Great Spies of the 20th Century

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, Gunther 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 Gunther 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 Gunther Guillaume, despite his excellent record, he still received a life sentence. He had merely been