Chapter 16

The Guillaume Affair: A Conspiracy against Brandt

It is a story that could have been dreamt up by John Le Carré. 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, Günter 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 Lüdke, 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 Böhm, 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 Carré’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 Carré 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 Lübeck 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.

As Mayor of Berlin, Brandt refused to have any contact with any Soviets who might remember him fondly. He knew that the KGB had hold of the famous receipt that he had foolishly signed, however, he did not seem to fear being blackmailed as a result of his wartime activities - another argument in favour of his not being an agent. However, Moscow was not willing to give up such a big fish so easily, especially one who undoubtedly had a bright international future.

Having failed thus far, the KGB now changed their tactics. With help from the Stasi and the collaboration of Markus Wolf’s HVA, they launched a veritable smear campaign against Willy Brandt, which was helped largely by the German right. After unsuccessfully spreading the rumour that he had been a US intelligence agent during the war, they highlighted his suspected communist convictions by recalling his commitment to the Marxist group that joined with the SPD. This was certainly a juicy rumour if it really did come from eastern intelligence agencies.

They also questioned his patriotism: had he not spent the war in exile while his fellow Germans had suffered at home? The primary aim was to try and make him as uncomfortable as possible so it would be easier for the KGB to trap him in their net. The smear campaign certainly made Brandt vulnerable, and it could not have occurred at a worse time: the party had just appointed him as opposition candidate for chancellor against Konrad Adenauer. He consequently lost the 1961 election and would not become chancellor until 1969. 1961 was also the year the Berlin Wall was erected and Brandt came into his own during this period. He took an international stance and fought hard against its construction, even appealing to Kennedy and the West. At one point he compared the building of the wall to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, although as we know, it was all in vain. In this instance, however, Brandt had shown himself to be a true opponent of Moscow and the Kremlin was once more keen to try and get around him.

In late 1961 or early 1962, Moscow sent a KGB agent (probably a journalist or diplomat) to blackmail him. He suggested that if Brandt returned to the excellent relationship he had had with the NKVD during the war, then it would be possible to begin serious negotiations with Moscow regarding the status of Berlin. Once again, Brandt refused and the blackmail had failed. The KGB agent tried to speak to him about the infamous receipt, but he was bluffing: the receipt had disappeared from the ‘Poliarnik’ file. As unbelievable as it may seem, after the first blackmail attempt had failed, someone in the KGB had decided to destroy what was then deemed to be a useless document. Such an act would prove irreparable and Brandt would never become a KGB agent. In any intelligence service, any document that might be used to blackmail an agent should never be destroyed. However, Moscow was still not quite finished with Willy Brandt.

Before proceeding further, it is perhaps useful to look at Brandt’s politics towards the East, which are a key factor in this story.

As Chancellor, Brandt remained deeply influenced by the Berlin Crisis and the construction of the Wall in 1961. It had all happened during the time when he was the mayor of the former Third Reich capital and so he had experienced everything first-hand. Despite all the good words and speeches in support of the people of Berlin, the West had proved powerless to prevent the Wall’s construction. Even Kennedy’s famous visit did nothing: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’ (‘I am a Berliner!’) were only words, not actions. At the time, the future chancellor believed that nothing could be done in Berlin, or the rest of Germany, to combat the USSR. Consequently, as soon as he came to power in 1969, he strongly asserted his intentions to open political negotiations with the East: he believed that the only way forward was through dialogue, but not only with East Germany, but with the entire Soviet Bloc, beginning first, of course, with Moscow. Intentions such as these could not fail to worry the West. However, at the same time the German Chancellor ensured that he remained firmly anchored in the western camp and was committed to European integration.

It is true that by choosing ‘Ostpolitik’, Brandt was breaking a taboo. Since the creation of West Germany, Bonn did not consider East Germany to be a ‘Soviet Occupied Zone’. However, Brandt was ready to discuss this allegedly occupied zone with West German leaders. Once more, the right-wing began to speak up and again reminded everyone of Brandt’s suspected communist leanings. The chancellor did not care and had the support of most of the population: the majority of Germans also wanted reconciliation and peace.

Brandt wanted to move fast and so established contacts with the Kremlin and its counterpart in East Germany, Willy Stoph. The Moscow Treaty was signed in 1970 and was later followed by the Treaty of Warsaw (1970). Federal Germany recognised the post-war frontiers, such as the famous Oder-Neisse line between Germany and Poland, but even more spectacularly, the border between the two Germanys! Willy Brandt accepted the partition, the existence of which West Germany had previously refused to acknowledge. Brandt believed that this was the only way to achieve reunification eventually and that it was important to be realistic by admitting that it existed in the first place. He therefore opted for reconciliation rather than permanent hostility. Furthermore, he stated that even if there were two states, there was still only one Germany and so both the GDR (East Germany) and the DDR (West Germany) entered into the UN at the same time. There were now many more official and private contacts, as well as exchanges of representatives, but not ambassadors. Brandt essentially believed that in the West, as in the East, it was important to keep a sense of belonging to a community and any official formal diplomatic relations would have soured that feeling. This does beg the question as to whether or not Brandt was naive in the hope that the GDR would be able to evolve in any way. Above everything else, had he not now satisfied the USSR? Recognising the post-war borders had long been Moscow’s wish. Once again there was little Brandt could do against the USSR. Rather, it was better to hold back and then move forward step by step, such as improving the situation for West Berliners, who were now finally allowed to visit their families over in East Berlin. Yet the wall itself remained. However, West Berlin was also involved in this mutual recognition and so Moscow finally accepted that the city was part of the DDR, considering it a form of western bridgehead beyond the Iron Curtain.

In fact, the Kremlin could only welcome the German Chancellor’s decision. However, he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon and unfortunately, Willy Brandt’s might not have been long enough, as the Guillaume Affair would prove.

Henri de Bresson⁹¹

Fiercely resisted in his own country by the Right, who were locked in systematic opposition, no one was indifferent to Ostpolitik. Abroad, where some, like Henry Kissinger, did not hide their distrust, we are grateful to the Chancellor for having the political courage to admit the post-war realities. He knew what he needed to do to prove his sincerity and overcome suspicions, so that the rapprochement between Bonn and the East would be reflected in other western capital cities. During his visit to Warsaw to sign the treaty, he silently knelt before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto: an act which made considerable impact throughout the world. In November 1971 he received the Nobel Peace Prize, which was very important for Germany, occurring only twenty-six years after its surrender. In his speech, the Chancellor stated that no international interest could be separated today from overall responsibility for peace.

Günther Guillaume, who died in 1995, had a French surname. If his name really was Guillaume (William), then he must have been descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Germany after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But his true nationality is of little importance. Only his story matters. A lot of what we do know of him is shrouded in mystery: his father, for example, was a Berlin doctor and a man of communist sympathies, who would have looked after Brandt during the time when he was being hunted by the Gestapo. Others, however, claim that Guillaume’s father was a cellist and a Nazi. What is fairly certain though is that the young Günther Guillaume was born in 1920 and a was a member of the Hitler Youth. At the end of the war he was to be found serving in the Wehrmacht and although captured by British soldiers, he managed to escape and return home to Berlin, where he was told that his father had been taken prisoner by the Russians. Despite the fact that he lived in the Soviet zone, Guillaume was not worried about his Nazi past. These were confusing times and many people who were at risk of being compromised changed their identity or went into hiding.

Guillaume tried to earn a living by working as a photographer, but his past soon caught up with him. By this time, the East German secret police were beginning to mobilize and work their way through the Third Reich’s archives, assisted by the KGB. Consequently, Guillaume was indentified and so joined the many other former Nazis who had been recruited by the East German intelligence agencies. It was impossible to refuse: his hands were tied by a bond that could not be broken at any price.

Nevertheless, Guillaume joined the Communist Party with the same zeal he had previously shown when joining the Nazi ranks. So much so that much later, when he was denounced and arrested, Guillaume would proudly assert that he was an officer of East Germany. Even so, he was first hired as a photographer in a publishing company that was known for being a hotbed of communist agents. He then spent a long time at an intelligence officer training school in Kiev. Guillaume certainly had many talents and already seemed to have a promising career as a spy: the results he achieved exceeded the expectations of his leaders, including the enigmatic Markus Wolf.

After his long training, Guillaume was ready to become operational. In the mean time, however, he got married - no doubt on the instructions of his superiors. His wife, Christa (or Christel) was also a HVA agent, the secret service of East Germany. To outsiders, a couple attracted far less attention than a single man, however, that is not to say that there was no genuine affection between the two agents: they always seemed very attached to each other, even if Guillaume had no qualms about lying to his wife.

Their mission was to go to the West. They began by completing missions in West-Berlin, which were successful as they were granted permits to travel to West Germany in 1955 or 1956. At the time, the border was not as tightly controlled, which was why the two spies had no difficulty slipping though as they joined a band of refugees who were heading west for ‘freedom’. After spending time in a refugee camp they were questioned by counterintelligence agents, but were experienced enough to undergo such an examination with ease. They were now West German citizens and settled in Frankfurt, an SPD stronghold, and began by running a news kiosk. Their mission was to infiltrate the SPD and so both Günther and Christa enrolled in a local party. They soon became model militants, ready to protest, hand out leaflets, or participate in endless meetings. They were so successful and made so much money that they were asked to take over permanently. It is true that they were not yet able to send any vital information to East Berlin, but any undercover mission takes time. Besides, back in Berlin, Markus Wolf was very patient: he was waiting for the SPD to come to power, a fact that was looking increasingly likely from the mid-1960s.

The SPD was made up of various trends: Guillaume, cleverly, joined the most rightwing group of the party, and thus the most anti-communist. The majority of other communist spies who had infiltrated the West would have done the same. Guillaume became the right-hand man of Georg Leer, a party deputy and a future minister of Willy Brandt. In the mean time, Christa climbed the ranks in the party administration. Their mission seemed to be progressing perfectly.

Always eager to progress further, Guillaume applied to be a technical advisor to the new chancellor, following the victory of Willy Brandt’s Social Democrats during the 1969 elections. He came highly recommended by his current boss, Georg Leber, but first had to undergo a background check. He would certainly have already had one of these before entering West Germany, but it was still a matter of routine. The only difference this time was that Guillaume was applying for a very important position. Yet his CV hid a secret: after going through his records, the West German counterintelligence unit discovered a witness who claimed that Guillaume had previously travelled to West Germany while working for a publishing company that was known to be a nest of eastern spies. His superiors consequently ordered a more detailed investigation and advised the chancellery against his employment.

Guillaume quickly collected himself and showed great composure: when summoned before Willy Brandt’s cabinet, he asked to confront the witness who had accused him. The Chief of Staff informed him that the person in question had died, so any confrontation was impossible. Consequently, Guillaume appeared to be exonerated, with the intelligence agency responsible for the case, the BfV, seeming to forget all about it - even though such agencies never really forget.

Yet in stopping their investigation, the German authorities were guilty of gross negligence. Apparently, the French had information on Günther Guillaume and intelligence networks in Paris had long indentified him as someone who made regular visits to France. Admittedly, this was not enough to make someone a suspect, but the SDECE had recently discovered a mole in Willy Brandt’s entourage and as a possible candidate, Guillaume was put under surveillance. The DST, who had now taken over from the SDECE, were almost certain that Guillaume was not visiting France as a tourist, but instead was going there to meet with his case officer or to send messages using the famous ‘dead letterbox’ system. However, they had no evidence to prove this and so had to be content with keeping a watchful eye.

Markus Wolf’s HVA network soon benefited from an extraordinary stroke of luck. Until 1972, Günther Guillaume had only been one of many technical advisors to the German Chancellor, although it did allow him access to information regarding the GDR. This was the era of Ostpolitik: the East Germans and their Soviet big brother were on the alert and wanted to ensure that any negotiations were as beneficial to them as possible. But it never hurts to know in advance the intentions of one’s opponents. In 1972, Willy Brandt’s personal aide, who was responsible for his agenda and accompanied him everywhere, even on holiday, decided to enter into politics. The position was now open for Guillaume, who was encouraged by other members of Brandt’s entourage to take the role. Although there were plenty of spies around Brandt, this was an unexpected coup for Markus Wolf, who now had one of his own men at the heart of the West German government.

Guillaume very quickly proved himself to be an excellent employee, a man who could be trusted and who showed the greatest discretion. However, just as he had been appointed Brandt’s personal aide, a Soviet defector allowed the French authorities to confirm their suspicions. When shown a series of photographs of West German figures, the defector recognised Günther Guillaume as a former classmate from the military training school in Kiev. The French immediately alerted their German counterparts, but Guillaume would not be arrested until a year later. Was the German intelligence agency negligent? Or did they knowingly dismiss the French information provided by the defector? If this was indeed the case, then what was the reasoning behind such a disastrous scheme?

Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer⁹²

Born in Berlin in 1937, this civil servant entered into the BfV (the West German counterintelligence unit) at the age of twenty-nine. His new duties allowed him to monitor developments in the Guillaume Affair between 1973-74.Impeccable and appreciated by his superiors, Tiedge was appointed head of the service in 1979. His speciality was operations in East Germany. However, he mysteriously disappeared on 22 August 1985 before finding refuge in the GDR, leading to the resignation of Heribert Hellenbroich, the head of the BND (the German intelligence agency), on 27 August.

Was it this Tiedge who had hampered the investigations concerning Guillaume? Or should we put it down to the incompetence or negligence of an agency, which, at the time, had been infiltrated at the very highest levels?

Nevertheless, the BfV, the German intelligence agency who had long distrusted Guillaume, continued to lead their own investigations. They did so in the upmost secrecy as they were worried that they would be forced to stop their enquiries, just as they had been told to do in 1969. After all, attacking the German Chancellor’s personal aide was hardly nothing! Furthermore, the intelligence officers suspected that there was someone at the head of the organisation that did not want the investigation into Guillaume to succeed. One of the officers had the idea of digging up the archives of intercepted coded shortwave messages sent by the East German services. There were certainly thousands of messages, but they had never really been exploited as the spies who had sent them so were so hard to identify. However, as soon as one could identify a suspect it was then possible to cross-reference everything else. It was important to remember though that the East German services, like those of other eastern countries, had a particular habit: they never forgot to wish their agents, and even members of their family, a happy birthday! Markus Wolf had wanted to establish a friendly relationship with the men and women living in exile in a hostile environment: wishing them a happy birthday meant that they had not been forgotten.

As a result, a zealous BfV official began looking through the old files, although the most recent were unusable as the HVA had learned, through its spies, that its message were being decoded and so had changed its encryption methods. After a painstaking search, the official noticed that a number of birthday messages matched the birthdays of the Guillaume family exactly. From this moment on, the official was convinced that Guillaume was a communist agent and the head of the BfV, Günther Nollau, was officially informed.

Like Guillaume, Nollau was a refugee from East Germany. He was a former lawyer and had been a member of the Nazi administration in occupied Poland. After the fallout of the Guillaume Affair, some journalists were quick to suggest that this head of counterintelligence was in fact an eastern agent: a feeling shared by the French. It was impossible to find the truth, however, as after all the tumult, Nollau was forced to resign in order to avoid scandal. When told of the charges against Guillaume, Nollau, an eastern agent or not, had to inform the chancellery. He did not confirm that Guillaume was definitely a spy, merely suggesting that there were suspicions against him. Willy Brandt remained sceptical: contrary to what might have been said, the Chancellor was not particularly intimate with Guillaume. They were work colleagues, that was all. But what if he was actually a spy? Brandt did not believe it. Yet as a responsible statesman, he asked the head of the BfV what he thought he should do. Nollau’s response was outrageous: he told him to keep him close by so that he could keep a constant eye on him. This was a considerable risk and a whole year went by before the BfV decided to take action by arresting Guillaume and his wife - a year during which the spy continued to send secret information back to his masters in the East.

How can one explain this mistake by Nollau? If he had been more adamant, Brandt would have immediately separated himself from his personal aide and any subsequent investigation would have quickly shown that Guillaume was indeed a spy. Also, it is hard not to imagine a conspiracy against the Chancellor, with someone hatching a plot on the very day that he was informed of the suspicions surrounding his aide. By keeping a man who had been suspected of spying with him for so long, Brandt condemned himself. It is true that he had merely followed the advice of the head of the BfV, but could he prove that? There were others who already knew that Guillaume was a spy, and had been told so personally by Nollau. These men included the liberal Interior Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, as well as Herbert Wehner, the president of the Social Democrats and a politician who had little sympathy for Brandt and who was secretly trying to bring him down. It was Wehner, for example, who told the party elite after Guillaume’s arrest that the personal aide might make some very embarrassing revelations about Brandt’s private life, which could be harmful to the SPD.

Wehner was undoubtedly the soul of the plot, which is why it was only Brandt’s closest friends who tried to dissuade him from resigning. Yet the story is even more interesting as Wehner himself had a very revealing past: before the war, he had been a Communist and a great friend of Erich Honecker, who in 1973 became the leader of the GDR. It is possible to suggest from this that Wehner too was a spy, although perhaps more of an informer rather than an agent in the strictest sense of the term, but still enough for the KGB to have a file on him. He was in Moscow during the great Stalinist Terror, and denounced a certain number of his comrades, in fact so many that at one point the Soviets suspected him of being a Gestapo agent. It is likely that after this, he was manipulated by the KGB.

Did the Kremlin wish to topple Willy Brandt, the man of Ostpolitik, while at the same time sacrificing Günther Guillaume, a man who had rendered such good service? In Moscow, not everyone was in favour of the German Chancellor’s Ostpolitik. In the highest echelons of power was a clan who had a great deal of influence in the KGB and they feared that this Ostpolitik might one day or another lead to the reunification of Germany. They therefore had to fight it and ensure that its promoter, Willy Brandt, was forced to leave power. Moscow must therefore have devised this plot against Willy Brandt, with the active participation of Herbert Wehner, who was unable to refuse his Soviet friends. Even the East Germans were kept ignorant of the plan, with the KGB keeping it a secret from Markus Wolf and the HVA. Indeed, Wolf later confessed that the Soviets did sometimes keep things secret from him and it was through his western sources - his spies in West Germany - that he learned about the secret contacts between the Soviets and politicians in Bonn. As for Günther Guillaume, despite his excellent record, he still received a life sentence. He had merely been a scapegoat for Moscow, but his East German masters had lost an informant of the highest order.

Markus Wolf⁹³

The fall of Willy Brandt, which closely followed that of Guillaume’s, was a serious political defeat. We knew that Brandt was committed to his Ostpolitik, which overlapped with our own strategic interests. We had no interest in aiding his downfall. Quite the contrary!