Media report: Willy Brandt was kept as an informant by the US military intelligence service CIC for four years

Former Chancellor Willy Brandt was listed as an informant by the US military intelligence service CIC. Secret documents show that he met agents more than 200 times between 1948 and 1952. In particular, he passed on information about the SED and the Soviet armed forces in the Soviet Zone and later in the GDR.

Again Spiegel reported, a list from the US Military Intelligence Corps (CIC) dated June 1, 1952 has now emerged. It bears the names of German and Austrian informants. The document is arranged alphabetically and contains dates of birth, nationalities and addresses of the sources as well as the times at which the respective collaborations ended.

One line says “Brandt, Willy”, lives in Berlin-Schlachtensee. Collaboration ended: March 17, 1952. At the end a five is noted, which, according to the CIC classification, meant that either the CIC or Brandt had lost interest in the collaboration.

The file is part of an otherwise secret bundle of the CIC on Brandt, which the German-American Thomas Boghardt was allowed to examine. The historian Boghardt is a senior scientist at the Center for Military History of the US Army in Washington, DC His book on the history of the US secret services in the FRG is coming out soon.

Accordingly, Brandt had been writing reports to the CIC since 1948. The Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets was already underway and the division of Germany was imminent. As an SPD functionary and later as a member of the Bundestag, Brandt mainly reported on the Soviet occupation zone (SBZ), which was to become the GDR in 1949. The original reports were probably destroyed, but Boghardt was able to access so-called control sheets, i.e. copies. Specifically, Brandt passed on information about the SED and its functionaries, the FDJ, political prisoners in the “Yellow Misery” in Bautzen, as well as various combines and infrastructure elements, but also about the telephone equipment of the Red Army in the Soviet Zone.

The SPD headquarters was then in Hanover and was looking for capable young politicians. Brandt left the Norwegian civil service – he fled the Nazis to Scandinavia – and in early 1948 became a representative of the SPD party executive in West Berlin and a kind of ambassador for the Social Democrats to the Allied Control Council, as biographer Peter Merseburger reports. He took back German citizenship. Relations with the victorious powers were henceforth one of his tasks, including with the CIC. As a result, he arranged for the Americans to have at least one appointment with SPD leader Kurt Schumacher.

The CIC turned out to be a mixture of police and secret service. The US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who comes from Fürth in Franconia, also served there as a young man. In occupied Germany, the secret service had enormous powers: it could arrest “suspects”, open letters and tap telephones. Initially, the Americans persecuted Nazi criminals, with the emergence of the East-West conflict they turned against the Soviet Union and the Soviet Zone or GDR. Der Spiegel characterizes the future Federal Chancellor around 1950 with the following words:

“Brandt, later revered as a détente, was a cold warrior at the time who welcomed the American policy of containment towards the Soviets.”

He was a friend of the Western powers who “hates communism like a true socialist”.

The historian Boghardt claims that Brandt acted behind the backs of his comrades. This is supported by the secret meetings between Brandt and the US agents, the payment and his CIC registration with the number “O-35-VIII”. According to Boghardt, such codes with an O were assigned to actors who passed on information from organizations to which they had special access due to their position, in Brandt’s case it was the East Office of the Berlin SPD.

more on the subject – Fasbender in conversation with Peter Brandt – “Relationships were better before”