Günter Guillaume

Hanning's initiative of moving the BND headquarters to Berlin was part of his publicized mission to move the intelligence service away from a purely sober analysis role and more towards being intimately involved in federal politics in Berlin, which of course happened.

Hanning's betrayal is seen as the biggest scandal in German intelligence circles since the so-called Guillaume affair caused Willy Brandt to resign his chancellorship in 1974.

Günther Guillaume was a spy for the East German regime.

The Stasi orchestrated his emigration to West Germany in 1956 under orders to penetrate the political system of the Federal Republic.

He became a member of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, and a close aide to Willy Brandt, who became chancellor in 1969.

When the BND was able to decipher encrypted Stasi communications, they eventually discovered Guillaume was a spy.

There have been lingering doubts ever since that the Stasi purposefully outed Guillaume in order to topple Brandt, whose appeasement Ostpolitik towards the GDR threatened the Soviet regime in East Germany.

Just like the Guillaume affair, Hanning's arrest could have serious political repercussions, as it comes in the middle of a process of a wide-reaching regulatory change affecting the German intelligence services.

East Germany's Stasi and its foreign intelligence arm the HVA, under Markus Wolf, the so-called man with no face, ran rings around the west for decades.

I've done a full video on Markus Wolf so I won't go over it all again here, but the headline case is Gunther Guillaume.

He was an East German spy who worked his way up to become a close aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Everyone's got a hard question

Every service has former chiefs who've gone into consulting, onto boards and onto advisory roles with foreign governments and wealthy clients.

Expect a lot of services to start checking who their retired seniors are still talking to.

Is this the new Guillaume or even a German Philby, as one British academic has put it? I think it's too early to say.

Guillaume and Philby worked for the enemy from the start.

And I was going to start with this question anyway, but everybody is asking themselves, how big is... is this espionage scandal.

And I want to tell you me on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the Gunther Guillaume scandal, which is when a German Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign in 1974, where there's a few things I'm not too old for, but this was before I was even born, narrowly, I must add.

This marks kind of the absolute low point when it comes to the credibility of German intelligence.

It turned out that a man working closely with the then chancellor was actually a spy of East Germany.

But what brought this down is fascinating.

Willy Brandt's top aide and the Social Democrat Party secretary was a guy named Gunter Guillaume, okay? And Guillaume was connected at the hip to Willy Brandt.

He was this kind of shifty-looking guy, frankly, always wore dark glasses.

He was always dressed impeccably, but he truly was ubiquitous.

When Brandt went on vacation, Guillaume went with Brandt and his family too.

They were that close.

And it was believed that basically Brandt was a womanizer.

Brandy Willy was his kind of nickname.

Please respect my honour as an officer.

Well, there it was, proof that Günter Guillaume, one of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's closest aides, was, in fact, an East German spy.

And this espionage scandal would shake the German Federal Republic to the core, eventually bringing down even the Chancellor himself.

So in this episode of Rights and Republics, we'll delve deep into one of the most fascinating German Cold War spy stories, the Guillaume Affair.

And so he presented himself as though he was kind of belonging to the right wing within the left wing party to the more conservative wing.

Also, I think to try and avoid kind of suspicions.

But whatever the case may be, the main point for our purposes here is that nobody suspected Günter Guillaume at this point of anything.

He was just a quiet, efficient guy with an impeccable work ethic, very happy to steadily climb the ladder, say all the right things, do all the right things, and kind of just go the normal way that he would have done at the time.