audio_story · the-most-helpful-man-in-the-room
{
"kind": "truestory",
"slug": "the-most-helpful-man-in-the-room",
"title": "The Most Helpful Man in the Room",
"voice": "25dfa8ed-dcd0-446e-8490-5b87da2ee760",
"script": "Early on the morning of 24 April 1974, officers of the federal criminal police knocked at a flat in Bad Godesberg, the diplomatic suburb at the southern end of Bonn. They had a warrant from the federal prosecutor.\nThe man who opened the door was forty-seven and balding. His wife was in the flat, and so was their sixteen-year-old son.\nHe did not argue and he did not deny anything. What he said went into the arresting officers' report, was printed within days by Der Spiegel and every other paper in the country, and was read back to him at his trial in Düsseldorf the following year.\nHe was an officer of the National People's Army of the German Democratic Republic and an officer of the Ministry for State Security, and he asked that his honour as an officer be respected.\nThey searched the flat and took him away. He had been at his desk in the government quarter the previous working day.\nHis name was Günter Guillaume, and for the previous two years he had worked at the desk outside the office of the Chancellor of West Germany, handling his party correspondence, his diary and his post.\nThe Chancellor had been told about him eleven months earlier. He had been asked to change nothing, and he had agreed.\nGuillaume and his wife Christel had crossed from East to West in 1956 and presented themselves as refugees from communism. They joined the Social Democratic Party in Frankfurt in 1957.\nThey were officers of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, East Germany's foreign intelligence service, sent over with no target and no timetable. The instruction was to settle, blend in and wait.\nChristel's mother was already living in Frankfurt, which gave them an address and a reason for choosing the city, and in the files back east he was carried under a cover name: Hansen.\nThey opened a small coffee and tobacco shop with a photocopying business attached, and for the next fourteen years they were simply two hard-working members of a local party branch. That is what a sleeper is. The value is in the years when nothing happens.\nWhen Der Spiegel and the rest went round the Frankfurt Social Democrats in the weeks after the arrest, asking what the man had been like, the quotations they printed all had the same shape: the mailings, the halls, the lift to the station, the one who stayed to lock up.\nThat work got him a seat on Frankfurt city council, and then the running of campaigns, and in 1969 he ran the Frankfurt campaign of the federal transport minister, Georg Leber.\nLeber's word was good enough for Bonn, and in January 1970 Günter Guillaume joined the staff of the Federal Chancellery.\nThe Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution ran the standard check on a man who had come out of East Germany in 1956, and cleared him. There was nothing in the file, because there was nothing to find.\nThe man whose Chancellery it was had taken office a few months earlier, in October 1969, on a coalition majority of twelve seats, after a life that reads like three lives stacked on top of one another.\nWilly Brandt was born Herbert Frahm in Lübeck, the son of an unmarried shop assistant. He left Germany ahead of the Gestapo at nineteen and took the cover name he would keep for the rest of his life.\nIn 1940 the Germans caught him in occupied Norway wearing a Norwegian uniform, failed to recognise him, and let him go. His own country had already taken his citizenship away.\nHe came home to a bombed nation that could never quite decide whether he was a patriot or a deserter, and he was Mayor of Berlin the year the wall went up through the middle of it.\nAs Chancellor he did the thing he had been arguing for his entire adult life: he stopped pretending the East was not there. Treaties with Moscow, with Warsaw, with East Berlin — which in practice meant telephone lines, visitor permits, and West Berliners allowed across to the eastern half of their own city in their millions.\nIn December 1970, in Warsaw, he laid a wreath at the memorial to the ghetto uprising, and then, in the wet, in front of the cameras, without having told anyone he meant to do it, he knelt down on the stone and stayed there.\nThe photograph went round the world, and the Nobel Peace Prize followed in 1971.\nAnd the whole time, at home, the same accusation followed him about: that he was soft on communism, an émigré who had spent the war somewhere else and could not be trusted with the nation.\nIn 1972 the Chancellery made Guillaume a personal assistant to the Chancellor — persönlicher Referent, in charge of party liaison, correspondence, the diary and the travel. Sixteen years after crossing the border with a suitcase and a story, he had the desk outside the door.\nThat spring nearly ended Brandt's government anyway. His majority had been bleeding away over the Eastern treaties, and on 27 April the opposition moved to replace him mid-term.\nRainer Barzel had the numbers on paper and everybody in the Bundeshaus knew it. The deputies filed through for a secret ballot, and then the result was read out in the chamber. Barzel, 247. He needed 249.\nTwo votes short, and nobody could find them. A Christian Democrat deputy called Julius Steiner later admitted, in public and to a Bundestag inquiry, that he had taken fifty thousand marks to abstain, and in his memoirs Markus Wolf, the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, acknowledged that his own people had put money into making sure that vote failed.\nThe Ministry for State Security had bought Bundestag votes to save a West German Chancellor.\nThrough the autumn of 1972 Günter Guillaume worked to get that Chancellor re-elected, arranging halls and mailings and the schedule for a man who was speaking somewhere different almost every night.\nIt was the campaign that put the Chancellor's first name on a lapel badge — Willy wählen, vote Willy — with Günter Grass touring the country for him at the head of an initiative of writers and actors.\nOn 19 November the country voted, and turned out in numbers it has never reached since: 91.1 per cent. The Social Democrats took 45.8 per cent and finished ahead of the Christian Democrats for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic.\nIt was the largest vote the party had ever been given, and it bought Willy Brandt eighteen months.\nDays later he went into hospital to have his vocal cords operated on. The voice that had carried the campaign had given out, and he began his second term unable to speak above a whisper.\nGuillaume had started three floors down, handling the government's dealings with trade unions and associations, and worked his way up to the Chancellor's own office in two years. The job there was mostly paper: a Chancellery takes in sacks of it a day, and somebody has to decide what the Chancellor sees, and in what order.\nBy 1973 the argument of Brandt's whole life was coming good on paper. That June the treaty with East Germany came into force — two German states, each conceding that the other existed — after Bavaria had failed to have it struck down in the Constitutional Court as a betrayal of the nation.\nIn September the two Germanys walked into the United Nations on the same afternoon and took their seats a few rows apart. The man who had made that possible was fifty-nine years old and at the height of everything he had.\nThat same year, in Cologne, the counter-intelligence branch of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was going back through East German agent radio traffic recorded in the nineteen-fifties.\nThis was how East Berlin talked to its people in the West: a voice on shortwave reading out strings of digits, night after night, to agents who wrote them down and decoded them by hand. West German listening stations had recorded those broadcasts for years and kept them, unread.\nExactly how a batch of them came to be readable two decades later has never been set out in public, and the Federal Office has never explained it. What the office did put on the record, in its evidence to the Bundestag afterwards, is that in 1973 its people were reading messages sent in the fifties, and that most of what they got was long-dead administration.\nAmong it, congratulations. One message to an agent on his marriage, and another, some time afterwards, on the birth of a son. Warm, brief, entirely human, and dated.\nThe service ran those dates against the family details of people holding sensitive posts, and found a couple in Frankfurt whose wedding fell on one and whose child had been born on the other.\nSeventeen years of flawless cover — the shop, the party card, the council seat, the desk in the Chancellery — snagged on birthday greetings.\nThe official who made the match has never been named in public. What the match was worth in law is not in dispute: it was not enough to arrest anybody.\nThere was no document, no dead drop, no courier and no witness. Two dates in a twenty-year-old file were pointing at a decorated party loyalist standing three feet from a Nobel peace laureate.\nSo the service opened a file on the family, put people on the flat in Bad Godesberg, and settled in to wait for him to do something a court would recognise.\nNollau's explanation, given afterwards under questioning and repeated in his memoir Das Amt, was why they had not simply moved him out of the Chancellor's office: a folder that stops arriving is a message, and if the man read it there would be nothing left to catch him doing.\nThat left one person who had to be told, because the plan did not work unless he agreed to it.\nTuesday, 29 May 1973. Nollau took what he had to the Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Genscher took it up the hill to the Palais Schaumburg, the small white palace on the Rhine that West Germany used as its Chancellery.\nNo minute was taken, and no photograph exists of that afternoon. Everything known about it comes from three memoirs and one set of hearings: Nollau's Das Amt, published in 1978; Brandt's Erinnerungen, 1989; Genscher's Erinnerungen, 1995; and the evidence all three gave to the committee of inquiry the Bundestag set up in the summer of 1974.\nNone of those accounts describes the room. What they describe is the request, and on that they agree.\nGenscher asked for the Chancellor's time without the staff present. The evidence he had to show him would have fitted in an envelope: a wedding date, the birthday of a child, and nothing else at all.\nAnd what he asked for was that the Chancellor keep Günter Guillaume exactly where he was.\nNot move him, not lighten his duties, not hint. Behave in the office and in the car and on the trips precisely as he had behaved the week before, for as long as it took — and nobody in the room could say how long that would be, because there was nothing to build a timetable out of.\nKeeping him meant leaving an officer of a hostile service in charge of the incoming correspondence of the head of a NATO government, with the Chancellor's knowledge, indefinitely.\nBrandt said yes.\nIn none of the accounts does he ask for time to think about it. In all of them, he agrees that afternoon.\nHe would keep the man on, work with him as before, and tell nobody: not his ministers, not his staff, not his wife.\nWhich meant that from the following morning the Chancellor of the Federal Republic went in to work and behaved, in front of the man at the desk outside his door, as though the conversation of 29 May had never taken place. He did that for eleven months.\nOn everything except the answer the accounts pull apart exactly where you would expect them to. Brandt's Erinnerungen has the suspicion described to him as thin, and himself asked to do nothing about it. Nollau's Das Amt has a Chancellor left in no doubt about what was being alleged. Both men were in the same room, and both books are still in print.\nWhat nobody disputes is what happened next, which is that nothing happened next. Guillaume kept his desk, kept the correspondence, kept his place on the travel list, and was given more to do rather than less.\nThat July, Brandt took his summer holiday where he always took it, in Norway — the country that had hidden him when Germany wanted him dead, and his wife Rut's country before it was his refuge.\nA Chancellor does not stop being a Chancellor in July, so the government sent the work north by courier: papers from Bonn, from the ministries, from the alliance, with NATO material among them.\nThere was one aide up there to handle it, for about three weeks, and it was Günter Guillaume. The bag arrived, and he was the man who opened it, sorted it and carried it in.\nThat holiday post is the part of the affair the committee examined most closely, because it was the plainest. Nollau's evidence was that it had never occurred to him the Chancellor would take the man on holiday. Brandt's was that he had been asked to change nothing and had changed nothing. Both answers are in the record of the hearings, and they cannot both be comfortable.\nWhether the watchers from Cologne went north as well was never established in public. What the committee did establish was the material: government papers, ministry papers, alliance papers, NATO among them, handled for three weeks by a man under suspicion of being an East German officer, in another country, a long way from anyone investigating him.\nBack in Bonn the arrangement held through the autumn and the winter. Guillaume stayed on the travel list and in the outer office, and the watchers watched the flat and waited for one wrong evening.\nIt was not a good autumn in any case. Herbert Wehner, the most powerful man in Brandt's own parliamentary party, went to Moscow that September and let journalists know that in his opinion the Chancellor's leadership was tepid, then came home and withdrew none of it.\nThe oil embargo arrived in October, and by November there were Sundays with no cars on the autobahns at all, families walking their children down the middle of empty motorways because driving had been banned.\nIn December, in Prague, Brandt signed the treaty with Czechoslovakia, the last of the Eastern treaties, and the paperwork for it moved through the same office as everything else.\nIn February the public-service unions struck and he settled at eleven per cent, which did him damage on his own side.\nEleven months of surveillance produced no courier, no dead drop, no photograph of Günter Guillaume doing anything at all.\nThey arrested him anyway.\nWhy April, after eleven months of nothing, was one of the questions the committee put later, and the answer amounted to this: the case was not getting any better and the risk of him being tipped off was not getting any smaller.\nSo: the morning in Bad Godesberg. Christel was arrested the same day. Their son learned what his parents were from the police, and thirty years later he wrote a book about his father under his mother's name, Pierre Boom.\nBy that evening it had stopped being a security matter. An East German agent had been working outside the Chancellor's door, and the government had known since May.\nThe newspapers ran the pictures they already had: a pleasant, balding man in a suit at the Chancellor's shoulder, in the background of official photographs nobody had ever looked at twice.\nThe question they asked was not what he had taken. It was who had known, and since when, and why the Chancellor had gone on holiday with him afterwards.\nGuillaume had also travelled with Brandt on the campaign journeys and knew his private routine at close quarters, and within days what he might have reported, and to whom, was being discussed all over Bonn and printed nowhere plainly.\nFor twelve days the Federal Republic did very little else. Genscher had to explain in public why his service had left an agent in the Chancellery for eleven months, the opposition demanded an inquiry, and the Chancellery started listing every document the man could have touched since 1972 on the assumption that all of it was gone.\nThe argument that mattered was already taking its final shape: not what Guillaume had sent east, but whether the Chancellor had been properly warned in May 1973 and what he had done about it. That question was put to Nollau, to Genscher and eventually to Brandt, and the answers did not fit together then either.\nThe papers ran it every morning: the security failure, the eleven months, the holiday in Norway.\nFor the first week the coalition held the line in public and said the Chancellor was going nowhere. In the second week the tone changed, the coalition partners began counting their votes, and members of Brandt's own party started saying, on the record, that the government needed to be able to speak with authority again.\nOn Monday 6 May 1974 the leadership of the Social Democratic Party met in Bonn. Wehner was there, and Helmut Schmidt, and the men who would decide what happened next were all in the room.\nThere is no minute of that meeting, and the versions given afterwards do not entirely match. Whether Wehner helped push Brandt through the door has been argued over in every biography of both men since; Wehner denied it, and Brandt, in Erinnerungen, insisted the decision had been his own and nobody else's.\nWhat survives is the letter, which is in the federal archives, and which anybody can look at.\nIt is short, it is typed, it is dated 6 May 1974, and it is signed with the name a nineteen-year-old had taken in exile to stay alive.\nIt is addressed to the Federal President, Gustav Heinemann, whose residence, the Villa Hammerschmidt, stands a few hundred yards along the same stretch of the Rhine as the Chancellery — close enough to walk, which is how the government of a country of sixty million people changed hands that night.\nIn it Brandt wrote that he took political responsibility for negligence in connection with the Guillaume espionage affair, and declared his resignation from the office of Federal Chancellor.\nThat is the wording. Not guilt for the espionage; responsibility for the negligence.\nHe added a line about the attempts being made to use his private life against him. He wrote nothing at all about 29 May 1973, or about the request that had been made to him that afternoon, or about the answer he had given.\nTwelve days of front pages had been asking who knew what and when, and the letter answered none of it.\nThe Deutsche Presse-Agentur put it on the wire shortly before midnight, and the late news read it out to a country that had gone to bed with a Chancellor and woke up without one.\nTwelve days earlier, the only people in the Federal Republic who knew that Willy Brandt had been warned about Günter Guillaume were Nollau, Genscher, a handful of officers in Cologne, and Brandt.\nHeinemann accepted it, and the resignation took effect the next morning, four years and seven months after Brandt had first walked into the Palais Schaumburg. He told the cabinet and stayed on as chairman of his party.\nThe following evening he spoke to the country for a few minutes. He did not use the time to explain 29 May 1973 either.\nIt was the first time since Ludwig Erhard in 1966 that a West German Chancellor had gone in the middle of a term, and on 16 May the Bundestag elected Helmut Schmidt in his place.\nThe treaties stayed. The telephone lines stayed open, the visitor permits went on being issued, and the crossings at Christmas went on happening. The man who had built all of it was out, over an aide he had been asked to go on greeting in the mornings.\nThe committee of inquiry sat through the rest of 1974 and reported the following year, having gone through the chain — what Nollau had told Genscher, what Genscher had told Brandt, and what had been done in the eleven months between. It criticised the handling at both ends and prosecuted nobody.\nGuillaume spent a year and a half on remand. In December 1975 the higher regional court in Düsseldorf convicted him of treason and sentenced him to thirteen years; the judgment rested on the old radio intercepts and on what he had said at his own front door. Christel, who had been running material of her own out of the party machine in Hesse, was sentenced to eight.\nChristel was traded east in an agent exchange in the spring of 1981 and Günter in the autumn of the same year, and East Germany received them the way a state receives officers home from a long posting: promotion, decorations, a pension.\nMarkus Wolf ran the service that sent them for more than thirty years, and Western intelligence could not obtain a photograph of him until the late nineteen-seventies; in the trade he was the man without a face. The Guillaume operation was the deepest penetration his service ever achieved.\nIn the memoirs he published in 1997, Man Without a Face, he set it down as one of the worst mistakes of his career. By his own account it amounted to putting the ball into his own net.\nHis reason was Brandt himself: the one Western leader who had spent his entire standing on making the division of Germany easier to live with, and the reason there had been anything to negotiate about at all.\nBrandt never held office again. In November 1989 he stood in Berlin among the crowds at the opened wall, an old man of seventy-five, and said that what belonged together was now growing together.\nHe died in 1992, two years after the two Germanys became one country, and was buried after a state ceremony in the city he had governed when the wall went up.\nGünter Guillaume died in 1995, in that reunited country, holding the medals of a state that no longer existed and a rank in an army that had been disbanded.\nThe official photographs are still in the archives, thousands of them: Willy Brandt at a lectern, on a platform, getting out of a car in some provincial town.\nAnd in a great many of them there is a pleasant, balding man standing just behind his right shoulder, holding a folder, waiting to be handed something.\n",
"synopsis": "In 1956 a young couple crossed from East Germany into the West and asked for asylum as refugees from communism. They were nothing of the kind. Günter and Christel Guillaume were officers of East German foreign intelligence, sent with no target and no timetable — just orders to settle, blend in and wait. So they opened a coffee and tobacco shop in Frankfurt, joined the Social Democratic Party, and did the dullest work in politics for years: mailing lists, duplicating fluid, the folding chairs after the meeting, the man still there at eleven at night licking envelopes. Everyone remarked on how reliable he was. Nobody asked anything else. By 1972 he had the desk outside the door of Willy Brandt — Chancellor, architect of Ostpolitik, Nobel laureate, the man who had knelt at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, and the Western leader East Berlin least wanted to lose.\n\nThen, in 1973, an analyst pulled old intercepted East German radio traffic from a file: congratulatory messages to an unnamed agent, timed to a wedding and to the birth of a son. Seventeen years of flawless cover snagged on birthday greetings. But dates are not proof, and to build a case counter-intelligence needed him left in place, working, unaware — which meant the Chancellor had to be told, and then asked to behave perfectly normally. Greet him in the morning. Take the folder. Say nothing. For as long as it takes. The difficulty is that Guillaume's gift, the thing that carried him through eighteen years of party machinery, was reading rooms: knowing which folder was wanted before anyone asked for it. Any adjustment at all would be a message, delivered to the one man in the building certain to receive it. Brandt had spent his career being called soft on communism, and now he had to decide what a careful man does with a suspicion he can neither act on nor forget.",
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"durationSeconds": 1562
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