One neglected aspect of the plotting against Harold Wilson and the Labour Governments of the 1970s was the fact that it took place while the social democrat governments of Australia, New Zealand and West Germany — and possibly Canada — were also being subjected to destabilisation campaigns, with the some of the same characters playing a role in these machinations. David Leigh writes that the Brandt Affair “had involved at least four of the West’s Intelligence agencies, working in partnership with each other — the West Germans, the French, MI5 and the CIA’.(1)
A Sunday Times “Insight” article informs us that MI5’s Director General Michael Hanley first quarrelled with Wilson over the case of Judith Hart, Minister of Overseas Development and that “It seems to have been a foreign agent who sparked the row.’ The agent was Gunter Guillaume, special assistant to the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. On 24 April 1974 Guillaume was arrested as an East German spy. On 6 May 1974 Brandt, a friend of Wilson, resigned, ostensibly as a result of revelations about Guillaume.(2)
We know of no evidence that in his subsequent interrogation Guillaume said anything that pointed to Britain. However, “one high political source in London’ maintained that it was in some fashion because of Guillaume that in July 1974 Hanley “presented Wilson with the suspicion that in the early 1950s [Judith] Hart had been closer than she had admitted to the Communists’.(3) The smear campaign against Hart and the way that the Brandt/Guillaume episode was used by MI5 is dealt with in our book Smear!. Here I shall deal with the campaign against Brandt. I have no access to German sources and would welcome additional information which would flesh out this skeletal account.
During the thirties Brandt was a resilient anti-nazi activist, a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) which sought to develop a popular front of all left-wing forces. Brandt’s enemies later “portrayed him as a crypto-Communist at this stage of his life, but in fact he was warning against Stalinism and wrote spiritedly against the Moscow trials, which brought death sentences for so-called “deviationism” ‘. In 1933, when the SWP was declared illegal by the Nazi regime, Brandt went into exile in Norway. There he remained until 1945, becoming the leading spokesman of Norway’s German-speaking emigres.(4) When he returned to Germany after the war with Norwegian nationality, Brandt embodied one dilemma for post-war Germany: what made a “good’ German? Brandt was an emigre and therefore suspect in many eyes. This was used in 1961 when, in one of the dirtiest political campaigns in post-war Germany, the conservative CDU/CSU parties called Brandt “a traitor to the fatherland”. Nazi propaganda that emigres were untrustworthy had a lasting effect. This unease even extended into the West’s security agencies.
In 1967 the first of the CANZAB (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Britain) conferences of the heads of the counter-intelligence departments, was held in Australia. MI5 Director-General Martin Furnival-Jones informed the assembled intelligence chiefs that Peter Wright had broken some old Soviet wartime radio traffic known as VENONA and had found the name of Willi Brandt in it.(5) In his private correspondence Wright has written that “elements in MI5, sharing their information with the CIA, claimed that old war-time ciphers threw suspicion on Brandt himself of being a Soviet agent’. Wright’s friend James Angleton, head of the CIA’s counter-intelligence division, had been at that 1967 meeting and, as a result, had used his super-secret Special Investigation Group to investigate Brandt. The SIG, basically Angleton and a couple of his right-wing cronies, concluded that Brandt was “a KGB agent’. Wright later described the supposed evidence in a letter to Chapman Pincher: “Brandt …… himself is very suspect. In the war, he left Germany and was firstly in the Danish resistance and then the Norwegian. He was one of the leaders of a big communist network run by radio from Moscow. In the second half of the sixties, we broke most of the traffic between the communist resistance in the war and Moscow …… with the help of the Danes, we definitely identified Willy Brandt in the traffic’.(6)
Just as MI5’s hostility to Harold Wilson was rooted in Wilson’s support for and participation in trade with the Soviet bloc, the anti-Brandt feeling had a great deal to do with his support for Ostpolitik — seeking improved relations with the Soviet Union, normal relations with the East European states, and a modus vivendi between the two parts of Germany. Even though Brandt was an outspoken anti-communist and a loyal supporter of NATO, this was anathema to professional anti-communists such as Angleton, Wright and their colleagues in West German intelligence.(7)
When the Brandt-led SPD alliance with the Liberals was elected to office in October 1969, relations between some sections of the BND (West Germany’s equivalent of MI6) and Bonn reached a new low. Many of the leading SPD figures, including Brandt when he had been Mayor of West Berlin, had been placed under surveillance by the BND. In 1967, BND founder and head General Gehlen had commissioned an inquiry into Egon Bahr. An Ambassador in the Foreign Office and a close friend of Brandt’s, Bahr was believed to have contacts in East Germany and other Eastern bloc states. One BND report showed that Brandt’s adviser, State Secretary Leo Bauer, who had been condemned to death in Moscow in 1952 and later pardoned, had once been a communist. Shortly after becoming Chancellor, Brandt publicly ridiculed the idea that Bauer was a communist.(8)
When Gerhard Wessel became head of the BND in the late sixties, he arrived determined to implement a policy of “reconstruction’ in the agency. Wessel did away with many of the conspiratorial ways of the BND and even placed the agency’s address in the telephone directory. He had many enemies within the organisation.(9) Some opposed his destruction of domestic intelligence material; others were opposed on ideological grounds. His “cautious attempts to reduce the BND’s fixation on Russia as the enemy offended the cold-war warriors, who already thought that the [Brandt] Great Coalition’s Eastern policy was going too far.’ Wessle had to fight off his own “Young Turks’.(10) Brandt put the intelligence agencies under the supervision of one co-ordinating authority. Eventually Brandt’s nominee, Professor Horst Ehmke, and Wessel began to work together and Wessel was able to push through his reforms in the BND and dismiss a number of section heads.
Although in the early seventies BND relations with Bonn did initially improve, they fell back as old officers first undermined the changes then began to openly broadcast their opposition to Ostopolitik. “They also feared that an over-violent swing Eastwards by Bonn would scare away old friends. They accordingly allowed stories to filter through alleging that the BND was gradually losing credibility with its foreign friends.’ MI6 was said to regard the BND reports as unreliable; the CIA was said “to have largely discontinued exchange of information with the BND.’ Though untrue, such stories poisoned the atmosphere with the blame falling on the politicians (and Brandt in particular).(11)
Nonetheless Ostpolitik continued: Brandt signed treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland. The opposition CDU attempted to block ratification of the treaties but, faced with massive popular support for Brandt, gave way at the last moment. The run-up to the November 1972 Election saw a series of scandals involving highly confidential leaks to papers and magazines in the right-wing Springer group, and allegations of bribes, which shook the Brandt government. Even so, Brandt was re-elected Chancellor with an increased majority for the SPD.(12)
However, 1973 was a difficult year for Brandt. During the Yom Kippur war, after an outcry in the German press, the Federal Republic refused to allow arms to travel to Israel from United States bases in Germany. Brandt explained that “we expressly protested against the use of our territory without notification, let alone consultation, as if NATO did not exist.’ The Americans were not pleased and viewed him as dangerously pro-Arab. President Nixon openly alleged that his “softness’ towards the Arabs was an attempt to safeguard his Ostpolitik by supporting the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Kissinger and his National Security Council aides “hated’ Brandt and thought him and his chief aide, Egon Bahr, “pernicious’ for pursuing Ostopolitik on their own. The withdrawal of the American “security shield’ was threatened at one stage if West Germany broke ranks.(13)
Despite the economic difficulties caused by the oil price rise, Brandt’s personal standing increased and political commentators began to predict an unending period of SPD rule. There was, however, increasing opposition to Brandt within the party from people like Helmut Schmidt, and when Brandt celebrated his 60th birthday in December 1973, commentators dwelt on the “weakness of his leadership’. Brandt fought back and in early 1974 rejected any idea of resigning to become President. Political moves to replace him looked unlikely to succeed: an extra putsch would be required.
According to Peter Wright, code-breakers at GCHQ broke into East German Intelligence ciphers and identified a woman spy. “As a result of this success, we had a conference with the BfV [West German security] who explained there was another agent in the traffic who appeared to be more important. I briefed GCHQ …… they managed to get some more out which showed the agent was very close to Willy Brandt.’ The agent had been also allegedly identified by a Soviet defector to French intelligence.(14)
A former officer in the East German army, Gunter Guillaume emigrated to the West in 1956. He joined the SPD the following year and made steady progress through the party before being appointed to his post in the Chancellery in 1970. It was said that his father, a doctor, had treated Brandt’s wounds and sheltered him during the war. It was alleged that Guillaume had long been regarded as a security risk but was nonetheless taken onto Brandt’s personal staff. This is probably untrue. Guillaume had never been seriously vetted, apparently because he “seemed to be a commendable example of an ordinary man who was overcoming the shortcomings of his background and this required an unconventional approach by his employers’. While this hardly seems to be satisfactory, it appears that none of the politicians had been informed that he was a security risk. It was only later that this was leaked to right-wing journalists and politicians.(15)
During the summer of 1973 Guillame was put under surveillance by West German counter-intelligence. “They reported their views to the Chancellor — among other things, Guillaume had failed to state that he had been an East German Army officer when applying for West German citizenship and enrolling in government service. But the Office for the Protection of the Federal Constitution recommended that Guillaume should be kept on in the Chancellery.’ Terence Prittie states that this was “even after his guilt had been proved beyond doubt. Their argument was that Guillaume would incriminate his masters’. However, other sources suggest that “enough evidence had emerged to raise serious doubts as to Guillaume’s trustworthiness but not enough to secure his arrest’. Accordingly, Brandt “did not take these allegations very seriously and agreed to keep the matter secret (even from his closest collaborators) and to act as “bait” for the German Secret Service’.(16)
This appears to be true: Guillaume was allowed to accompany Brandt on his annual holiday to Norway in the summer of 1973. There is some debate, however, about what access Guillaume had to secret material during this period. One account suggests that the aide was allowed access to all communications reaching the Chancellor, but another that “Brandt was advised to ….. exclude him from access to secret material’. According to British cold warriors Dobson and Payne, however, “despite the fact that Brandt had been informed, he continued to allow Guillaume sight of important papers.’ This is probably false. More likely is Leigh’s version that “when Brandt was eventually forced to resign as Chancellor, he said that Guillaume had inadvertently been allowed to see secret material’.(17) But what kind of secret material did Guillaume actually see? Prittie claims that he “handled secret and confidential documents, and enjoyed Brandt’s fullest confidence. He was situated at the key, pivotal point for obtaining information on all policy matters of crucial importance’. On the other hand, West Germany’s external intelligence agency the BND, which did an exhaustive analysis of the case, concluded that ‘Guillaume’s main …… function evolved into spotting the specific organisational sources for important data rather than attempting to acquire the data itself’. Did Guillaume in fact take any secret material?(18)
Brandt returned to Bonn from a visit to Egypt on the morning of 24 April 1974 to learn that Guillaume had been arrested as a spy in the service of the GDR. Although initially there seemed to be no cause for alarm, Brandt resigned on 6 May 1974.
Brandt has said very little about the affair. “It did not immediately occur to me that considerations of personal responsibility would force me to resign ….. my decision to resign matured without undue haste…… I took advice which, looking back, I should not have taken. I was right to shoulder the political responsibility …… I could not have soldiered on with an easy mind.’ He was a sensitive person who placed a great deal on personal integrity and loyalty. At the moment of crisis “government officials and even Ministers, hastened to disassociate themselves from the “Guillaume Affair”.’ One of his colleagues — and rival — Herbert Wehner felt that if the Chancellor remained he “might in future be open to blackmail’.(19)
Brandt later wrote that there had been signs, “[his] private life would have been dragged into speculation’. In an attempt to garner sufficient material in order to arrest Guillaume, the security service kept members of his entourage under surveillance. They inspected his personal diaries, his personal life became the focus of close attention, and it became clear that “real or alleged affairs with women journalists would be revealed’. German newspapers linked Brandt to a former journalist Susanne Sievers and claimed that she had been paid £100,000 out of public funds not to publish a book about her affair with Willy Brandt. Brandt refuted the lurid stories which were circulated about his private life — “one theory was that Guillaume had obtained information about it and had threatened to blackmail the Chancellor’ — denied that he had been subject to blackmail, and later protested that a campaign of defamation had been set in motion against him. Peter Wright later wrote: “I believe Brandt resigned to stop further inquiries into himself and his associates”.(20)
Brandt later complained that the counter-intelligence services could have informed him of their suspicions and information about Guilllaume much earlier. Even the official independent commission of inquiry which looked into the affair “agreed on this point, and put the main blame on those services’. It is likely that the security services allowed Guillaume to see some secret material, or at least said that he had, as part not only of the operation to entrap East German agents but also to ensnare Brandt himself. Having apparently cooperated with the security services’ wish to “dangle’ Guillaume for as long as possible, Brandt ended up being portrayed as lax with regard to the security implications of the Guillaume affair. Finally, when Brandt refused to budge, a whispering campaign began. Without the support of his main ministers and colleagues Brandt felt isolated and decided to do the honourable thing rather than fight what would have been a highly damaging and dirty battle.
The parallels with the fate of Wilson are striking. In his case Ministers Judith Hart and John Stonehouse were left to “dangle’ by MI5 in the hope that the Prime Minister could subsequently be blamed for apparent security lapses. There are, after all, only so many intelligence operations that can be run and it is not surprising that the same techniques were used against the social democratic leaders of both countries.(21)
Notes
- David Leigh, The Wilson Plot, (London, Heinemann, 1988), p. 231.
- Sunday Times, 31 July 1977.
- Ibid.
- Prittie (1979) p. 160.
- Leigh p. 152. see also Wright, Spycatcher. I have used the acronym CANZAB rather than the more common CAZAB. Peter Wright, for example, uses CAZAB but the updated edition of Richelson and Ball’s The Ties That Bind uses CANZAB, and CANZAB — Canada, Australia and NZ for New Zealand — makes more sense.
- Leigh p. 231; Mangold pp. 280-1.
- Brandt himself has written: “It goes without saying that my so-called Ostopolitik was not first developed in 1966. The Adenauer and Erhard Governments had both, in their own way, striven to ease our relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.’ There are obvious parallels here with Wilson’s support of increasing trade with the Soviet bloc. This had been encouraged by the then Conservative Prime Minister, Winston Churchill — but Wilson was attacked for it, not Churchill. Prittie (1979) pp. 168/9.
- Hohne and Zolling pp. 265-79.
- Ibid. p. 250.
- Ibid. p. 264.
- Ibid., p. 274.
- Barley p. 248.
- Prittie (1974) p. 194. See also Brandt, and Marshall, p. 98. For Kissinger on Brandt, see Hersh. During the same war Prime Minister Edward Heath refused to allow the US to use Cyprus as a base for airborne missions. See New Statesman, 25 April 1986.
- Leigh p. 231; Dobson and Payne p. 126. Guillaume’s name had cropped up when security investigated a woman secretary to two of West Germany’s foreign policy officials, including Egon Bahr, who we have seen was a target of the “ultras’ within West German security.
- Marshall p. 100. Most of the accusations that Brandt failed to heed the supposed security warnings were detailed in the newsletter of Frank Capell, an American extreme right-winger. See, for example, his Confidential Intelligence Report of the Herald of Freedom, June 1974.
- Prittie (1974) p. 198; Marshall p. 101.
- Dobson and Payne p. 126; Leigh p. 230.
- Prittie (1974) p. 197; Corson and Crowley p. 261.
- Prittie (1974) pp. 198/9; Marshall p. 101.
- Marshall p. 101; Prittie (1974) p. 198; Leigh p. 231; Capell, op. cit..
- Prittie (1974) p. 199. In 1990 Guillaume was still a staunch communist, living in what was then East Germany. He told the journalist Tom Bower that he is writing the “complete story’. See the Independent Magazine, 17/3/90.
Bibliography
- Barley, Stephen — Double Cross, (London, Coronet, 1976)
- Brandt, Willy — People and Politics, (London, Collins, 1978)
- Corson, W. R. and Crowley, R. T. — The New KGB: The Engine of Soviet Power, (London, Harvester Press, 1986)
- Dobson, Christopher and Payne, Ronald — The Dictionary of Espionage, (London, Grafton, 1986)
- Hersh, Seymour — The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House, (Washington, Summit, 1983)
- Hohne, Heniz and Zolling, Hermann, — The General Was A Spy: the truth about General Gehlen and his spy ring, (London, Pan, 1972) pp. 265-7. This book was originally published under the title Network
- Leigh, David — The Wilson Plot, (Heinemann, London, 1988)
- Mangold,Tom — Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, The CIA’s Master Spy Hunter, (London, Simon and Shuster, 1991)
- Marshall, Barbara — Willy Brandt, (London, Cardinal, 1990)
- Prittie, Terence —
- Willy Brandt, (London, 1974)
- The Velvet Chancellors: A History of Post-War Germany, (London, Frederick Muller, 1979)