With the Christian Democrats in open opposition to Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the Centre was now concerned not to compromise Brandt but to keep him in power. By the spring of 1972 a series of defections from the SDP and its Free Democrat allies had reduced Brandt’s majority to four. With more defections in the offing, the fate of Ostpolitik hung in the balance. In April 1972, confident of success, the CDU (Christian Democrat) leader, Rainer Barzel, tabled a motion of no confidence.39 With the blessing of the Centre, Wolf made a possibly critical secret intervention in the Bundestag with the aim of keeping Brandt in power.
Shortly before the crucial vote of confidence, the HVA had recruited a corrupt CDU deputy, Julius Steiner, as an agent with the codename SIMSON.40 Wolf paid Steiner 50,000 marks to vote for Brandt.41 Barzel’s no confidence motion failed by two votes. At a general election in November, Brandt won a more secure parliamentary majority, with the SDP for the first time beating the Christian Democrats in the popular vote.42 The HVA continued to run SIMSON as an agent in the new Bundestag. In February 1973 Steiner agreed to a contract with the HVA (euphemistically described as the “Structural Working Group of the GDR Council of Ministers”), under which he was paid a retainer of 3,000 marks a month. Soon afterward (the date is not recorded by Mitrokhin), Wolf reported to the Centre that Steiner was in contact with the BfV, the West German counter-intelligence agency, and thus useless as an agent.43 In June the Munich weekly Quick published a photograph of a bank deposit slip showing that 50,000 marks had been paid into Steiner’s account the day after the April 1972 vote of confidence, thus provoking a public scandal which was quickly dubbed “Bonn’s Watergate” or “Rhinegate.” Steiner acknowledged being recruited as an HVA agent but claimed that he had worked as a double agent with the approval of the BfV, and said that the 50,000 marks had come from the SDP chief whip, Karl Wienand44—a charge denied by Wienand (who, it later transpired, was also an HVA agent).45 A parliamentary inquiry decided that there was no conclusive evidence of bribery.46
By the time of Brandt’s victory in the November 1972 elections, Guillaume was at the peak of his career as a penetration agent, attending all meetings of the SDP party and parliamentary leadership. On May 29, 1973, however, Günter Nollau, head of the BfV, informed Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister, that Guillaume was under suspicion of espionage and had been placed under surveillance. (Their recollections later differed over how serious the suspicions reported by Nollau were.)47 Shortly afterward, alerted—according to Wolf’s not wholly reliable account—by the BfV’s clumsy surveillance of Guillaume’s wife, the HVA ordered both Günter and Christel Guillaume to suspend their intelligence work.48 At 6:30 a.m. on April 24, 1974 the Guillaumes were arrested at their Bonn apartment. In a curious breach of espionage tradecraft, Guillaume virtually admitted his guilt. Dressed only in a bathrobe, he declared defiantly, “I am an officer of the [East German] National People’s Army!” According to Genscher, “It was basically only Guillaume’s own declaration which convicted him.”49
Wolf now argues that his success in penetrating Brandt’s entourage was “equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal.” The political scandal caused by Guillaume’s arrest was the immediate cause of Brandt’s resignation on May 6, 1974. The HVA, Wolf concludes, “unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen.”50
THE HVA OPERATIONS in West Germany which had had the greatest influence on the KGB’s own methods were probably those of its “Romeo spies (a phrase invented by the Western media but later taken over by Wolf himself).51 The KGB had specialized in the sexual entrapment of Western diplomats and visitors to Moscow since the 1930s. The entrapment followed a straightforward sequence: the use of attractive female or male swallows as sexual bait, the seduction of the target, the secret photography of the sexual encounter (and, on occasion, the interruption of the encounter by a supposedly outraged “spouse” or “relative”), followed by blackmail.52 Wolf’s tactics were both more subtle and more effective. Love, or a plausible semblance of it, was capable of generating more intelligence over a longer period than brief sexual encounters.53 The main targets of the Romeo spies were lonely female secretaries, most in their thirties or forties, employed in West German ministries and intelligence agencies.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the KGB base in Karlshorst began imitating the HVA’s “secretaries offensive.” Indeed, the KGB files seen by Mitrokhin show that some of the “secretary spies” later thought to be HVA agents were in fact working for the KGB. Karlshorst’s initial targets were female employees in the Bonn Foreign Ministry identified by a KGB agent in the ministry’s personnel department, Gisela Herzog (codenamed MARLENE), recruited in 1954—without, apparently, the use of a Romeo spy. Herzog herself married an official from the French defense ministry in 1958 and moved to Paris. The first victim of the KGB’s secretaries offensive was Herzog’s friend Leonore Heinz (codenamed LOLA), secretary to a foreign ministry department head. Her seducer was Heinz Sütterlin (codenamed WALTER), a West German from Freiburg recruited by the KGB in 1957, whose first name, confusingly, was identical to Leonore’s surname. When Herzog heard in 1958 that the 30-year-old Leonore Heinz had succumbed to Sütterlin’s advances, she became consciencestricken. Probably foreseeing Heinz’s devastation when she discovered that she had been deceived, Herzog wrote to the Centre, “I should like to say that you should not involve LOLA in co-operation with us through Sütterlin. She would be very disillusioned.” “I do ask you,” she wrote on another occasion, “to please leave LOLA in peace.”54 The Centre, predictably, paid no attention.
In December 1960 Heinz Sütterlin and Leonore Heinz were married. Over the next year Sütterlin frequently discussed with his wife the danger that the Cold War might turn into hot war. At a time when the West German leadership were building themselves nuclear shelters, he argued that they had to be concerned for their own safety. Leonore agreed to confide in him everything she knew about East—West relations. In 1961, at first unwittingly, she was included in the KGB agent network. Two years later, Sütterlin reported to the Centre that, without mentioning the KGB, he had told his wife he was passing on her information to an organization dedicated to preventing nuclear war:
I told LOLA that there is one great organization in the world which regards the preservation of peace as its task. This organization requests one great favor from her. She must continue to work in the foreign ministry and report to me everything that she finds out… The organization thinks well of her work… She has agreed to cooperate in every way she can, and declared that she regards it as the duty of every decent person to seek to tie the hands of warmongers. She declined to receive money for her help. I believe that in LOLA we have an assistant on whom one may rely totally.
Though his wife refused payment, Sütterlin received 1,000 marks a month.
From 1964 onward, Sütterlin handed film of documents LOLA had smuggled out of the ministry to the East German illegal Eugen Runge (codenamed MAKS), who was working for the Karlshorst KGB. Runge, in turn, left the film in a dead letter-box which was emptied by the Bonn residency. After Leonore at last realized that she was working for the Soviet Bloc, Runge had a personal meeting with her. He found her unperturbed by her discovery. Leonore said that she trusted her husband absolutely, and that her work in the cause of peace was a job that had to be done. Sütterlin told Runge that Leonore was also motivated by “hatred for the caste of haughty foreign ministry officials” and “derived satisfaction from causing as much damage as she could.”55 His comment supplies a missing element in traditional explanations of the success of the HVA and KGB secretaries offensive. Though most of the secretaries began spying for love, their espionage was probably sustained, at least in part, by the arrogance of some of their better-educated and better-paid male superiors.
In 1967 Runge defected to the CIA, betraying both Leonore and Heinz Sütterlin. Runge told his debriefers, “We received [FRG diplomatic] documents before they moved across Le
onore’s desk and on to the code room, and we read the reports brought by diplomatic couriers from abroad, mostly even before German Foreign Minister [Gerhard] Schrîder got them.” As her friend Gisela Herzog had feared nine years earlier, Leonore was distraught at the discovery that she had been targeted by a Romeo spy. During her police interrogation, she was confronted with a confession by her husband that he had married her not for love but on orders from the KGB. Soon afterward Leonore hanged herself in her cell.56
TWO OF THE other most successful seductions in the KGB’s secretaries offensive recorded in files seen by Mitrokhin—those of DORIS and ROSIE—also involved a false flag recruitment and the use of East German illegals. The false flag, however, differed from that which had deceived LOLA. DORIS and ROSIE believed they were working not for an underground peace movement but for a secret neo-Nazi group.
DORIS was Margret Hîke, a secretary in the office of the West German president, where she worked successively in the mobilization and security departments. Her Romeo spy was the East German illegal Hans-Jurgen Henze (codenamed HAGEN), who assumed the identity of Franz Becker, a West German living in the GDR.57 Henze discovered the 33-year-old Hîke by chance. One day in 1968, while looking out of the window of his Bonn apartment, he saw a woman who struck him as a possible civil servant going for a walk alone. Henze stood waiting in a telephone kiosk along her route and, as Hîke passed by, asked if she had change for a phone call. Somehow he also managed to strike up a conversation and, on discovering where she worked, arranged another meeting with her. Gradually, according to Hîke’s operational file, “She fell seriously in love and was greatly attached to him.” Henze explained that he was a postgraduate student writing a dissertation on the work of the president, but needed additional source material before he could complete it. Hîke supplied documents from work to help finish the fictional thesis. Though less infatuated than Hîke, Henze also became emotionally involved in their relationship and for several years “found it difficult to switch to a business footing.” Finally in 1971 or 1972 (the date is unclear from the file), hoping to appeal to Hîke’s somewhat extreme right-wing views, he told her he belonged to an organization of “German patriots,” based in Brazil, who were committed to the cause of national revival and needed inside information on the Bonn government to continue their work.58
Hîke said she had guessed something of the sort and agreed to assist the “German patriots.” Henze then persuaded her to sign a contract, allegedly drawn up by his “boss,” under which she agreed to provide information from the President’s office in return for her expenses and 500 marks a month. Among the intelligence she supplied were the mobilization plans of the Chancellor’s office and the major Bonn ministries; details on the government war bunker (which were reported to Brezhnev); despatched from FRG ambassadors in Moscow, Washington and elsewhere; the secret weekly reports to the President from the foreign ministry; a dossier on Brezhnev’s visit to the FRG; and accounts of the President’s meetings with foreign diplomats. Hîke gradually became dependent on the 500 marks she received each month. In order to leave no trace of it in her own financial records, she gave it to her mother to invest on her behalf, telling her that she found it difficult to save herself.59 With the help of her mother’s investments, Hîke was able to buy a new apartment (Apartment 85, House 16, am Baitzaplen 37, Oberkassel).60
After Hîke signed her agent contract, she ceased to take the risks of smuggling classified material back to her flat. Instead, Henze taught her how to photograph documents in the President’s office with a miniature camera concealed in a tube of lipstick. On one occasion Hîke’s boss entered the room just as she was about to use the camera, but—to her immense relief—failed to notice what she was doing.61 She usually handed over the film either in Cologne or Zürich. The yavka (secret rendezvous) in Cologne was at 8:30 p.m. on the first Tuesday of each month in Kîln-Bayenthal, at the end of Bayenthalgürtel, about fifty meters from the Bismarck column, by a telephone kiosk next to an advertising pillar. Hîke was told to have a copy of Der Spiegel in her hand if she was ready to go ahead with the meeting; if she needed to give a danger signal, she was to carry a plastic bag instead. The meetings in Zürich took place at 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoons at Rennweg 35, by the window of a china shop.62
Henze was twice awarded the Order of the Red Star for his success in running Hîke as an agent. In 1976 he returned to East Germany but continued to meet her regularly in Cologne and Zürich.63 Hîke was temporarily put on ice in 1979 during a security scare caused by the investigation of another secretary suspected of spying for the East, but was reactivated a year later with the new codename VERA. By 1980 the “product file” of the documents she had provided filled ten volumes.64 Though Hîke remained in touch with Henze, she also passed on intelligence through RENATA, a female East German illegal working for the KGB.65 Among the intelligence she supplied during the early 1980s were details of talks in October 1982 between Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and US Secretary of State George Schultz over the stationing of Pershing II missiles in the FRG. She also took part in two major NATO WINTEX exercises, during which she had been able to provide intelligence on the FRG wartime command and control system, and was able to report on her experience of working inside the secret wartime government bunker in the Eiffel hills near Bonn.
Hîke was arrested in 1985, and quickly confessed. In 1987 she was sentenced to eight years in jail and fined 33,000 marks, the total sum she was believed to have received from the KGB (probably an underestimate). The judge told her that, in passing a relatively lenient sentence, he was taking into account that she had fallen “hopelessly in love” with her recruiter. The British press was curiously divided in its opinion of Hîke. Though the Daily Telegraph described her as a “dowdy secretary,” she impressed the Observer as a “Glamour Spy.”66
The methods used to recruit Hîke were similar to those employed against Heidrun Hofer (codenamed ROSIE), a secretary in her early thirties in the FRG foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND).67 While serving at the BND Paris station during the early 1970s Hofer was seduced by ROLAND, an East German illegal with a military bearing who, like Henze, claimed to be working for a neo-Nazi group of “German patriots.”68 Hofer’s deception was taken one stage further than that of Hîke. On February 26, 1973 at Innsbruch in Austria, ROLAND introduced her to VLADIMIR, telling her that he was one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi underground. Next day VLADIMIR met Hofer alone, telling her that he had known Admiral Canaris, wartime head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence), in which her father had served, and discussed the intelligence which he wanted her to supply. Unknown to Hofer, VLADIMIR was, in reality, a senior KGB illegal, Ivan Dmitryevich Unrau, an ethnic German born in Russia in 1914.69
In 1974 Hofer was transferred to BND headquarters at Pullach in Bavaria, where she worked successively for the west European and NATO liaison departments, and became engaged to a BND major.70 Following the end of her affair with ROLAND, the KGB used two further East German illegals, MAZON (who pretended to be ROLAND’s father) and FRANK, to maintain contact with her. Both pretended to be members of the neo-Nazi underground.71 Hofer appears eventually to have realized that she had been recruited under false flag but to have carried on working as a paid KGB agent. On December 21, 1977, possibly as the result of a tip-off to the BND from the French SDECE, she was arrested while driving across the Austrian border to meet her controller. Next day she confessed to being a KGB agent. Hofer showed little emotion until told that her BND fiancé had broken off their engagement. After bursting into tears, she asked for the window to be opened to give her some air, then suddenly leaped to her feet and threw herself from the sixth floor. Though her fall was partially broken by some bushes, she was critically injured.72
Apart from Hîke and Hofer, the most successful KGB recruitment made by an East German Romeo spy during the 1970s appears to have been that of Elke Falk (codenamed LENA). After Falk had advertised in a lon
ely hearts column, she was contacted by the illegal Kurt Simon (codenamed GEORG), who introduced himself as Gerhard Thieme. It is unclear from Mitrokhin’s notes what, if any, false flag Simon employed to recruit her. However, with his encouragement, Falk gained a job in 1974 as a secretary in the Chancellor’s office,73 taking with her to work a miniature camera disguised as a cigarette lighter and a bogus can of hairspray in which to store her films.74 Like Hîke, Falk was a member of the crisis management team during the WINTEX exercises. In 1977 the Centre awarded Simon the Order of the Red Star. Later Falk was moved to the control of two other illegals, one who used the alias “Peter Muller” and a second who was codenamed ADAM.75 Falk moved from the Chancellor’s office to the transport ministry in 1977, then in 1979 to the economic aid ministry two years later.76 By 1980, when Mitrokhin saw her operational file, it filled seven volumes.77 Falk was arrested in 1989 but wrongly described at her trial as an HVA rather than a KGB agent. Though sentenced to six and a half years’ imprisonment, she served only a few months before being released as part of an East—West spy exchange. Falk was alleged to have received a total of 20,000 marks for her espionage.78
NOT ALL THE Romeo spies, however, achieved results. Among the failures was one of the KGB’s East German illegals, Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), who assumed the identity of a West German living in the GDR. Kahle’s cover occupations included working as a laboratory technician in Cologne and Bonn universities and as a German language teacher in Paris. During the early 1970s he set out to cultivate four FRG foreign ministry and embassy secretaries, a female clerk at an American embassy in Europe, an American student at a German university who invited him to her parents’ home in the United States and a British secretary at NATO. Kahle’s ten-volume file, however, contains no indication that he obtained significant intelligence from any of them. His main West German cultivation was BELLA, who worked at the FRG embassies in Tehran and, from 1975, in London. According to WERNER’s file, his attempts to recruit BELLA during her tour of duty in London showed “insufficient determination” and were hampered by a number of operational errors, such as attracting the attention of the embassy security officer. Kahle became more interested in MONA, a French technical translator for a firm of Swedish paper manufacturers in Paris, where he was based from 1975 onward. His file records that he had “intimate relations” with MONA and wished to marry her. The Centre, however, became understandably skeptical both of MONA’s intelligence potential and of Kahle’s motives in pursuing her. The KGB also discovered, through tapping the telephone and intercepting the correspondence of Kahle’s mother in East Germany, that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow and anxious about the fate of his crystal and porcelain collections in Paris, of which the Centre was previously unaware.79
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