Subject: Cryptome, Romeo Spy autobiography
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| Guillaume had arrived in the Federal Republic as a refugee in 1956, four years after he had joined the East German army as a loyal Communist Party member and had served as an officer with the rank of captain. He had also been trained as an agent, and when he settled in Frankfurt, supposedly as an authentic refugee, he had joined the SDP as a voluntary worker before becoming a full-time party functionary. In 1970 he had expressed the wish to become a civil servant in Bonn and, having sailed through a security check which failed to reveal his service as an officer in the East German army, had been appointed to the economic and social affairs staff of the Chancellery. Soon afterwards Brandt had picked him to act as his link to the SDP, and he maintained an office both in the party’s headquarters and in the Palais Schomburg. For the next three years Guillaume enjoyed access to the very highest classifications of secret information and passed it back to Wolf who shared it with Moscow. As well as material about the FRG’s foreign policy and relations with NATO, Guillaume passed on details of Brandt’s rather exotic extra-marital affairs which, at that time, were completely unknown to the public. The spy’s run of luck ended when suspicions were raised about the existence of a top-level mole with direct access to Brandt, and the BfV had launched an investigation which turned out to be not quite discreet enough, with word of it leaking to me through Nina. Exactly how the BfV got on to Guillaume remains a matter of speculation, and much of what has been written about the case, including by Markus Wolf, has suggested that the BfV had initiated an investigation after a study had been conducted of illicit East-West communications and found traces of an illegal codenamed GEORG who had completed several missions in the 1950s. Allegedly a detailed analysis of contemporary decrypted East German wireless traffic had revealed a message, dating back to April 1957, in which a source known as ‘G.G.’ had been sent birthday greetings. Supposedly his clue had led he BfV molehunters to conduct a lengthy trawl for anyone with the same birthday, and eventually the field had narrowed to Guillaume’s son Pierre. ‘G.G.’ was somehow linked to the missions undertaken by GEORG, and both agents were tentatively identified as Guillaume who had been placed under intensive surveillance.
Personally, I have my doubts about this version of events, for two reasons. Firstly there is scarcely a single example in the history of espionage in which a spy has been caught by unprompted sleuthing or that frequent cover story, the vigilance of colleagues. In most cases there is a straightforward tip-off from a defector who uses his knowledge for resettlement in the Florida sunshine with a swimming-pool and a generous pension plan. Secondly, there was the information I had acquired from Nina who had suggested that the BfV had been working on advice from the British. She had no reason to lie, and this was at such an early stage that it was most unlikely to have been part of an elaborate cover story. Indeed, if it was a cover story it must have been a bad one because it has never appeared anywhere else. What is known definitely is that Gunter Nollau, the BfV’s counter-intelligence chief briefed his Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, on 29 May 1973 and informed him that Guillaume was the subject of an investigation. Wolf was probably told about this much later by his star mole in the BfV, Klaus Kuron (who had offered to spy for the HVA in 1982, and continued undetected until the collapse of East Germany in 1989), but instead of moving Guillaume away from access, no action was taken, and this inertia led to Nollau’s subsequent resignation. Thus, much to everybody’s embarrassment, Guillaume was allowed to continue spying for eleven months before he was finally confronted, and even allowed to accompany Brandt on his holiday to his hideaway retreat at Hamas in Norway. During these final months Christel reported that she thought she was being watched but Wolf had not taken much notice of this warning, on the assumption that agents often develop a healthy degree of paranoia, and he had failed to extract his two agents before finally they were confronted by the BfV. He was also influenced, so he admitted later, by Christel’s new job as an aide to Georg Leber, Brandt’s Defence Minister. Whatever the source of the initial tip, Guillaume came under intensive surveillance, which he also spotted, and was arrested by the BfV early in the morning on 24 April 1974, thus provoking a major political scandal that led to Brandt’s resignation just twelve days later. When the police had burst into his house, Guilaume had not attempted to deny he was a spy, but instead had identified himself proudly as an officer and citizen of the GDR, and demanded the appropriate, respectful treatment! Fortunately, my warning had come too late to prevent Guillaume’s arrest, but the fact that I had been able to obtain this information must have impressed Nick and his masters. As for Guillaume, he was sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment in Rheinbach prison, outside Bonn, and Christel received eight. Suffering from kidney disease, he was released in October 1981 in a spy-swap, and returned as a hero to East Germany, where he died in April 1995. According to KGB gossip, Leonid Brezhnev had been angered by the KGB’s failure to pull Guillaume out of Bonn in time, and Markus Wolf had been summoned to Moscow to be reprimanded by the General-Secretary himself, in his office in the Kremlin. Indeed, Wolf himself later admitted that the entire affair had been ‘unfortunate’, not least because it had destroyed Willy Brandt’s political career, and he had been responsible for developing Ostpolitik, a policy of détente that had been greatly welcomed by the Soviet Bloc. Brandt’s initiative had led to diplomatic recognition of the GDR, and the signing of the Four-Power Treaty which had preserved West Berlin as a permanent, separate entity, both key objectives of the Communists. By ruining Brandt, the Soviet Bloc had played into the hands of the anti-Socialist hardliners and terminated détente, which the Kremlin had been so anxious to encourage. The extent to which the KGB had participated in the Guillaume affair is unknown, but according to the KGB rezident in Karlshorst, Sergei Kondrashev, the information from the spy codenamed HANSEN was ‘of such extraordinary importance’ that the KGB’s Chairman, Yuri Andropov often passed it personally straight to Andrei Gromyko, Brezhnev’s foreign minister. An officer messenger then waited for him to read the material, ‘information of the best quality on the situation in Germany and on discussions with the Western powers’, and returned it to the KGB’s headquarters. After Guillaume’s exposure Brezhnev had written a personal note to Brandt denying any personal knowledge of the espionage, but few had believed him because he too must have been one of his recipients and beneficiaries. Certainly, in political terms, Guillaume was in a position to reassure the Soviet bloc that détente was not a ruse, and supply crucial reports in 1973, when a potentially damaging political split had developed over policy between President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger on one side, and Washington DC’s European partners in NATO on the other. Such reliable information, in large quantities from a trusted source with proven, virtually unrestricted access, is the dream of every spy-master, but Wolf’s failure to act on my warning and the source was terminated, later forcing him to acknowledge that the episode had been “an own goal,, a bad one”. By then, however, Wolf’s almost mythological reputation had been established, and in January 1974 he had been awarded the GDR’s most coveted decoration, the Karl Marx medal, while his minister, Erich Miekle, had been appointed to full membership of the Politburo. Upon my return to Sofia I was met at the airport by the Soviet ambassador, General Sheventenko, who took me to a luxury flat in the centre of the city, formerly occupied by the ex-leader of the Greek Communist Party, and told to make it my own, as this was a reward for what I had accomplished for the KGB. It was a modern block, probably built just before the war, and my neighbour was an exceptionally tall woman, a former member of a handball team, who managed Radio Bulgaria’s English transmissions and compiled a weekly broadcast, not unlike Alastair Cooke’s Letter from America. Her husband, who was even taller, spent much of the year on an engineering project in Nigeria, so he was around very little. She told me a little of my apartment’s former occupant, which explained why it was decorated with relief wall maps of Greece. It was at this point that it was explained to me that the KGB had more plans for me, back in Africa. I had been given a warm welcome, but I was keen to returned to Rabat to be reunited with Barbara and meet my baby son Alex. My limited task, as I then saw it, had come to an end, and I was back in Africa, in good health and available to resume my work as a mercenary. However, this was not quite what the KGB had in mind for me, and my new role, as explained to me in Sofia, was to travel to Zambia and then Tanzania where, ostensibly, I was to manage a photographic safari business, the Selous Safari Park at Oyster Bay owned by an expatriate Briton, John Bailey. In reality I was taking instructions from a tall thin Russian who was supervising the construction of the new embassy in Lusaka, to cultivate vulnerable American diplomats and gain their confidence in the hope of recruiting them as sources. One of my missions had been to penetrate a British radio relay station outside Lusaka and report on any prospect of recruiting a source among the operators who were mainly ex-Royal Navy. Another mission was to Tanzania to report on the Chinese railways, and a supposedly secret airfield at Morogoro where I found a job with Humphrey Luckhurst as the manager of the Selous Safari Lodge until the beginning of the rainy season. This did not last long, and I planned to move to an island to help run a game fishing business, but a well-timed invitation to Moscow interrupted, just as I had been robbed of a large quantity of cash during a visit to the Bambino Club in Lusaka. Suddenly very short of money, an all expenses paid trip to Moscow sounded attractive. It was during this period, as I travelled across Africa talent-spotting likely targets that Nick visited me with a special message of encouragement: my information about Guillaume had proved absolutely authentic, and I had been congratulated by Leonid Brezhnev himself. Nick wanted me to come back to Moscow immediately, but I had too much work to do, and instead asked Nick to wait for a couple of weeks. Instead, Nick went swimming in the Indian Ocean where he encountered hundreds of Portuguese Men O’War and was badly stung. I am amazed he survived this experience, but he assured me that he was a bear hunter from Siberia, and could survive anything! As I was preparing to travel to Moscow I went to see the KGB rezident in Dar-es-Salaam who asked me to make contact with an American woman, the collector of shells who went beachcombing every day, and was married to the local Pan Am representative. According to the rezident, he was also suspected of being a CIA officer working under non-official cover, and my task was to befriend her and find out as much as I could about his real job. To make the encounter plausible I borrowed a book on shells, published by the oil company, from Luckhurst and pretended to be another collector so I could have an excuse to bump into her. Sure enough, according to plan, I ambled along the beach the next afternoon and spotted the woman carrying a wicker basket searching the sand for useful specimens. Within minutes we were chatting, although my knowledge of the subject was soon exhausted we continued to walk together, and she gently chastised me for using a plastic bag to collect shells because some contained dangerous toxins and their spikes could easily puncture the plastic, and my skin. Apparently this was a common hazard for shell collectors in the tropics, but she seemed unconcerned at my lack of professionalism. It seemed that my rather flimsy cover as an amateur had worked, and she invited me back to her house for a drink. Wishing to take my assignment slowly, I declined, but instead took her out to lunch at a nearby beach restaurant the following day, and afterwards we returned to her home where she took me up to her bedroom to show me her collection of shells. She also made it obvious that she was interested in more than my sparkling conversation and pretty soon we were writhing in bed, ripping each other’s clothes off and indulging in some passionate love-making. By the early evening, when I left her asleep with a gentle kiss on her cheek, I slipped quietly out of the house, none the wiser about her husband’s occupation. I had intended to move onto stage two of my mission the next day, but events overtook me. This episode resulted in her visiting Humphrey Luckhurst the next morning, sporting a black eye, and she asked him to tip me off that her husband had found out about our tryst and was after me. As a precaution I moved out of my hotel and stayed with Gloria, my English girlfriend who worked for the United Nations, and kept away from the lovely beachcomber. There was a curious sequel to this because when I finally left Dar-es-Salaam for Ethiopia a group of Americans got on the same plane who seemed quite hostile towards me. They all gave me what I took to be threatening glances and, fearing some ugly incident, I decided not to leave the plane with them when we landed. Sure enough, the US ambassador’s limousine drew up beside the aircraft and I realised the Americans were probably planning to snatch me as I came down the steps and maybe bundle me into the car. This may not be the kind of behaviour one might expect at an international airport, but even in those days all sorts of strange things happened in Addis Ababa. Fortunately, at that moment a group of Soviets turned up to escort me into the city, and the Americans were left scowling on the tarmac, apparently infuriated at having lost their chance to abduct me, or worse. I was dropped at my hotel, where I checked in, and then left a chalk mark on the wall outside as a signal to the local KGB. Doubtless they knew already of my arrival, but this procedure was to indicate my readiness for a rendezvous. According to my contact, whom I met the following day, the commendation I had received over the Guillaume affair had resulted in an invitation to Moscow, and my first step in my journey to the Soviet Union was an exchange of passports. I surrendered John Freeman’s passport and received one in the name of Eddie Herbert, together with an Aeroflot ticket, which I used to board a flight to Sheremetyevo. When the plane pulled to a halt and the doors opened I was welcomed by Nick’s big, smiling face, and a very impressive welcoming, uniformed committee at the bottom of the steps who gave me a smart salute. I was ushered through the airport controls, avoiding all the usual formalities, and as I only had cabin luggage with me, we walked straight through the terminal, with our military escort alongside until I was in the back of a limousine. It seemed I was some kind of a hero, for this was the kind of reception that I had seen Ken Drury have at the Yard. The official car took us down an empty, central lane of the highway and soon I had my first sight of Moscow. My first impression was of a very well organised city, though ‘regulated’ might be a more appropriate term. We passed huge buildings, set well back from the wide boulevards, and I was struck by the contrast of London and its higgledy-piggledy houses crowding in on the narrow roads. As I was gazing at Stalin’s wedding-cake skyscrapers Nick leaned over and said ‘We’re almost there’, as if he thought I had finally arrived at my ideological home. We rolled up at a huge hotel, the Rossiya, overlooking St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin, and as I stepped out of the car I was treated as a VIP, with the manager rushing forward to welcome me, help me register, and show me up to a magnificent suite. The lavish experience was so unreal that I began to get nervous, thinking that they must be up to something, and it would not last. Would it be like Bulgaria, where I had been given a night in luxury, followed by a month in the relative slum of the Struga? I decided to enjoy myself, and over the next few days I was given a whirlwind tour of all the major tourist sites, including a shuffle past old Lenin in his mausoleum. There was no waiting for hours in a queue outside, and we went straight to the front. At one point, when I mentioned how cold it was, I was presented with a fur hat of the kind worn only by generals and important politicians. Initially I was a little nervous about wearing it because I worried that it might be swapped ot swiped whenever I checked it in, but I soon learned that its quality gave it a ‘swipe-me-not’ status. Protected by the respect its owner must command in this oppressed society, it was untouchable. The highlight of my visit to Moscow was a magnificent banquet that took place in the Rossiya’s rooftop restaurant, guarded by uniformed KGB men at the entrance, where there was a large gathering of intelligence professionals, entertained by a band. Nick showed me the impressive night view from a huge picture window, and then showed me to my table for dinner. I soon gained the impression that this was some kind of initiation ceremony, not unlike some of the Masonic meetings I had attended in London. However, this was a state function, and I was escorted around the tables to be introduced everyone before they tucked in to the magnificent spread laid before us? Was this a regular event, or one thrown for my benefit? Either way, I enjoyed the apparently unlimited quantities of vodka, caviar, and salmon, interrupted only by frequent toasts and the constant appearance of senior officers at our table who were keen to make themselves known to me, with Nick interpreting in between mouthfuls. These, I presumed, were KGB management types from the Lubyanka who rarely left Moscow, and they were welcoming me into a fraternity. Among the dignitaries, completely unknown to me at the time, was Georgi Tsinev, the KGB’s First Deputy Chairman, and Brezhnev’s brother-in-law. No longer on probation, I was now aboard. It was not unlike a mafia celebration, in which I was being introduced to ‘the firm’, but the difference was that I was the golden boy with a commendation from Brezhnev himself, and everyone present was aware of it. The fact that this was, in my opinion, sheer beginner’s luck, as I had bumped into Nina entirely accidentally, with no planning involved, was apparently irrelevant. I had scored a considerable coup for the KGB and this was my reward. An invitation to Moscow was, so I was informed, a rare and signal honour for a field agent, and when I realised I was being feted as a star, and began to act the part. Certainly I looked the role, being relatively young, much fitter than I had been for years, deeply tanned by an African sun, and probably the embodiment of the white hunter, just in from the bush. With the KGB so used to dealing with homosexuals like Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, I must have appeared as a refreshing change, and few could doubt my heterosexual credentials. I had succeeded on all my assignments in Africa, and even in the single episode in Cotonou where my target had appeared reluctant; Kate had delivered the goods in the end. That particular experience had resulted in warnings being circulated to all KGB rezidenturas, alerting them to the possibility that the CIA had adopted the tactic of employing hookers to entrap its adversaries. The banquet, evidently thrown in my honour, had the desired impact on me. For the past couple of years I had been a fugitive, looking over my shoulder, operating under a false identity and living on my wits. Now I was being feted by Moscow’s most senior intelligence officers and toasted as a hero. Nothing like this could ever have happened in England, either in the army or the police, both hidebound rigid structures handicapped by a class system and snobbery. Yet here I was, surrounded by the top of the tree, celebrating the quality of information contained in my dossier. This was the same information that had become so dangerous for me in London, and later would be ridiculed and rejected by that other supposed British elite, the Security Service. Of course, as I was to learn, the KGB had been beguiled, like so many others, into thinking that Scotland Yard was incorruptible. It had never occurred to them that there was an opportunity here to be exploited, and that the Metropolitan Police was just as vulnerable to penetration as any other branch of the British establishment. I simply told the truth about London’s CID, and the KGB soon came to realise the accuracy of my dossier on corruption, especially when Detective Sergeant Nobby Pilcher went down for four years in October 1973, and two of his detective constables had received eighteen months. We had been at training school together, and had both served at Bow Street, and Nobby had featured in my dossier, written long before he had faced any charges. Put bluntly, the police could be bought as easily as anyone else, and probably with rather less of an investment. Nor were these few prosecutions an indication of the willingness of the Yard to clean the Augean stables. In reality the Met had wanted to perpetuate the myth of the single bad apple, and pretend that an isolated case of corruption had been rooted out and eliminated, with the implication that Nobby’s example had no wider implications for the rest of the force. There was a logic in this, for the alternative meant getting rid of most of the Met’s three thousand detectives and starting again, which would be hard, if not impossible to contemplate. My view was that once an officer had taken the smallest bung, perhaps from a Covent Garden street porter, he would take a bribe from almost anyone, which left the system wide open to exploitation by the KGB if it moved fast enough. However, as I was to learn from Nick, I had rather overwhelmed the KGB’s analysts, and had provided them with far too many personalities to study and too much information to absorb. There had been no argument with my general interpretation, but I had been so productive that I had choked the system, and it had been unable to process all my material, let alone recommend particular courses of action. The impact of my dossier had been such that a team of specialists were to be gathered to consider the matter further. On the day after the dinner I had another unusual experience. Nick turned up without warning to take me out to lunch, and accompanied me to a restaurant that appeared to be closed. He spoke a few magic words for us to get in, but after we had ordered some food he left me quite alone. There was just one other person in the restaurant, sitting diagonally opposite me, wearing distinctive glasses, who looked vaguely familiar. He turned and addressed me in quite good English, saying “that was a very good you did over Brandt”. I made some non-committal reply and thanked him for the compliment, but he did not introduce himself, and soon afterwards wiped his mouth with his napkin and left. When Nick turned up I asked him about the stranger who, I remarked, looked a little like his boss Yuri Andropov, and he replied with a smile “that was the Chairman”. So now I had been congratulated by the head of the KGB, the man who in 1982 would succeed Brezhnev as General-Secretary of the Communist Party. Over the next few days I was debriefed by Nick and other KGB officers who wanted to hear about my adventures in Dar-es-Salaam, and were also keen to learn my view on particular personalities in London. This went far beyond my knowledge of corruption at the Yard, and included brief personality profiles of numerous other people, including MPs, whose names had been mentioned to me by members of the Dirty Squad. I was, at the time, quite bitter about how the establishment had worked against me, so I was quite strident in my opinions, although I doubt I compromised any single individual to the extent that they might have become a target for blackmail. It was just that the KGB, isolated in Moscow and heavily reliant on the limited reporting from the rezidentura in London, wanted to know how the country worked, and I was happy to give my somewhat jaundiced perspective. As well as getting this off my chest, I was enjoying the attention, which included an entire new wardrobe. I had arrived in Moscow with very little, so I was escorted to the hard currency shops to buy suits, ties, sports trousers, shoes and a fur-lined leather coat. I was not only licensed to kill, I was now dressed to kill! |