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Andrew also demonstrates that Germany rated as the second
most important target after the USA. The East German Hauptverwaltung
Aufklärung (HVA) in many cases was even more successful
than the KGB, and some agents did not realize that they were under
the control of the KGB while they thought that they were working for
the HVA. Their tasks were almost identical: ‘The chief priority of
both KGB and HVA influence operations during the 1950s and 1960s
was to discredit as many West German politicians as possible as neo-
Nazis and “revenge-seekers’’ ’ (p. 573). On the other hand, there were
persistent rumours about connections between West German politicians
and Soviet and East German intelligence, especially combined
with prejudices against Willy Brandt’s policy. Several of these rumours
could be cleared by Mitrokhin’s information. There was a file
on Brandt, codenamed POLYARNIK, in the KGB archives. On 15
June 1996, the German weekly, �ocus, accused Brandt of having been
a spy for the Soviets during the Second World War while he was
working in Scandinavia. Mitrokhin’s files proved that this was
untrue, and that Brandt had kept in touch not only with Moscow’s
Stockholm residency but also with members of the British and
American intelligence corps. He gave information to all of them with
the single motive to ‘hasten the defeat of Adolf Hitler’. When the
KGB tried to blackmail Brandt in 1962 it failed (p. 23). Another prominent
case was that of Herbert Wehner (codenamed KORNELIS),
who was classified as a ‘confidential contact’. Wehner was obviously
confident that he could not be blackmailed. He was valued so highly
that, according to Markus Wolf, ‘Mielke alone edited the reports on
conversations with Wehner for passing on to Honnecker’. 4 Mitrokhin’s
archive also suggests that there was ‘a KGB agent in the
entourage of Egon Bahr’ (not Bahr himself), who has not, so far, been
able to be identified (p. 594). Mitrokhin’s archive furthermore illustrates
the nature of Cold War operations against Western countries
and reveals the KGB’s influence on Western Communist parties. It
also makes clear the extent of penetration and persecution of the
Soviet churches and the KGB’s activities in Poland in connection with
Karol Wojtyla’s rise as a moral authority against the Soviet system
after his election as Pope John Paul II in October 1978. Anyone who
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The Mitrokhin Archive
4 Markus Wolf, Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen (Munich, 1998),
pp. 207–9.