Birthday greetings helped unmask master spy

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 32

Birthday greetings helped unmask master spy

NZPA-Reuter Bonn Radioed birthday greetings from East German intelligence helped unmask Guenter Guillaume, the Communist master spy whose arrest toppled the West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, in 1974, Bonn’s former top spycatcher has revealed. Retired West German counter-intelligence chief, Guenther Nollau, made the revelation in excerpts from his diaries covering the period, published in the magazine “Quick.” The highest-placed East German agent to be exposed in Bonn, Guillaume worked for more than three years in the Bonn Chancellery, rising to become Brandt’s personal aide with ready access to

top-secret documents. Nollau said suspicion fell on the agent and his wife Christel as a result of intercepted radio messages 11 months before their arrest in April, 1974. Brandt, a Social Democrat, resigned two weeks after the couple were seized.

“The decoded radio messages contain only initials of names and it is not known whether the ini-

tials relate to real names or aliases.

“What points to Guillaume and his wife Christel, however, are birthday greetings the East German State security service has sent its agents by radio. They match their dates of birth,” Nollau wrote in a diary entry dated May 27, 1973.

Guillaume, now 60, was traded to East Germany in an international spy swap in 1981 after serving more than seven years of a 13-year prison sentence for treason.

Interest has continued to focus on the former mole in West Germany. One subsequently-dis-credited news report said recently he had died in April, 1986, after a severe

kidney disease. Ironically, the report was knocked down by the appearance in an East German magazine of a message of congratulations to Guillaume on his sixtieth birthday-on February 1. Nollau, aged 65, headed West German counterintelligence until September, 1975, when he retired r after public criticism of the agency’s handling of the Guillaume affair. “Quick” said the diary extracts, which are taken from a forthcoming book, marked the first time Nollau had broken silence on the case. Born in Berlin, Guillaume came to West Germany in 1956 with his wife. She later played a key role in smuggling

Chancellery documents. Among the secrets which Guillaume’s trial found he had betrayed to East Germany was a 1973 letter to Brandt from then United States President, Richard Nixon, dealing with rifts in the Western alliance and the military strength of the Warsaw Pact.