Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

Wehner seems to have been saved from execution only by the winding down of the Terror and the disgrace, a few months later, of Yezhov. Early in 1940 Comintern sent him to carry out “illegal work” in Sweden, using identity documents in the name of H. M. Kornelis. In June 1941, shortly before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, the Centre once again considered Wehner as possible NKVD agent material. It was decided not to recruit him, however, when it was discovered that he had included in a report of the previous October an accurate but politically incorrect warning that an attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union was, sooner or later, inevitable. 94Wehner was later arrested by the Swedish police and—according to later claims by Markus Wolf—revealed the names of members of the Communist underground in both Sweden and Germany. 95On emerging from prison Wehner broke away from the Communists and made common cause with the SDP.

Wolf found the post-war Wehner “a person of irreconcilable contradictions.” Though playing a major role in turning the SDP from a Marxist into a social democratic party, Wehner remained nostalgic for his Communist roots. In 1973 he had an “intensely emotional” reunion with Ulbricht’s successor, Erich Honecker, with whom he had worked as a young Communist in the Saarland almost half a century earlier. Honecker went to enormous pains to arrange the details of the reunion, trying to ensure that a cake prepared for tea at a hunting lodge tasted exactly like one baked for Wehner many years before by Honecker’s mother. 96After Wehner’s death in 1990, Honecker claimed that, although he had rejected Communism, “his goal was still the union of the labor movement and the building of a socialist German republic.” 97

According to Wolf, secret contacts with Wehner began in the mid-1950s but were initially regarded with great suspicion by Ulbricht, who absurdly suspected him of being “a British spy.” Contact became easier when Wehner became Minister for All-German Affairs in 1966 and began regular meetings with the East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who negotiated on “humanitarian questions” with West German officials. Vogel took his instructions directly from Erich Mielke, the GDR Minister of State Security, and reported to him after each meeting with Wehner. According to Wolf:

Mielke alone edited the reports on conversations with Wehner for passing on to Honecker. Since drafting was not his strong point, he often locked himself in his room for a whole day to put the Wehner reports into the proper form. Hardly anything in the GDR was more secret than these reports. Apart from the three copies for Honecker, Mielke and myself, there was also a re-edited and censored version of the reports which was sent to our Soviet colleagues.

Mielke boasted to the Centre that Wehner’s regular briefings gave the Stasi a direct line to the heart of the West German power structure. 98Mitrokhin’s notes contain none of these briefings. They do include, however, one example from KGB files of the trust placed in Wehner as a “confidential contact.” He was informed in 1973—apparently before the news became public—that the editor of the weekly magazine Quick, Heinz Van Nouhuys (codenamed NANT), who had been recruited as an HVA agent, was in fact a double agent working for the BfV. 99

Brandt later concluded that Wehner had been negotiating with the GDR behind his back. 100It is unlikely, however, that Wehner ever consciously betrayed what he saw as the interests of the FRG. “From his youth onwards,” Wolf argued, “he regarded conspiracy as an instrument of power politics and sometimes physical survival. From his first contacts with us… he no doubt felt that he was always the stronger party in the political game.” 101

Though the KGB appears to have left the running of Wienand entirely to the HVA and never regarded Wehner as more than a “confidential contact,” during the 1970s it had a hitherto unknown agent, codenamed CARDINAL, an SDP official who had been talent-spotted by another KGB agent, MAVR, a West German film-maker. The intelligence provided by CARDINAL included reports on FRG politicians and industrialists, the issues to be raised by Brandt during his visit to Moscow in 1973, Brandt’s resignation in 1974, the subsequent state of the SDP leadership and FRG relations with China, Israel and Portugal. As well as being rewarded with an icon and other gifts, CARDINAL was paid 5,000 dollars in 1974, the same sum in 1976 and 11,635 deutschmarks in 1977. Then the doubts began. A detailed study of his “intelligence” by the Centre revealed nothing of significance which had not also appeared in the West German press—apart from some items which the KGB suspected were disinformation. It was concluded that CARDINAL and MAVR had been seeking to ingratiate themselves with the KGB in the hope of gaining its assistance in winning valuable contracts in the Soviet Union. Contact with both was abruptly broken off. 102

Mitrokhin’s notes on KGB attempts to penetrate the Christian Democrats (CDU) are thinner than those on the SDP. He does, however, identify two agents within the CDU, both recruited in 1972; SHTOLPEN, a party adviser, 103and RADIST, a member of the West Berlin city assembly. 104No details are available on the intelligence which they provided. Mitrokhin also identifies a leading member of the Free Democrats (FDP), codenamed MARK, who had been recruited as a Soviet agent in East Germany in 1946 on the basis of what were alleged to be “compromising circumstances” arising from his wartime service in the Wehrmacht. A few years later MARK succeeded in fleeing to the West, where he rapidly embarked on a new career as a politician. In 1956 the KGB resumed contact with him and remained in touch for the next twenty-four years. However, there is no evidence that during that time MARK supplied any significant intelligence. A later Centre assessment concluded that he had passed on information slanted in favor of the political interests of the FDP and had tried to use his contacts with the East to further his own career. In about 1975 one of MARK’s parliamentary colleagues told Aleksandr Demyanovich Zakharov, a KGB officer stationed in Karlshorst, that MARK’s earlier association with Soviet intelligence had been “a youthful error.” In 1980 the Centre finally decided that there was no point in remaining in contact with him. 105

Both the recycled newspaper stories provided by CARDINAL and the quarter century wasted in trying to extract intelligence from MARK provide further evidence of the limitations of the KGB’s political intelligence analysis. Mitrokhin records one occasion on which Andropov issued what amounted to an official rebuke for the poor quality of FCD assessments on the FRG. In October 1977, as part of the preparations for Brezhnev’s state visit to West Germany in the following year, Kryuchkov submitted an alarmist report on the likely security problems, claiming that no fewer than 250 terrorist and extremist groups in the FRG were capable of attempting the assassination of the Soviet leader. Andropov replied acerbically:

Comrade [V. I.] Kevorkov [of the Second Chief Directorate], who has just returned from the FRG, gives a different account of the situation. You should synchronize your watches, as for us this is not a trivial matter. 106

In the event, Kevorkov’s less alarmist assessment proved correct and Brezhnev’s visit in May 1978 passed off without incident. 107

MITROKHIN’S INFORMATION ON the KGB’s West German agents, though extensive, is not comprehensive. There is, for example, intriguing evidence in the files seen by Mitrokhin of a KGB agent in the entourage of Egon Bahr, one of Helmut Schmidt’s most trusted advisers and a leading architect of Ostpolitik. (There is no suggestion that the agent was Bahr himself.) On February 5, 1981 Andropov sent Brezhnev and the CPSU Central Committee an intelligence report (no. 259-A/OV ), marked “of special importance,” which recounted a telephone conversation on January 27 between Schmidt and Ronald Reagan, whose inauguration as president of the United States had taken place a week earlier, and gave details of Schmidt’s subsequent discussions with Bahr and other advisers. To Schmidt’s irritation, Reagan asked for a month’s delay to the chancellor’s visit to Washington, previously arranged for March 3, on the grounds that the President was not yet ready “for a serious discussion of foreign policy problems.” Schmidt told his advisers that this was a deliberate delaying tactic by the new Reagan administration “designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field.”