Karlshorst’s main achievement in the early years of the Federal Republic was the penetration of the semi-official West German foreign intelligence agency, the Gehlen Org, which from 1956 was officially attached to the Federal Chancellery as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In March 1950 Karlshorst recruited “for material reward” an unemployed former SS captain, Hans Clemens (codenamed KHANNI), who in the following year gained a job in the Gehlen Org. Over the next decade he supplied what his file describes as “valuable information” on the FRG intelligence community: “This made it possible to prevent the exposure of valuable agents, and to disrupt operations directed against Soviet missions in the FRG.”10 Clemens’s greatest success, however, was to recruit a former SS comrade, Heinz Felfe (codenamed KURT), whom he successfully recommended for a job in the Gehlen Org.11 With the active assistance of Karlshorst, Felfe rapidly established himself as one of the most successful agents of the Cold War. According to a KGB report, his intelligence, when combined with that from the British spies George Blake and Kim Philby, made possible “the elimination of the adversary’s agent network in the GDR” during the period 1953 to 1955.12
In 1953 Felfe astounded his colleagues in the Gehlen Org by announcing that he had set up an agent network in Moscow headed by a Red Army colonel. Much of the intelligence from the non-existent network—a blend of fact and fiction fabricated by the Centre—was passed on to the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in Bonn. Simultaneously, Felfe was providing Karlshorst with large numbers of FRG intelligence reports. Urgent reports went by radio; the remainder were despatched in the false bottoms of suitcases, on film concealed in tins of babyfood, via dead letter-boxes, or through a Gehlen Org courier, Erwin Tiebel, who was also working for Karlshorst. By 1958 Felfe had established himself as the German Philby, becoming—like Philby in SIS fourteen years earlier—head of Soviet counter-intelligence in the BND. Unlike Philby, however, his motives had more to do with vanity than with ideology. He was, he told himself, the supreme intelligence professional, recognized as the rising star of the BND yet outwitting it at the same time. Karlshorst was careful to boost his ego, encouraging him to believe that his achievements were eclipsing even those of Richard Sorge. “I wanted,” Felfe said later, “to rank as top class with the Russians.” A CIA officer who served in Germany during the 1950s concluded after Felfe’s arrest in 1961:
The BND damage report must have run into tens of thousands of pages. Not only were agents and addresses compromised, but ten years of secret agent reports had to be re-evaluated: those fabricated by the other side, those subtly slanted, those from purely mythical sources.13
Soon after Andropov became KGB chairman in 1967, he singled out Felfe—along with Philby, Blake and Vassall—as the kind of past agent whose recruitment was, once again, urgently needed in order to keep the Soviet leadership abreast of the development of Western policy.14
THE FRG WAS a major target for KGB active measures as well as intelligence collection. The chief priority of both KGB and HVA influence operations during the 1950s and 1960s was to discredit as many West German politicians as possible as neo-Nazis and “revenge-seekers.” Disinformation almost always works most effectively when it includes a basis of fact. In the early years of the FRG, there was no shortage of real ex-Nazis in positions of power and influence to denounce in active measures campaigns. Among the most effective denouncers was the Reuters correspondent in Berlin, John Peet, who had been recruited as an NKVD agent during the Spanish Civil War. In 1950 Peet defected to East Berlin, somewhat disconcerted by the excessively clandestine preparations made for the defection by his East German case officer. All Peet expected was a phone call inviting him to coffee from an East Berlin professor who frequently visited his West Berlin flat. Instead, the professor rang him and, in what struck Peet as a curiously high-pitched voice, declared, “PRIMROSE has a message for DAFFODIL. 1600 hours on Monday. I repeat, 1600 hours on Monday.” Once in East Berlin, Peet announced at a press conference:
I simply cannot consent to take part any longer in the warmongering which threatens not only the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies, but which is also well on the way to converting my motherland, Britain, into a powerless American colony.15
From 1952 to 1975 Peet edited the fortnightly Democratic German Report, which spent much of its time denouncing the past records (often supplied by Wolf) of West German politicians, diplomats, industrialists, lawyers, generals and police chiefs. Peet regarded as his “prize exhibit” Adenauer’s most important aide, Hans Globke, who had drafted the infamous official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 race laws.16
Peet’s propaganda was powerfully reinforced by the KGB-arranged defection in July 1954 of Otto John, first head of the FRG security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). Like Peet four years earlier, John gave a press conference at which he denounced the alleged revival of Nazism in West Germany. In December 1955 John reappeared in the West, claiming that he had been drugged by Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, a doctor working for the KGB. The West German supreme court was skeptical. According to other evidence, John was a heavy drinker who had been observed crossing to the East in a “cheerful” rather than comatose condition, after Wohlgemuth had plied him with whisky and played on his fears of a Nazi revival. In December 1959 he was sentenced to four years in jail, but served only eighteen months. Considerable mystery still surrounds the John case. The head of the KGB Karlshorst apparat, Yevgeni Petrovich Pitovranov, reported to the Centre in July 1954 that John had come for discussions in East Berlin because he “wished to maintain contact with us to discuss political problems and joint action against the Nazis of East Germany.” John’s decision to remain in the East, however, was made under KGB pressure. According to one of the KGB officers involved in the John case:
We wanted to recruit him, but he turned us down. Because it was necessary that John remain in East Berlin, we put a sleeping pill in his coffee… After sleeping for about thirty hours, he was worked over by specialists from the KGB with psychological pressure. He finally said that he would cooperate with us.
Among the deceptions used to persuade John to remain in the East was a fake Western news broadcast announcing that he had already defected to the GDR.17
The HVA and KGB had at their disposal an archive in East Berlin which held Wehrmacht, SS and Nazi records seized by the Red Army. In two large volumes of material on real and alleged war criminals and neo-Nazis, the HVA’s active measures department, Abteilung X, combined authentic archival documents and fabricated evidence to form a damning indictment of the West German political, business and military élite.18 Abteilung X also concocted an additional, highly discreditable chapter to the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, first head of the BND, in an imitation of his handwriting.19
The most celebrated West German target of the KGB and the HVA was Willy Brandt, codenamed POLYARNIK (“Polar”).20 From the moment Brandt became Bürgermeister of Berlin in October 1957, he was the victim of a series of active measures operations designed first to discredit and then to blackmail him. Given Brandt’s heroic record of resistance to Hitler, it was plainly unrealistic to include him in the KGB’s list of neo-Nazi conspirators. Instead, by distorting his early career and war record, KGB and HVA active measures sought, at various times, to portray him as a Gestapo informer, an anti-German émigré, a collaborator with SIS and the CIA and even as a former Soviet agent.
In 1931, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Willy Brandt (born Herbert Frahm) had become leader of the youth section of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP), a left-wing breakaway party from the socialist SDP. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Brandt went into exile, traveling to Norway carrying only a briefcase containing the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital, a few shirts and 100 marks. Once in Oslo he established himself as the SAP representative and began a career as a journalist. In February 1937 he traveled to Spain, ostensibly as a journalist covering the Civil War but also to act as liaison between SAP members of
the International Brigades and the neo-Trotskyist POUM militia. Brandt quickly denounced the “blind terror” waged by the Communists, on Soviet instructions, against POUM and other left-wing heretics:
The truth of the matter is: the Comintern is determined to destroy all forces that refuse to obey its orders. It is for this reason that the whole international labor movement must rise against it.
Brandt in turn was, absurdly, denounced by the Communists as “an agent of Franco” and “a spy of the Gestapo.”21
The earliest reference to Brandt in his KGB file is a description of him in 1936 as a member of the Danzig Trotskyists. The other reports on Brandt during the late 1930s, all of them hostile, accurately reflect the paranoia of the Great Terror. There are fabricated claims that POLYARNIK had been tasked by the Paris Sñreté to infiltrate POUM, that he had betrayed many members of the SDP to the Gestapo and that he was involved in the murder in Spain of Mark Rein, son of a prominent Russian Menshevik, who had in reality been killed by the NKVD.22
After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Brandt’s attitude to Moscow changed. The NKVD residency in Stockholm, whither Brandt had moved after the German occupation of Norway, reported that there had been a split in the ranks of “Norwegian Trotskyists.” Some, including Brandt, were now willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union to secure the defeat of Hitler. In the autumn of 1941 M. S. Okhunev (codenamed OLEG), an operations officer at the Stockholm residency, called on Brandt but found him out and left his card. The following evening Brandt visited the Soviet embassy and spent three hours talking to Okhunev and the NKVD resident, Mikhail Sergeyevich Vetrov. Brandt said that he ran a news agency whose clients included the American press, was ready to do anything to hasten the destruction of Nazism and would be happy to send stories from “Soviet comrades” to the United States (which had not yet entered the war)—if necessary, disguising their source. Vetrov and Okhunev replied that the most important contribution he could make to the war effort would be to gather intelligence from his Norwegian friends on German forces and operations in Norway. Brandt agreed, and for the next nine months had clandestine meetings once a fortnight with officers from the Stockholm residency. On one occasion he was handed 500 kroner, probably to meet his expenses, and gave a receipt.
Among the intelligence supplied by Brandt from his Norwegian sources was information on the German battleship Tirpitz, which left the Norwegian port of Trondheim in March 1942 to attack Arctic convoys. Brandt informed the NKVD that he had passed the same information to the British, who tried and failed to sink it.23 He also supplied the Stockholm residency with information on German pressure on Sweden to join the Anti-Comintern Pact and on plans (never implemented) to ban the Swedish Communist Party. In the summer of 1942, after the arrest by the Swedish police of two Czech agents of the residency, TERENTY and VANYA,24 Brandt refused further secret rendezvous with NKVD officers, despite pressure from the residency to continue them. He did, however, agree to come openly to the Soviet embassy, sometimes to meet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover.25
None of this makes POLYARNIK a Soviet agent. The Stockholm residency reported in 1943 that Brandt had also been in touch with British and American intelligence officers in Sweden, as well as with Trotsky’s Norwegian former secretary, who remained deeply suspect as far as the Centre was concerned.26 Brandt’s overriding motive was to provide any information to all three members of the Grand Alliance which might contribute to the defeat of Hitler. In the case of the Soviet Union, he calculated accurately that his best channel of communication with Moscow was via the Stockholm residency.
The first attempt to discredit Brandt after his election as Berlin Bürgermeister in 1957 was a lengthy operation carried out jointly by the KGB and HVA in 1958-9 to use tendentious versions of his wartime record and other fabrications to show him as an agent of British and American intelligence. But, as the file on the operation acknowledges, “This did not produce the desired result, and Brandt’s position as a politician was not undermined.”27 Wolf next proposed reviving the old slander that Brandt had been a Gestapo agent during his Norwegian exile, but the East German leadership ordered the plan to be aborted due to lack of credible evidence.28
In the 1961 West German elections Brandt stood as the SDP candidate for the chancellorship. The campaign was the dirtiest in the history of the FRG. Brandt was assailed by what he denounced as “a right-wing barrage of mud.” The fact that he had spent the Nazi years in exile led to accusations that he was unpatriotic, while his background as a left-wing socialist gave rise to insinuations that he was a crypto-Communist. Brandt was deeply depressed by the “political pornography” used to discredit him. “My opponents,” he later admitted, “were sometimes successful to the extent that they kept me from my work for days on end.” Sensing his vulnerability, the Stasi gave secret but, in Brandt’s view, “vigorous encouragement” to some of the charges fabricated against him.29
Though the SDP succeeded in cutting the Christian Democrat majority (thanks largely to the building of the Berlin Wall during the campaign), the Centre decided to threaten Brandt with far more damaging evidence than had surfaced during the elections. On November 16, 1962 Semichastny, the KGB chairman, formally approved a blackmail operation proposed by Sakharovsky, the head of the FCD. Though there is no mention of it in the file seen by Mitrokhin, the operation was also, almost certainly, approved by Khrushchev, still smarting from the humiliating outcome of the Cuban missile crisis in the previous month.30 The operational plan was for Brandt to be approached by the Izvestia correspondent, Polyanov, to whom he had given an interview earlier in the year. On this occasion, Polyanov would be accompanied by an undercover KGB operations officer who would tell Brandt, “We would like to resume our confidential relations with you in order to develop together sensible solutions to the West Berlin question.” If Brandt refused, he was to be told, “We have sufficient means to cause you unpleasantness, and therefore assume that you will reconsider your position.” The threat was in fact largely bluff. Sakharovsky had been annoyed to discover that the original documents in Brandt’s wartime operational file had been destroyed in 1959 (an inconceivable action had he actually been an agent), among them such apparently compromising items as his receipt for 500 kroner for the Stockholm residency. Brandt, however, would be unaware of this. The operational plan approved by Semichastny confidently asserts that Brandt must believe that “there are materials in our possession which could compromise him.”31
Mitrokhin did not see the report on the meeting with Brandt.32 It is clear, however, that—if it went ahead—Brandt brushed the attempted KGB blackmail aside. Semichastny and Sakharovsky had almost certainly intended, with Khrushchev’s approval, to soften up Brandt before a meeting with the Soviet leader. In January 1963, while on a visit to East Berlin, Khrushchev duly invited Brandt to a meeting. Already convinced of the need to reach a modus vivendi between the FRG and GDR as well as to settle the Berlin question, Brandt was willing to accept. Opposition to the proposed meeting from the Christian Democrats in the ruling West Berlin coalition, however, persuaded him to refuse. According to Brandt:
Khrushchev must have taken my refusal as an affront. Ambassador [Pyotr Andreyevich] Abrasimov later gave me a vivid description of the total dismay that overcame his erstwhile master when the news was communicated to him. Khrushchev, caught in the act of changing, almost dropped his trousers with surprise…33
Brandt’s four and a half years as West Germany’s first SDP chancellor, from October 21, 1969 to May 6, 1974, marked the high water mark of the HVA and KGB intelligence offensive in the FRG. Wolf’s greatest success was the penetration of the Chancellor’s office by Günter Guillaume (codenamed HANSEN). In 1956 Guillaume and his wife Christel, both HVA officers, had staged a carefully orchestrated “escape” from East Germany, set up small businesses in Frankfurt to act as cover for their intelligence work and become active, apparently staunchly anti-Communist, members of the SDP. By 1
968 Guillaume had become chairman of the Frankfurt SDP and an elected member of the Frankfurt city council, thus becoming the only HVA officer (as opposed to agent) ever to hold public office in the FRG. In November 1969, three weeks after Brandt became chancellor, Guillaume gained a job in his office, initially as an assistant dealing with trade unions and political organizations. Hardworking and efficient, with a jovial down-to-earth manner, he was promoted in 1972 to become the Chancellor’s aide for relations with the SDP, as well as being put in charge of Brandt’s travel arrangements. His reports were so highly rated in the Centre that they were personally forwarded by Andropov to foreign minister Gromyko.34
The key intelligence requirement placed on Guillaume concerned Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which he defined as having “a threefold aim: improved relations with the Soviet Union, normal relations with the east European states, and a modus vivendi between the two parts of Germany.” In his “Report on the State of the Nation” to the Bundestag at the beginning of 1970, Brandt called for “cooperative togetherness” between the FRG and GDR. In the course of the year he became the first chancellor to visit East Germany, and signed treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland.35 “Through Guillaume’s judgments,” writes Wolf in his memoirs, “we were able to conclude sooner rather than later that Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, while still riven with contradictions, marked a genuine change of course in West German foreign policy.”36 Moscow reached the same conclusion. After Brandt’s visit to East Germany, however, Karlshorst reported “a noticeable rise in his popularity,”37 which caused some concern to the GDR leadership. During his visit, as the crowds chanted, “Willy, Willy!,” Brandt mischievously asked the East German prime minister, Willi Stoph, whether the name being chanted was spelled with a “y” or an “i.” Stoph remained stony-faced.38
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