LETTER FROM BERLIN
December 1953. Reinhard Gehlen, head of the West German secret service, learns from one of his agents that a member of the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then the main opposition force to the Christian Union- Democrat (CDU) of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, is ready to play informant. Deal done.
For nine years, this “mole” will deliver all kinds of first-hand information about the activities of the SPD. Once transcribed by the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) – the name given from 1956 to the organization headed by Reinhard Gehlen –, these will be transmitted to the head of the Federal Chancellery, Hans Globke, before landing on the office of Konrad Adenauer himself.
Revealed by the Suddeutsche Zeitungat the beginning of April, in a fascinating article entitled “The German Watergate”, this incredible surveillance operation is the heart of a 1,500-page book which will be published, mid-May, under the title Geheime Dienste. Die politische Inlandspionage des BND in der Ära Adenauer (“Secret Service. Spying on National Politics by the BND in the Adenauer Era”, Ch. Links Verlag, untranslated).
For its author, the historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke, professor emeritus at the Technical University of Dresden and member of the independent commission on the history of the BND, this affair even deserves the qualifier of “Great Watergate”.
“What didn’t work one day in Washington worked for ten years in Bonn. Not with microphones, but thanks to a traitor coming from the very ranks of the SPD. » Klaus-Dietmar Henke, historian
Why such a superlative? Because, in 1972, the bogus plumbers sent by Republican President Richard Nixon’s entourage to install microphones in the Watergate building, the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, were arrested on the spot. While in Germany, the SPD surveillance operation took place from 1953 to 1962 without anyone knowing anything about it. Hence the expression of “Great Watergate”used by Klaus-Dietmar Henke in an interview with Die Zeit : “What didn’t work one day in Washington worked for ten years in Bonn. Not with microphones, but thanks to a traitor coming from the very ranks of the SPD. And not with the help of a team of fake plumbers but with the instrumentalization of the foreign intelligence services by the head of government. »
Some 500 reports
If this affair had been revealed at the time, would the consequences for Konrad Adenauer have been the same as for Richard Nixon, whom the investigation into the Watergate scandal prompted to resign in 1974? Impossible to say.
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