominent European political personalities and enjoyed great international prestige. He was the first German leader to have visited Israel, as well as the first to have dared to kneel at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. Such strong actions had certainly earned him worldwide admiration.

  This was why his resignation was such a shock to everyone in the western world, not

  to mention the fact that an eastern spy had managed to infiltrate the federal government at the highest level. After all, West Germany was a key figure in NATO, mainly due to its proximity to the Eastern Bloc.

  Indeed, it was not the first time that the importance of an infiltration such as this had been addressed. In 1968, only a few years before the Guillaume Affair, an eastern agent named Runge had defected over to the other side of the Iron Curtain, after which followed a strange suicide epidemic. First was Horst Wendland, the second in command of the BND's intelligence agency. On the same day, Vice-Admiral Hermann Ludke, who had held high office at NATO headquarters, shot himself with a revolver. Shortly afterwards, a senior civil servant at the Treasury called Schenk hanged himself, only to be followed the next day by a female official at the federal press office, Edeltraud Grapentin, who swallowed sleeping pills. But that was not all! Three days later a senior officer on the General Staff called Grimm, also committed suicide. Followed again three days later by the suicide of Gerhard Bohm, a senior official at the Ministry of Defence. This mysterious spate of suicides suggests that all of them were probably eastern spies, who were afraid of being denounced by Runge and were thus driven to suicide. The official version is that they were all suffering from depression, but the more serious observer would not come to such conclusions.

  Going back a little further, we can see that the West German intelligence agencies had been infiltrated for a long time. The Felfe Affair is a good example. Felfe had been an intelligence officer who was in charge of USSR counterintelligence in the BND, the organisation headed by General Gehlen: clearly a very sensitive position. However, in the early 1960s is was revealed he had been working as a spy for the KGB, but not before he had managed to cause considerable damage. Gehlen himself afterwards took responsibility for arresting hundreds of his agents in eastern European countries.

  It was inevitable that for many reasons, West Germany would be swarming with spies, the main cause being the existence of East Germany. Every citizen of the GDR who went to the West, automatically acquired German citizenship. Tens of thousands had moved there since the end of the Second World War and before the Berlin Wall went up, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Among them were people who genuinely wished to flee what they regarded as a harsh and dictatorial regime. However, others were sent to West Germany by the HVA, the GDR's secret intelligence agency, led by the legendary Markus Wolf: the man who inspired John Le Carre's ‘Karla', although as the author did not know Wolf personally, he did have to use his imagination. That was why when people in the West first saw a photograph of Wolf from the 1970s, it wasn't quite the man who people had imagined when they thought of ‘Karla'. Le Carre had described him as a small man with grey hair and brown eyes, where as the real ‘Karla' looked more like Paul Newman.

  Among these East German exiles, Wolf managed to slip thousands of agents across the border: men and women who could easily integrate in their new country because they spoke the same language. Many of them remained dormant agents, others were never ‘activated' and some were never even discovered. Perhaps one day they will be, if the archives reveal their secrets. Most of the documents, however, have disappeared, while others, strangely, are held by the CIA. Taking advantage of the confusion that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CIA managed to seize valuable East German archives, which they then refused to surrender to the government of the newly reunited Germany. But why? Perhaps it is always a good idea to hold back these kind of highly confidential documents in order to blackmail former Eastern agents and ensure they remain dedicated correspondents!

  Michel Verrier86

  Hundreds, even thousands of people in Germany trembled at the possibility that their missions in the service of the former GDR would come to light. The activities of former GDR spies are today covered by a statute of limitations. However, a charge of treason can always bring West German citizens who informed for the former GDR before the courts. Officially, the US secret service would have had to make this argument to justify their refusal to return the documents in their possession. They would first have wanted to measure the legal consequences that might have resulted from such an occurrence.

  Yet some experts believe that the CIA had already profited from the information in its possession and had visited former spies that were of particular interest and who could possibly now work for them instead. That was why the US persistently refused to hand over the Stasi documents to the authorities, or even provide them with a simple copy.

  Blackmail can also explain how Wolf was able to send and use spies in West Germany: he was shamelessly exploiting the Nazi past of these men and women. When those concerned refused to obey, he threatened to make public their service in the Nazi party or in the army of the Third Reich. It was no wonder therefore that former Nazi soldiers became communist agents. But that was not all. The Eastern intelligence services also made the most of information they had on people who were now settled in West Germany, but had previously worked for them; men from Comintern, for example, or simply former communist militants. In post-war West Germany, it was certainly not recommended to have once flirted with the Communists and was sometimes seen as being worse than having belonged to the Nazi Party. General Gehlen himself had had a very close relationship with the Nazis, but that did not prevent him from becoming the head of West
Germany's intelligence service!

  In the years after the war, Germany became almost the country of choice for eastern spies and there was always a permanent climate of suspicion. People were quick to suspect a neighbour, work colleague or boss as someone who worked for ‘the other side', as it was called. No one was immune, not even the most important people in the federal government. Willy Brandt himself was even the object of suspicion, with some accusing him of being a member of the CIA, while other believed he was a KGB agent.

  To understand this hotbed of suspicions, it is necessary to examine the biography of the Chancellor. For one thing, Brandt was not called Brandt. This pseudonym was actually given to him during the war and like many members of the French Resistance, he kept it after the war when he returned to his own country.

  His real name was Hebert Frahm and he was born in Lubeck just before the beginning of the First World War. He came from a very modest background, right on the edge of poverty. His mother was a shop assistant and his grandfather, who was a labourer on one of the Junker's estates,87 had become a socialist after rebelling against the brutal methods that his master used towards his staff. The young Herbert never knew his father, perhaps because his mother was not actually married to him. It is not hard to imagine the life of this young mother in such a corseted society as Germany in the early twentieth century. Many years later, the faults of the mother were still being reflected in the son: when Brandt became a prominent political figure, there were many of his opponents who chose to exhume the subject and bring up his mother's past.

  A brilliant student, the young Frahm was awarded a scholarship to study at high school. He passed his exams, but it was politics that already occupied most of his life. His grandfather's influence and his mother's low status in life all led to him quickly acquiring a left-thinking political conscience, joining the Young Socialists at an early age and becoming a member of the SPD (German Socialist Party) at seventeen. He soon came to believe that the party was too complaisant and, above all, too legalistic, so he moved to another socialist party instead. He was also wary of the Communist Party as he considered it to be too subservient to Stalin. The inevitable rise of Hitler soon began, ending with him becoming Chancellor in 1933. All left-leaning thinkers were hunted from the outset and Herbert Frahm went into hiding and adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt. Shortly after Hitler had seized power, Brandt sailed to Norway where he was charged with setting up a liaison office with the Socialist Party. His life was forever changed and he would not set foot back in his home country until after the end of the Second World War, with the exception of a secret journey he made in 1936 to make contact with the inner resistance.

  Brandt resumed his studies in Norway, but spent most of his time advocating and organising resistance to the Nazis among other German immigrants. Stripped of his nationality, he became a Norwegian citizen and wrote for several newspapers. He visited Spain during the Civil War in his role as a reporter, although he was more of a travelling salesman for the anti-Nazi campaign rather than a journalist. He moved around a great deal, making contact with other Germans who were fighting with the International Brigade. He sympathised with the POUM party88 and had his first altercations with the communists, who regarded it as a den of Trotskyites and lefties. Indeed, the Stalinists would physically eliminate many of its members.

  Willy Brandt therefore became a target for the communists, with its leaders accusing him of one absurd allegation after another: he was suspected of being a Gestapo agent, then a spy for Franco. It was even insinuated that he was trying to infiltrate POUM on behalf of the French National Police.

  In 1940, Brandt was surprised by Hitler's invasion of Norway and he was at great risk if the Germans discovered his true identity. Taken prisoner, he pretended to be a Norwegian officer, with his political opponents later using this information to accuse him of having fought against his own countrymen. Nevertheless, he managed to escape and made it to the Swedish border where he made sure to be particularly cautious. Although a neutral country, Sweden still had many supporters of the Nazi regime and paid close attention to the activities of its German opponents. Some Swedish citizens were even interred in camps. However, as a Norwegian citizen, Brandt was allowed to continue his resistance activities and used his position as a journalist as a cover to get information. Thanks to the resistance network that he had established in Germany, Norway and Denmark, he was able to collect information together and send it to not only to London, but also to Moscow, after Hitler had invaded the USSR. Despite his reticence in regards to Stalin, Brandt now realised that the USSR was a necessary ally in the fight against Nazism. Brandt provided them with information and thus helped in the defeat of Hitler. After making contact with the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm, he was put in touch with NKVD agents,89 who were living in the Swedish capital under diplomatic cover. However, Brandt did not become a Soviet agent and continued to send information to other allied states as well.

  However, when one begins to have regular contact with the Soviet agencies, you are at risk of being compromised and driven far beyond what you may have envisioned at the outset. It is therefore certain that the NKVD tried to trap Brandt in order to recruit him and even tried to give him money. He accepted at least one payment from Moscow after signing a receipt for it upon delivery, which was a big mistake! NKVD agents immediately dispatched this precious document to Moscow, with the possibility of using it against him later.

  How can this faux pas be justified? Willy Brandt was a resistance member and the organisation needed money to operate. As long as there was money there to contribute to the fight against Hitler, did it matter where it came from? Unfortunately, this recklessness was to cost him dearly after the war.

  Christopher Andrew90

  After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Brandt changed his attitude towards Moscow. The presence of the NKVD in Stockholm, where he had fled after the Germans had occupied Norway, provoked a split among the ‘Norwegian Trotskyites’. Some, including Brandt, were now ready to work with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler. In Autumn 1941 M.S. Okhounev, aka ‘Oleg’, the operations officer at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm, visited Brandt but finding him not at home, left his business card instead. The next evening, Brandt went to the Embassy and spoke with Okhounev and the local head of the NKVD, Mikhail Sergeyevich Vetrov, for three hours. He explained that he ran a news agency, which counted the US media among its clients, and that he was ready to do anything to hasten the destruction of Nazism. He said that he would be delighted to send articles from ‘Soviet Comrades’ to the United States (who had not yet entered the war), and conceal his sources, if necessary.

  [Andrew adds that subsequent clandestine meetings ensued every fortnight.]

  What was the kind of information that Brandt passed on to the Allies? Essentially it was military information such as the position of Nazi forces in Norway, or the movements of the German Fleet in the North or Baltic Seas. Brandt was also well-placed in Stockholm to follow the diplomatic efforts of the Third Reich in their attempts to persuade the Swedish government to surrender its sacrosanct neutrality. This is why the importance of Brandt's resistance activities cannot be denied. There are even those who believe that it was thanks to the information he provided that the RAF were successfully able to bomb the famous Tirpitz battleship while it was moored in a Norwegian port.

  At the end of the war, Brandt quickly returned home to Germany, although he returned as a Scandinavian journalist due to the fact that he still possessed his Norwegian citizenship and covered the Nuremburg Trials for the Norwegian press. Soon enough however, he regained his German citizenship in 1947 in order to embark on a political career.

  Although still a socialist, he was not the same one who had left Germany in 1933. In Sweden he had found the kind of social democracy for which he had abandoned the hard line Marxism of his youth. It should also be noted that one of his first political actions had the aim of frustrating the attempts by the communist East to
become the leaders of the German left. Brandt thus remained resolutely anticommunist, something that would certainly have negated his chances being a KGB agent. It is true that Soviet agents would often willingly express anticommunist views in order to maintain their cover, but Brandt was a major politician who throughout his life, despite his policy of rapprochement with the East, remained adamant in his ideological hostility towards the communist system, most notably during the Berlin Crisis.

  Brandt quickly made a name for himself in the SPD: he was ambitious, talented, intelligent and handsome and notably had a certain way with women, although this also led to a few setbacks. He is often compared to President Kennedy, and not just for his charisma and eloquence! Despite all of this, Brandt certainly had many strengths. In a Germany where the ghosts of Nazism still hung in the air, he had a history of resistance, even if some members of the right accused him of having fought against his compatriots during the war. There were many former Hitler supporters in the opposition, who had managed to slip through the cracks or had quickly become ‘de-Nazified', as they called it.

  Last but not least,Willy Brandt embodied a new form of socialist; the social-democrat. This was a man who had broken with the sectarianism of the past and a politician who acted as a contrast to the stiff, petty-bourgeois side of the traditional German political class. It was clear that Brandt looked set to have a bright future and proved so by becoming President of the Berlin Parliament in 1955 and later Mayor of Berlin. The former capital of the Third Reich was a nest of spies and a western enclave in the middle of the GDR, making it the object of all Moscow's attention.

  This is why the Soviets now opportunely remembered their old informant. At the time when Brandt met with the agents in Stockholm, the NKVD - and this is a point that had resulted in many tentative speculations - assigned him a code name of ‘Poliarnik', meaning ‘Polar', presumably in connection with Brandt's residence in Scandinavia. Codenames are usually only given to agents, which once again raises the question as to how far Brandt was involved with the Soviets. One can also legitimately ask how the West came to know this codename, although on this point, the only explanation is that it was revealed voluntarily.