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 Verrier
86
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
