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 Andrew
90
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.
