Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

I simply cannot consent to take part any longer in the warmongering which threatens not only the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies, but which is also well on the way to converting my motherland, Britain, into a powerless American colony. 15

From 1952 to 1975 Peet edited the fortnightly Democratic German Report, which spent much of its time denouncing the past records (often supplied by Wolf) of West German politicians, diplomats, industrialists, lawyers, generals and police chiefs. Peet regarded as his “prize exhibit” Adenauer’s most important aide, Hans Globke, who had drafted the infamous official commentary on Hitler’s 1935 race laws. 16

Peet’s propaganda was powerfully reinforced by the KGB-arranged defection in July 1954 of Otto John, first head of the FRG security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV). Like Peet four years earlier, John gave a press conference at which he denounced the alleged revival of Nazism in West Germany. In December 1955 John reappeared in the West, claiming that he had been drugged by Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, a doctor working for the KGB. The West German supreme court was skeptical. According to other evidence, John was a heavy drinker who had been observed crossing to the East in a “cheerful” rather than comatose condition, after Wohlgemuth had plied him with whisky and played on his fears of a Nazi revival. In December 1959 he was sentenced to four years in jail, but served only eighteen months. Considerable mystery still surrounds the John case. The head of the KGB Karlshorst apparat, Yevgeni Petrovich Pitovranov, reported to the Centre in July 1954 that John had come for discussions in East Berlin because he “wished to maintain contact with us to discuss political problems and joint action against the Nazis of East Germany.” John’s decision to remain in the East, however, was made under KGB pressure. According to one of the KGB officers involved in the John case:

We wanted to recruit him, but he turned us down. Because it was necessary that John remain in East Berlin, we put a sleeping pill in his coffee… After sleeping for about thirty hours, he was worked over by specialists from the KGB with psychological pressure. He finally said that he would cooperate with us.

Among the deceptions used to persuade John to remain in the East was a fake Western news broadcast announcing that he had already defected to the GDR. 17

The HVA and KGB had at their disposal an archive in East Berlin which held Wehrmacht, SS and Nazi records seized by the Red Army. In two large volumes of material on real and alleged war criminals and neo-Nazis, the HVA’s active measures department, Abteilung X, combined authentic archival documents and fabricated evidence to form a damning indictment of the West German political, business and military élite. 18Abteilung X also concocted an additional, highly discreditable chapter to the memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, first head of the BND, in an imitation of his handwriting. 19

The most celebrated West German target of the KGB and the HVA was Willy Brandt, codenamed POLYARNIK (“Polar”). 20From the moment Brandt became Bürgermeister of Berlin in October 1957, he was the victim of a series of active measures operations designed first to discredit and then to blackmail him. Given Brandt’s heroic record of resistance to Hitler, it was plainly unrealistic to include him in the KGB’s list of neo-Nazi conspirators. Instead, by distorting his early career and war record, KGB and HVA active measures sought, at various times, to portray him as a Gestapo informer, an anti-German émigré, a collaborator with SIS and the CIA and even as a former Soviet agent.

In 1931, shortly before his eighteenth birthday, Willy Brandt (born Herbert Frahm) had become leader of the youth section of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP), a left-wing breakaway party from the socialist SDP. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Brandt went into exile, traveling to Norway carrying only a briefcase containing the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital, a few shirts and 100 marks. Once in Oslo he established himself as the SAP representative and began a career as a journalist. In February 1937 he traveled to Spain, ostensibly as a journalist covering the Civil War but also to act as liaison between SAP members of the International Brigades and the neo-Trotskyist POUM militia. Brandt quickly denounced the “blind terror” waged by the Communists, on Soviet instructions, against POUM and other left-wing heretics:

The truth of the matter is: the Comintern is determined to destroy all forces that refuse to obey its orders. It is for this reason that the whole international labor movement must rise against it.

Brandt in turn was, absurdly, denounced by the Communists as “an agent of Franco” and “a spy of the Gestapo.” 21

The earliest reference to Brandt in his KGB file is a description of him in 1936 as a member of the Danzig Trotskyists. The other reports on Brandt during the late 1930s, all of them hostile, accurately reflect the paranoia of the Great Terror. There are fabricated claims that POLYARNIK had been tasked by the Paris Sñreté to infiltrate POUM, that he had betrayed many members of the SDP to the Gestapo and that he was involved in the murder in Spain of Mark Rein, son of a prominent Russian Menshevik, who had in reality been killed by the NKVD. 22

After Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Brandt’s attitude to Moscow changed. The NKVD residency in Stockholm, whither Brandt had moved after the German occupation of Norway, reported that there had been a split in the ranks of “Norwegian Trotskyists.” Some, including Brandt, were now willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union to secure the defeat of Hitler. In the autumn of 1941 M. S. Okhunev (codenamed OLEG), an operations officer at the Stockholm residency, called on Brandt but found him out and left his card. The following evening Brandt visited the Soviet embassy and spent three hours talking to Okhunev and the NKVD resident, Mikhail Sergeyevich Vetrov. Brandt said that he ran a news agency whose clients included the American press, was ready to do anything to hasten the destruction of Nazism and would be happy to send stories from “Soviet comrades” to the United States (which had not yet entered the war)—if necessary, disguising their source. Vetrov and Okhunev replied that the most important contribution he could make to the war effort would be to gather intelligence from his Norwegian friends on German forces and operations in Norway. Brandt agreed, and for the next nine months had clandestine meetings once a fortnight with officers from the Stockholm residency. On one occasion he was handed 500 kroner, probably to meet his expenses, and gave a receipt.

Among the intelligence supplied by Brandt from his Norwegian sources was information on the German battleship Tirpitz, which left the Norwegian port of Trondheim in March 1942 to attack Arctic convoys. Brandt informed the NKVD that he had passed the same information to the British, who tried and failed to sink it. 23He also supplied the Stockholm residency with information on German pressure on Sweden to join the Anti-Comintern Pact and on plans (never implemented) to ban the Swedish Communist Party. In the summer of 1942, after the arrest by the Swedish police of two Czech agents of the residency, TERENTY and VANYA, 24Brandt refused further secret rendezvous with NKVD officers, despite pressure from the residency to continue them. He did, however, agree to come openly to the Soviet embassy, sometimes to meet intelligence officers operating under diplomatic cover. 25

None of this makes POLYARNIK a Soviet agent. The Stockholm residency reported in 1943 that Brandt had also been in touch with British and American intelligence officers in Sweden, as well as with Trotsky’s Norwegian former secretary, who remained deeply suspect as far as the Centre was concerned. 26Brandt’s overriding motive was to provide any information to all three members of the Grand Alliance which might contribute to the defeat of Hitler. In the case of the Soviet Union, he calculated accurately that his best channel of communication with Moscow was via the Stockholm residency.