Ditch find adds to Minister’s problems

Press, 26 January 1984, Page 8

Ditch find adds to Minister’s problems

NZPA-Reuter Bonn The West German Defence Minister, Mr Manfred Woerner, already at the centre of a political storm for his firing of a top general labelled a homosexual, faced fresh embarrassment yesterday after news that internal data from his Ministry had been discovered in a roadside ditch. The data, found near Koblenz in October and acquired by the news magazine, “Stern,” is in the form of a computer print-out containing a detailed inventory of West German military procurements, prices, and part-numbers. A Defence Ministry spokesman said that no military or technical secrets had been contained in the unclassified data print-out, which was supposed to have been pulped by a local paper company. But Opposition Social Democratic Party members immediately attacked the

“security lapse” and ‘ have demanded an explanation from Mr Woerner when Parliament’s Defence Committee sits today. It was not clear whether Mr Woerner would appear in person to answer questions about the lost printout, which one Social Democrat called “a security scandal of the first order.” The same committee, reconstituted as an official inquiry, will begin hearings into the dismissal by Mr Woerner of General Guenther Kiessling, who strongly denies allegations that he had frequented homosexual night-clubs and risked blackmail. The Social Democrats demand that Mr Woerner resign over his handling of the Kiessling affair. At a meeting of the country’s senior military staff in Bonn yesterday, Mr Woerner spent several hours answering questions on his firing of the general, who was one of N.A.T.O.’s two Deputy Supreme Comman-

ders in Europe. Commanding officers of the Army, Navy, and Air Force were called in for the briefing by the InspectorGeneral (chief-of-staff), General Wolfgang Altenburg, who asked for reports on how the case had affected morale in the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). A carefully phrased statement after the briefing said that the officers had agreed that Mr Woerner, on the evidence available to him on December 8 last year, had had to act against General Kiessling. But it said that if the evidence failed to withstand scrutiny the general’s reputation must be fully restored. Eye-witness accounts of General Kiessling’s alleged visits to a Cologne “gay bar,” supplied to Mr Woerner by agents of the military counter-intelli-gence service, have been questioned by members of Government and Opposition parties.