Willy Brandt was one of the most important political leaders in Germany’s post-war history. During his long political career, he held several key positions. He was Mayor of West Berlin, President of the leading German Social Democratic Party and the fourth Federal Chancellor of West Germany. As a key player in the process of reconciliation and the improvement of East-West relations, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the early 1970s. Despite his political achievements, Brandt is considered to be a highly controversial figure, as investigators have discovered that his political success came at the expense of his collaboration with secret services – first American, then East German. But the very thing that gave him his political wings ended up clipping them.
Willy Brandt was born Herbert Karl Frahm in 1913 in the port of Lübeck in northern Germany. He grew up in poverty with a single mother and was more often hungry than full. The adverse living conditions led him into politics at the age of seventeen. He chose the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party, which at that time was fighting against the emerging Nazism.
When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Frahm went to Norway and planned to organise resistance against German rule. He learned to speak fluent Norwegian, acquired Norwegian citizenship and, to conceal his true identity from Nazi spies, adopted the pseudonym Willy Brandt. Meanwhile, in Germany – like Herbert Karl Frahm – he was stripped of his citizenship. When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, Brandt fled to neutral Sweden, where he met with intelligence.
He came into contact with several Allied secret services, including the US military intelligence service, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). He provided it with information on German exiles in Scandinavia, which led him to closer contacts with the American envoy Herschel V. Johnson.
In the spring of 1944, when it was clear that Hitler’s Germany would end up on the scrapheap of history, Brandt sent Envoy Johnson an eighty-page memorandum on the future organisation of Germany. In the document he spoke of the importance of the labour movement playing as large a role as possible in the post-war order.
The document would not have been anything special in itself if it had not reflected the character of its author. It was written in excellent English, which shows Brandt’s ability to learn languages and, consequently, his excellent ability to communicate with foreigners. It also demonstrates his great self-confidence. Not so long ago he was a political refugee, but now he was ‘dictating’ the post-war order of Germany.
Johnson sent the document to Washington with a note on Brandt’s political talent. Another OSS collaborator described him as “one of the most able German refugees in Scandinavia, who is likely to play a corresponding role in the post-war organisation of Germany.”
Brandt’s enthusiasm for the USA
On 8 May 1945, the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to the Allied forces. The victors divided the defeated German state into four occupation zones. The Americans, the British and the French took over the west and the Soviet Union the east. Berlin was similarly divided into four sectors.
The Spain of the West and the East soon began to fall. The USA and Britain defended and promoted capitalism and democracy, while the Soviet Union wanted to establish a communist regime in the areas occupied by the Red Army. Tensions reached a peak in 1948 when the Soviet Union blockaded the western sectors of Berlin in an attempt to force the eviction of Western forces. The Americans and the British therefore set up an air bridge to supply West Berlin. Brandt moved to this divided city, which became a torture ground for the world’s superpowers, in 1946. He served in the Norwegian military mission with the rank of major. His task was to keep the government in Oslo informed of what was happening in Berlin. He moved skilfully between the Allies and the Germans, reporting on the situation in communist East Berlin and on factional fighting within the Allies. By comparison, in 1947 alone he sent 400 letters to Oslo describing the situation on the ground.
Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had already linked up with the newly-established SPD party, which was based in Hannover. His German citizenship was restored and he joined the party. The SPD appointed him as the party’s representative on the Allied Council, which administered Berlin. A good organiser, a gifted orator and a born leader, he soon consolidated his position in the SPD in Berlin.
Brandt had always been fascinated by the USA and its democracy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. As a result, he trusted his successors, such as Harry S. Truman, who stood firm against communism. He therefore welcomed Truman’s re-election as US President, describing it as the bright spot of the year (1948). He was convinced that Truman would continue a strong American presence in Berlin as a bulwark against Soviet Communism.
Such support for America by Brandt did not always sit well with the SPD headquarters in Hannover, which advocated a neutral Germany to help it navigate between the world’s two superpowers.
Brandt’s pro-American views attracted the attention of Brewster H. Morris, an American diplomat working in the office of the US military governor in Berlin. In 1947, he introduced Brandt to a member of the US Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), which was frantically searching for new sources for the city of Berlin. Special Agent George D. Swerdlin saw the young Social Democrat as a potential informer. He described him as “an intelligent and energetic man who seems to be a friend of the Western powers. He harbours a strong hatred of Communism.”
Initially, Brandt acted as a casual or informal informer. An entry in his file described him as highly motivated to give information because “… he believes that the CIC is an agency fighting communism.” The record also shows that Brandt rarely reveals major secrets and that he favours the SPD party over the agency.
He had no reservations about revealing rumours about party colleagues. He once spoke in this way about Carl Schmidt, a Social Democrat from south-west Germany. The Francophile Schmidt, Brandt recounted, has pacifist tendencies and blindly follows the neutral policies of the SPD boss, but nevertheless “… loves to criticise him behind his back.”
Nevertheless, the agency gave Swerdlin the green light to recruit Brandt as a “full-fledged” informant. Unlike other informants, Brandt did not demand regular payment for his services. He was usually compensated by the Agency in the form of cigarettes, whiskey or other small goods and reimbursement of travel expenses.
On one occasion, the CIC provided him with an air ticket from Berlin to Frankfurt. Swerdlin wrote that “Brandt was very happy about the American whiskey and accepted it with very great gratitude”. There is an undated document which says that he was given five bottles of the finest whisky.
Marks for the Ovadouha
The more the Cold War escalated, the more work Brandt had to do. In 1946, the German Communist Party (KPD) forced the SPD in the Soviet occupation zone to merge into the socialist party SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), in which the communists retained all key positions. Many Social Democrats condemned and resented this move, since the party was little more than a puppet of the Soviet authorities.
In defence of this, they set up a secret organisation called Ostbüro, which provided the West with information on political developments in the East. The key point in the flow of information was West Berlin, which acted as a kind of bridge between the East (the Soviet occupation zone) and the West (the SPD headquarters in Hannover).
At the beginning of 1948, the SPD sent Stephan Grzeskowiak to Berlin to act as a liaison with Ostbüro. He was put up in Willy Brandt’s house, and the party boss warned him about Brandt’s sociability and told him not to accidentally reveal the task entrusted to him. But the two men were obviously of a similar calibre and quickly became good friends. Stephan thus soon revealed the real purpose of his presence in West Berlin. It must have been the light in Brandt’s eyes. His house slowly became a meeting place for members of the Ostbüro.
Information was dripping into Brandt’s lap, and he supplied it to the American agency CIC. It is therefore not surprising that the CIC labelled the Ostbüro as one of the most useful secret organisations in the Soviet zone.
In January 1950, therefore, the CIC changed Brandt’s status from that of a normal informer to that of an informer with access to information from foreign agencies. On a scale of reliability from A to F, the CIC gave him the second highest rating (B), which meant “normally reliable”.
Brandt reported tirelessly. Between 7 January 1949 and 3 November 1953, he met with Swerdlin of the CIC or his successor, Gustavo Bardo, almost 200 times.
The meetings took place in Brandt’s car, at his house near Wannsee or in the CIC’s safe house in Berlin. He provided information on the internal affairs of the Socialist Party SED, the Communist Youth Organisation (Freie Deutsche Jugend), the railways, factories, shipyards, police units, population statistics and the telephone equipment of the Red Army.
He also provided them with a list of prisoners at Bautzen, where the Soviets held political prisoners. In one case, he even personally introduced a reliable source from the government and the police to the Bardo. The CIC shared the information with other US agencies, including the CIA. The agencies repeatedly approached the CIC for specific information, and the CIC passed on the “demand” to Brandt.
As reported, the Americans initially paid Brandt in goods such as cigarettes, coffee, sugar, canned goods and sweets, but when the economy of post-war Germany stabilised, they gave him 250 Deutsche Marks (DM) per month. He also received 50 to 100 DM for each meeting, and it is also recorded that he received a special payment of 500 DM, and twice 1 000 DM. Brandt used the money to cover his own expenses and to pay for resources in Ostbüro.
A disorganised group
Neither Brandt nor the members of the Ostbüro were intelligence professionals with any training behind them, which cost them dearly at the end of the summer of 1948. At that time, the Ostbüro was getting to know two potential informants, Walter Willfahrt and Alfred Lippschütz. The latter worked for the paramilitary police in the Soviet occupation zone, while Willfahrt worked in the communications department of the Interior Ministry in East Berlin. Brandt took note of them and recommended them to the CIC.
Special Agent Swerdlin, who recruited Willfahrt, described him “… as completely honest and forthright.” He was high on the list of desirable persons, as he worked in an administration that had access to classified information of the Ministry of the Interior.
The CIC decided to accept them as informants on the basis of these recommendations. But just a few months later, in December 1948, the Soviet occupation zone authorities arrested the two men. The Soviet military tribunal sentenced Lippschütz to 25 years of forced labour in Siberia. He returned to Berlin in 1956 after an amnesty. It is likely, but not known, that Willfahrt suffered a similar fate.
The CIC analysed the incident and concluded that in this case there had been sloppiness “… and a total lack of awareness of the gravity of the situation, sloppy handling and a complex system of information transfer between staff”, with particular reference to Agent O-35-VIII and a few others. OO-35-VIII was the code name of Willy Brandt.
In another case, a member of the Ostbüro and a friend of Brandt’s was caught in a trap set by Soviet intelligence. The Soviets, either with the help of a defector or an informer, identified Hainz Kühne as an Ostbüro courier. In February 1949, he was lured to a house near the Soviet occupation zone, saying that the informer would like to meet him.
Brandt lent Kühne his vehicle and chauffeur. The chauffeur, who was waiting in a vehicle parked at the house, suddenly heard shouting from the house, and then several people ran out of the building and were lost in the darkness. Fifteen minutes later, the police arrived at the scene and discovered several bottles of vodka, blood, a syringe, a sock and a shoe belonging to Kühne. As it turned out, the Soviet agents had drugged and kidnapped Ostbüro’s agent.
Kühne was taken to East Berlin and tortured. Special Agent Theodor Hans, who was in Berlin at the time, told the US Congress that the Soviets were fond of using “… the so-called water treatment, which in practice meant that the cell was so flooded with water that the prisoner could barely hold his head above it. Ice-cold or very hot water was added as necessary. The Soviets liked to use simple but brutal methods of water torture.”
Living in such conditions became unbearable for the prisoners and few did not break. If that was not enough, they were also deprived of food, not to mention the poor hygiene conditions.
Kühne’s torture paid off for the Soviets, because they got important information from him. In April 1949, the socialist newspaper Neues Deutschland published Kühne’s “open letter” to the SPD leadership. Most probably the Soviets dictated the text to him. In the letter, the author revealed the names of several members of the Ostbüro, including Willy Brandt as a spy for the Norwegian military mission. In view of the names mentioned, the Soviets must have really got a concrete picture of who was who in Ostbüro and what kind of work they were doing.
The letter also mentioned another Ostbüro member, Ernest Möwes, as an informer for the CIC. He had indeed been recruited by the agency in February 1948, but was dismissed immediately after Kühne’s confession.
It is not known what happened to Kühne, but the fact is that the letter caused a storm in Ostbüro. According to Special Agent Hans, there was “… a loss of many contacts and resources that we had previously had through Kühne, and a loss of reputation for Ostbüro, from which it only recovered after several years.”
The kidnapping of Kühne took place on the eve of the proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany, in September 1949. A month later, the Soviet occupation zone declared the German Democratic Republic. Willy Brandt immediately joined the West German parliament, the Bundestag, as Berlin’s representative. In practice, this caused him difficulties, as he had to spend part of his time in the new West German capital, Bonn, where the parliament was based, and part of it in West Berlin.
Although he was still bringing information from Ostbüro to the CIC, he had less and less time to do so. As a result, given the smaller amount of information delivered and its (in)importance, the CIC let him off the reins. The two parties were to part amicably.
Under the auspices of the CIA
Although Brandt parted ways with the CIC, this did not mean that he lost contact with other US intelligence agencies. His circle of friends included Hans Hirschfeld, also a former political émigré and SPD member who had served in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during the Second World War, which was mainly involved in espionage activities against the Axis powers. He introduced him to Shepard Stone, an inter-war informer and then an official of the US High Commission for Germany.
The three met on 27 July 1950 at the Commissariat building in Frankfurt. Stone agreed to invest $200,000 in the Berliner Stadblatt, a newspaper controlled by the SPD, with Willy Brandt listed as editor-in-chief. The latter repaid the gratitude for the injection with pro-American articles.
In March 1951 he even wrote himself that “… without the USA there would be no free Berlin. Nor will it be possible in the future to solve the problems of this city without the material help of the most powerful factor in the democratic world.”
In order to strengthen transatlantic links, the US federal administration arranged for four Social Democrats, including Willy Brandt, to visit the USA in March 1954. The political tour included stops in the most important American cities: Washington, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit and New York. They met with Undersecretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon and CIA Director Allen W. Dulles. The visit confirmed Brandt’s assumption of the strength and vitality of the American economy and democracy. Years later, he looked back on the trip “… as one of the most enjoyable experiences of my political life.”
The German visit was probably also a good outcome for the CIA, the US intelligence agency founded in 1947. In the early 1950s, the CIA was very active in Western Europe and was constantly on the lookout for new informants. Even before Brandt arrived in the US, it had asked military informants whether it would be worthwhile to ask him about his cooperation during his visit. The CIC nodded, as they had had good experience with him, but warned them to leave him alone in order to give him a political career.
According to former CIA official Victor L. Marchetti, the agency ignored this request. Marchetti had been in the CIC in the early 1950s and then joined the CIA in 1955. Fourteen years later, he resigned because he had “… lost confidence in the Agency and its purpose.”
In 1974, he and the journalist John D. Marks published a book on the CIA, which was partly censored by the agency, citing the possibility of disclosing state secrets. The authors also wrote about a secret operation involving “political advice and counselling, financial and technical assistance to political parties.”
The censored part also describes a “certain” individual in this context: “A year later, he was elected mayor of Berlin. He was a very enthusiastic and hard-working politician in West Berlin. He worked hard to make the Social Democratic Party an alternative to communism.”
Immediately after the book’s publication, journalists tried to find the “missing” information that would put the story into historical context. In May 1974, Washington Post reporter Jack Anderson “… with the help of CIA sources” came to the conclusion that this “individual” was Willy Brandt. “Like many other world leaders,” Anderson wrote, “Brandt received money from the CIA when he was a promising young politician.”
However much the CIA had already invested in Brandt, he returned to the American people multiplied. In the 1950s, he promoted the rearmament of West Germany and its integration into NATO – the Americans’ wish, not the strict party line of the SPD, which feared that this would prevent German reunification for ever.
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From the airwaves to the mayoral tape
Brandt was also a member of the executive council of the Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom. The organisation, secretly sponsored by the CIA, mobilised the cultural elite of Western Europe in the fight against communism. “Brandt was financed by the Americans”, recalled a British informer, “and so was the Berlin cultural programme. He didn’t mind.” Under Brandt, the Congress turned West Berlin into a wharf of anti-communism within the “Red Sea”.
Brandt himself proposed the battle plan. With his help, the RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor) radio station was set up in the American sector, covering Berlin and part of East Germany. It was very popular among the people because of its imaginative mix of news, entertainment and popular music.
Its director was William F. Heimlich, who arrived in Berlin in July 1945 as Deputy Chief of Intelligence for the American forces. In 1948, he was appointed by the American Commander of Berlin, Frank I. Howley, as director of the radio in order to promote anti-communism.
As it turned out, the new assignment suited him. He had some previous radio experience, but above all, as a man who had seen the job, he quickly turned RIAS into a powerful anti-communist tool. One can imagine that by exposing East Germany’s repressive policies and fomenting discontent among citizens beyond the Iron Curtain, radio quickly became a thorn in East Germany’s side.
Heimlich often hosted local journalists and politicians, including Willy Brandt, in his luxurious house in Berlin. At one of these meetings, Brandt suggested to him that the names of Soviet and East German secret police informers should be made public on the radio. Brandt knew many of the names because of his contacts in Ostbüro.
Heimlich thought the idea was a good one, so every Thursday evening the radio broadcast a special programme called Spitzelsendungen, in which Soviet informers were exposed in a dramatic way. It started with a drumbeat, after which a radio voice called on the inhabitants of a particular town or city to identify or discover potential Ovadaks in their midst. “Attention Schwerin! Attention Schwerin! His name is August Schwarz, 31 years old, living in this and that street, on the third floor. August is an informer for the Soviet NKVD secret police. We repeat, beware, beware Schwerin!”
Such messages were very popular among the people. The broadcast, which highlighted the unpleasant aspects of the East German political regime, was indeed a success. For example, the owner of a hotel exposed by RIAS lost all his guests, and a singer found it difficult to perform on stage after her infidelity was exposed because the audience booed her.
At the same time, RIAS promoted Brandt in his campaign for Mayor of West Berlin. The SPD was the largest party in the city, but Brandt had to compete with the party heavyweight Franz Neumann. The latter, in line with the party’s official policy, advocated a more neutral status for West Germany, without strong ties to the USA. RIAS therefore portrayed him in its broadcasts as an old-style politician who did not understand the needs of the times and the power relations in the world.
Willy Brandt was greatly helped by such propaganda and in the end he emerged victorious from the electoral battle – in 1957 he became Mayor of West Berlin. A dangerous love affair
Brandt’s close ties with the Americans, his defiance of the Soviet Union and his growing popularity in West Germany caused the East German intelligence agency a lot of grey hairs. First, they tackled him with the media. In February 1950, Neues Deutschland described him as “… an agent of the secret American intelligence service and an associate of the Ostbüro.”
The allegations were true, of course, but because East German informers had little behind-the-scenes information, they could not back up their press reports with evidence. Fortunately for Brandt, East German propaganda portrayed virtually all West German politicians as American spies, so he did not stand out from the average in the public eye and was able to continue his intelligence work.
But not for long. Apparently, he was just too big a thorn in their side. The East German Ministry of State Security was looking for all possible ways to smear him. Eventually, they came across information that he had been an informer for the Gestapo during the Second World War, when he was in exile in Norway. “If we succeed in proving Brandt’s collaboration with the Gestapo,” the ministry’s internal report said, “it would mean his political death.”
The ministry sent a man to Norway to search the archives for a record of the act, but he was left empty-handed. When this fell through, the man who was supposed to have testified about Brandt’s collaboration with the Nazis was brought to light. This was Georg Angerer, who, like Brandt, had spent the Second World War in Scandinavia, and then returned and settled in Leipzig in the Soviet occupation zone.
The Stasi secret police heard Angerer bragging in pubs that he had met Willy Brandt in Norway. “The witness was detected by chance,” the report on Angerer says, “when he was bragging in the taverns about his contacts with Willy Brandt.”
The Stasi agents hoped that Angerer’s testimony would help them get evidence of his collaboration with the Gestapo, so they brought him in for questioning. They screwed him tightly. Several times. The result was a 54-page report on Brandt, in which he wrote that Brandt was a ruthless careerist, a fraud, an enemy of the labour movement and also a Trotskyist, but he did not confirm the suspicion of collaboration with the Gestapo.
After several months of interrogation, the Stasi let him go, seeing that they would not get the information they wanted out of him. When they saw that nothing would come of it, the Stasi put the case of Brandt and the Gestapo in a drawer.
Meanwhile, the West German secret intelligence service extended its operations to the West German capital, Bonn. The city, which had existed since the time of the Romans, had little to offer. Of the major institutions, the only one worth mentioning is the university where Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche once studied. Many other cities were higher on the list of potential capitals than Bonn, but since the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer lived near Bonn and did not want to move to another city, the city became the capital of West Germany.
Few were impressed by its weather. “Surrounded by hills and with a river running through the valley, the climate is like a greenhouse,” wrote one politician of the time. For some, the city seemed small, provincial, far from the cosmopolitanism that the capital was supposed to convey.
Some who found themselves there in their official capacity as politicians and civil servants were far from home. There was plenty of free time in the afternoons and evenings, and some of them filled it by flying after women’s skirts. Brandt, too, had blood under his skin and was not immune to the fairer sex. He had a crush on an attractive journalist seven years his junior, Susanne Sievers.
Unfortunately for him, Sievers was a double agent, working for both a West German agency and the East German Ministry of the Interior. When East Germany discovered her double game, she was lured to East Berlin, arrested in 1952 and sentenced to eight years in prison.
But they quickly realised what an ace they had up their sleeve, and offered her a reduced sentence if she would deceive her partner – Brandt. Sievers refused, saying she could not betray Brandt’s trust. But she vowed to lie to the Stasi anyway.
In 1956, she was released, returned to Bonn and, with the help of the Stasi, opened a pleasant café in a prime location, where the big names of the West German capital hung out. Here were Rainer Barzel, the key man of the “Christian Democrats” (CDU), Franz Josef Strauss, the Minister of Defence, and also Brandt. Sievers dutifully took everything she heard to Stasi. Sievers was in love with Brandt even after her release from prison, but Brandt refused to renew the affair. She was emotionally crushed by the rejection, but consoled herself with her former lover, Major Alfred Sagner. He worked in the Ministry of Defence and had excellent contacts with right-wing politicians. It was with the help of this circle of politicians and Stasi that Sievers wove her infernal revenge plan.
A strange symbiosis
In 1961, Brandt ran for Chancellor of West Germany. The effort produced an unusual alliance between West German conservatives and East German spies. A few years earlier, the Stasi had helped its informant, the journalist and publicist Hans Frederik, to set up the Humboldt Verlag publishing house to spread disinformation about West Germany and to propagandise East Germany.
Susanne Sievers came into contact with Frederik through her army lover, who, hearing of her affair with Brandt, began to urge her to write a book about it. This was published in 1961 and caused Brandt to lose the election to Konrad Adenauer for the Chancellorship.
1961 was also an important year for Brandt in another respect. East Germany had long been concerned about the increasing number of refugees from the East to the West. Although it had already closed the border in 1952, it was still possible to cross from the east to the west in Berlin. So anyone who wanted to escape simply went to East Berlin, hopped on the metro and got off at one of the stations on the west side of the city. On average, around 3000 citizens left East Germany in this way every week.
So in August 1961, East Germany started to build a wall around West Berlin to prevent brain and labour drain.
Willy Brandt was outraged by the wall, publicly denouncing its construction as “an act of inhumanity”. “This wall,” he demanded, “must be torn down.”
Well, the wall stood for another three decades and became a symbol of the Cold War. Unlike his political rivals, Brandt realised that the new situation needed adaptation. So, as he prepared to run for the chancellorship election for the second time, he began to think seriously about cooperation and integration between the two Germanies. This policy came to be known as Ostpolitik (Eastern Policy). This paid off, because in 1969 he swept to the Chancellorship with a coalition of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the centre-right Freie Demokratische Partei.
One of his first moves was to start reaching out to East Germany to talk about easing tensions, increasing trade and facilitating border crossings. For East Germany, which was not recognised by the West and whose economy was far from excellent, diplomatic contact with West Germany and possible financial aid would have been very welcome.
As the two countries had no official diplomatic contacts, communication was channelled through Brandt’s envoy, Egon Bahr, and Hermann von Berg, a representative of the East German Ministry of State Security.
US President Richard Nixon viewed this rapprochement between West Germany and its eastern neighbour and the Soviet Union with concern. The West German coalition, especially the Freie Demokratische Partei, was also divided on Brandt’s Ostpolitik, fearing that it would undermine US confidence. The government was in danger of falling apart because of the different party views.
This caused red lights to flash in East Germany. Von Berg proposed to bribe certain members of the Bundestag. No deal was formally struck. However, it is known that the East German secret service paid 50 000 Deutsche Marks to Julius Steiner of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and an unspecified sum to Leo Wagner of the Christian Social Union (CSU).
When the vote of confidence in the government came on 27 April 1972, these two gentlemen supported the government, which was subsequently retained (by a margin of one vote). The “investment” paid off for East Germany.As early as December 1972, Bonn and East Berlin signed a deed of normalisation of relations, paving the way for East Germany to gain international diplomatic recognition. As a result, East Germany was recognised by France and the UK the following year, and by the US the year after.
But what an irony! The alliance with the East, which helped its political rise, was ultimately responsible for its decline. In the late 1950s, the East German secret police sent Günter Guillaume to West Germany. He presented himself as a defector, joined the SPD and slowly elbowed his way towards the top of the party. In 1970 he became Brandt’s government adviser on labour issues. Of course, in doing so, he dutifully passed on information to his bosses in East Berlin.
The irony of fate
West German intelligence, based on its experience, followed the defectors for a short time in order to discover their real motive for defecting. In 1974, it followed Günter Guillaume and gathered enough evidence to identify him as an East German spy in the Chancellor’s office. Guillaum did not defend himself. “I am a citizen of the German Democratic Republic and an official of the German Democratic Republic,” he told the police when they arrested him at his home on 24 April. “Please respect that!”
Chancellor Brandt felt personally responsible for having an East German mole in their ranks. Two weeks after Guillaume’s arrest, he resigned. The head of East German intelligence, Markus Wolf, commented that the resignation was an irony of fate. “For years we have been forging plans and measures against Brandt, and now, when we really wanted him to stay in office, this accident has happened.”
Brandt’s resignation marked the end of the policy of rapprochement with the East. His successor, former Defence Minister Helmut Schmidt, strongly criticised the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan and paved the way for the deployment of nuclear-tipped missiles on German soil. As a result, relations between the two countries, East and West Germany, were also worse than they had been under Brandt. Tensions between the two countries were eased in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As far as Willy Brandt is concerned, it is clear today that he had two lives: a public political life and an intelligence life hidden from the public eye. In his view, these were not contradictory, but complementary. “Brandt exploited the US, and the US exploited him”, said one of the wives of a US official.
After his resignation, Brandt returned to politics and continued to act as an important leader in German politics. In 1976, he was elected President of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a post he held until 1987. He was also a member of the German Parliament until 1992.
He was a respected politician and statesman and one of the main architects of Germany’s policy of reconciliation with Eastern Europe. For his efforts to improve relations with the East, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971.
Willy Brandt died of cancer on 8 October 1992 in Unkel, Germany.
