Kohl, Minister refused order against couple

Press, 20 September 1985, Page 6

Kohl, Minister refused order against couple

By

JAMES MARKHAM,

of

“The New York Times” (through NZPA) Bonn The West German Interior Ministry says that the Chancellor, Mr Helmut Kohl, and his Interior Minister, Dr Friedrich Zimmermann, recently declined to order surveillance of a chancery secretary and her husband who were now reported to have defected to East Germany.

Hans Neusel, a state secretary in the Interior Ministry, told a news conference yesterday that, starting in 1973, evidence had accumulated against the husband, Herbert Adolf Willner, but no action had been taken against him.

Officials have said that Mr Willner is a former member of the Nazi Waffen SS and the East German Communist Party. Until his defection, an-

nounced on Tuesday, Mr Willner had been a senior foreign policy expert in a foundation linked to the small Free Democratic Party, which has been in Government coalitions since 1969.

His wife is said to have had access to the minutes of Cabinet meetings and other top-secret papers in the Bonn chancery, where she had worked for 12 years. The couple has been accused of spying. Mr Neusel’s disclosures for the first time linked Dr Kohl and Dr Zimmermann to key decisions in West Germany’s spreading spy scandal, which has revealed long-term East German agents functioning with seeming impunity in highly sensitive posts.

The opposition Social Democratic Party continued yesterday to focus its fire on Dr Zimmermann, renew-

ing demands for his resignation.

“The new spy case is so alarming,” said HansJochen Vogel, the Social Democrats’ Parliamentary leader, “that it obviously poses the question of whether a Minister who has been such a failure in the field of internal security should stay in office.”

The Social Democrats’ outrage appeared to be tempered by an awareness that several agents being uncovered had spied against Governments led by their party. Bureaucratic tradition leaves secretaries in sensitive positions for decades in West Germany. Despite the spy scandal in Bonn, Willy Brandt, the Social Democrats’ chairman, visited East Berlin yesterday and laid flowers at a monument dedicated to “the victims of Fascism and

militarism” on Unter den Linden boulevard. It was Mr Brandt’s first trip to East Germany since he was forced to resign as Chancellor because one of

his closest advisers was revealed as an East German spy. Mr Neusel said that first suspicions about Herbert Willner, who had purportedly fled from East Germany in 1961, had been raised by the embassy of a N.A.T.O. nation in 1973.

Two subsequent investigations, in 1974 and 1978, also had cleared Herbert Willner. But “somewhat harder” evidence had developed in July, 1983, during a check of the secretary, Herta-Astrid Willner, who had married Herbert Willner seven months after being transferred from the Defence Ministry to the chancery. Mr Neusel said that suspicions about Herbert Willner turned largely on his past life. He had fought in the Waffen SS in World War 11, joined the East German Communist Party,

was expelled after his SS links were discovered but was readmitted, and had studied in a journalism faculty at Karl Marx University that has a reputation for training spies. In May 1985, West Germany’s counter-intelligence agency had initiated a request for surveillance of the Willners, but elaborate procedures for approving such an application had stalled it. On June 28, Dr Heribert Hellenbroich, the agency’s chief, had met Dr Zimmermann and complained that the Willner case and two others were being delayed. Starting in August, two Bonn secretaries in sensitive posts and an army messenger vanished, apparently to East Berlin. On August 23 the East German news agency announced that Hans Joachim Tiedge, a senior counter-intelligence officer, had defected.

Tiedge had been in charge of the investigation of the Willners, who on August 12 had left on a long-planned holiday in Spain. On August 28 Dr Kohl, Dr Zimmermann, and Mr Neusel had met and discussed the Willner case. Dr Kohl had decided that it was “inopportune” to order their surveillance but urged that more information be gathered on them, Mr Neusel said.

The couple disappeared from their hotel in northern Spain around August 30, and Mr Neusel said that possibly they had been warned by Tiedge.

But a banner headline in the sensationalist newspaper, “Bild” speculating about a possible spy in the chancery might have provoked the flight.

“If I had been Mrs Willner and I had seen this,”

said Mr Neusel, holding up the issue of “Bild,” which is distributed in Spain, "I would have said, ‘Herbert, we’d better do something.’ ”

On August 28, Dr Kohl fired Mr Hellenbroich from his new post at the head of the Federal Intelligence Service, holding him responsible for the Tiedge affair.

But Dr Kohl has spurned opposition demands to remove Dr Zimmermann.

In responses to various scandals 5 that have buffeted his conservative coalition since it came to power in late 1982, Dr Kohl has regularly waited for the storm to blow over.

His refusal to relieve Dr Zimmermann reflects similar impulses, particularly since the Interior Minister’s removal might trigger a Cabinet reshuffle.