Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

By the time of Brandt’s victory in the November 1972 elections, Guillaume was at the peak of his career as a penetration agent, attending all meetings of the SDP party and parliamentary leadership. On May 29, 1973, however, Günter Nollau, head of the BfV, informed Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister, that Guillaume was under suspicion of espionage and had been placed under surveillance. (Their recollections later differed over how serious the suspicions reported by Nollau were.) 47Shortly afterward, alerted—according to Wolf’s not wholly reliable account—by the BfV’s clumsy surveillance of Guillaume’s wife, the HVA ordered both Günter and Christel Guillaume to suspend their intelligence work. 48At 6:30 a.m. on April 24, 1974 the Guillaumes were arrested at their Bonn apartment. In a curious breach of espionage tradecraft, Guillaume virtually admitted his guilt. Dressed only in a bathrobe, he declared defiantly, “I am an officer of the [East German] National People’s Army!” According to Genscher, “It was basically only Guillaume’s own declaration which convicted him.” 49

Wolf now argues that his success in penetrating Brandt’s entourage was “equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal.” The political scandal caused by Guillaume’s arrest was the immediate cause of Brandt’s resignation on May 6, 1974. The HVA, Wolf concludes, “unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen.” 50

THE HVA OPERATIONS in West Germany which had had the greatest influence on the KGB’s own methods were probably those of its “Romeo spies (a phrase invented by the Western media but later taken over by Wolf himself). 51The KGB had specialized in the sexual entrapment of Western diplomats and visitors to Moscow since the 1930s. The entrapment followed a straightforward sequence: the use of attractive female or male swallows as sexual bait, the seduction of the target, the secret photography of the sexual encounter (and, on occasion, the interruption of the encounter by a supposedly outraged “spouse” or “relative”), followed by blackmail. 52Wolf’s tactics were both more subtle and more effective. Love, or a plausible semblance of it, was capable of generating more intelligence over a longer period than brief sexual encounters. 53The main targets of the Romeo spies were lonely female secretaries, most in their thirties or forties, employed in West German ministries and intelligence agencies.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the KGB base in Karlshorst began imitating the HVA’s “secretaries offensive.” Indeed, the KGB files seen by Mitrokhin show that some of the “secretary spies” later thought to be HVA agents were in fact working for the KGB. Karlshorst’s initial targets were female employees in the Bonn Foreign Ministry identified by a KGB agent in the ministry’s personnel department, Gisela Herzog (codenamed MARLENE), recruited in 1954—without, apparently, the use of a Romeo spy. Herzog herself married an official from the French defense ministry in 1958 and moved to Paris. The first victim of the KGB’s secretaries offensive was Herzog’s friend Leonore Heinz (codenamed LOLA), secretary to a foreign ministry department head. Her seducer was Heinz Sütterlin (codenamed WALTER), a West German from Freiburg recruited by the KGB in 1957, whose first name, confusingly, was identical to Leonore’s surname. When Herzog heard in 1958 that the 30-year-old Leonore Heinz had succumbed to Sütterlin’s advances, she became consciencestricken. Probably foreseeing Heinz’s devastation when she discovered that she had been deceived, Herzog wrote to the Centre, “I should like to say that you should not involve LOLA in co-operation with us through Sütterlin. She would be very disillusioned.” “I do ask you,” she wrote on another occasion, “to please leave LOLA in peace.” 54The Centre, predictably, paid no attention.

In December 1960 Heinz Sütterlin and Leonore Heinz were married. Over the next year Sütterlin frequently discussed with his wife the danger that the Cold War might turn into hot war. At a time when the West German leadership were building themselves nuclear shelters, he argued that they had to be concerned for their own safety. Leonore agreed to confide in him everything she knew about East—West relations. In 1961, at first unwittingly, she was included in the KGB agent network. Two years later, Sütterlin reported to the Centre that, without mentioning the KGB, he had told his wife he was passing on her information to an organization dedicated to preventing nuclear war:

I told LOLA that there is one great organization in the world which regards the preservation of peace as its task. This organization requests one great favor from her. She must continue to work in the foreign ministry and report to me everything that she finds out… The organization thinks well of her work… She has agreed to cooperate in every way she can, and declared that she regards it as the duty of every decent person to seek to tie the hands of warmongers. She declined to receive money for her help. I believe that in LOLA we have an assistant on whom one may rely totally.

Though his wife refused payment, Sütterlin received 1,000 marks a month.

From 1964 onward, Sütterlin handed film of documents LOLA had smuggled out of the ministry to the East German illegal Eugen Runge (codenamed MAKS), who was working for the Karlshorst KGB. Runge, in turn, left the film in a dead letter-box which was emptied by the Bonn residency. After Leonore at last realized that she was working for the Soviet Bloc, Runge had a personal meeting with her. He found her unperturbed by her discovery. Leonore said that she trusted her husband absolutely, and that her work in the cause of peace was a job that had to be done. Sütterlin told Runge that Leonore was also motivated by “hatred for the caste of haughty foreign ministry officials” and “derived satisfaction from causing as much damage as she could.” 55His comment supplies a missing element in traditional explanations of the success of the HVA and KGB secretaries offensive. Though most of the secretaries began spying for love, their espionage was probably sustained, at least in part, by the arrogance of some of their better-educated and better-paid male superiors.

In 1967 Runge defected to the CIA, betraying both Leonore and Heinz Sütterlin. Runge told his debriefers, “We received [FRG diplomatic] documents before they moved across Leonore’s desk and on to the code room, and we read the reports brought by diplomatic couriers from abroad, mostly even before German Foreign Minister [Gerhard] Schrîder got them.” As her friend Gisela Herzog had feared nine years earlier, Leonore was distraught at the discovery that she had been targeted by a Romeo spy. During her police interrogation, she was confronted with a confession by her husband that he had married her not for love but on orders from the KGB. Soon afterward Leonore hanged herself in her cell. 56

TWO OF THE other most successful seductions in the KGB’s secretaries offensive recorded in files seen by Mitrokhin—those of DORIS and ROSIE—also involved a false flag recruitment and the use of East German illegals. The false flag, however, differed from that which had deceived LOLA. DORIS and ROSIE believed they were working not for an underground peace movement but for a secret neo-Nazi group.

DORIS was Margret Hîke, a secretary in the office of the West German president, where she worked successively in the mobilization and security departments. Her Romeo spy was the East German illegal Hans-Jurgen Henze (codenamed HAGEN), who assumed the identity of Franz Becker, a West German living in the GDR. 57Henze discovered the 33-year-old Hîke by chance. One day in 1968, while looking out of the window of his Bonn apartment, he saw a woman who struck him as a possible civil servant going for a walk alone. Henze stood waiting in a telephone kiosk along her route and, as Hîke passed by, asked if she had change for a phone call. Somehow he also managed to strike up a conversation and, on discovering where she worked, arranged another meeting with her. Gradually, according to Hîke’s operational file, “She fell seriously in love and was greatly attached to him.” Henze explained that he was a postgraduate student writing a dissertation on the work of the president, but needed additional source material before he could complete it. Hîke supplied documents from work to help finish the fictional thesis. Though less infatuated than Hîke, Henze also became emotionally involved in their relationship and for several years “found it difficult to switch to a business footing.” Finally in 1971 or 1972 (the date is unclear from the file), hoping to appeal to Hîke’s somewhat extreme right-wing views, he told her he belonged to an organization of “German patriots,” based in Brazil, who were committed to the cause of national revival and needed inside information on the Bonn government to continue their work. 58