Rigged

Admired abroad, Brandt had become an increasingly divisive figure at home. He had failed to anticipate the domestic uproar his foreign policy would generate. He put it best: “The battle over the treaties had become a struggle to overthrow my government.”31 Empowered by a series of defections, Barzel pursued a vote of no confidence. Neither the Soviet Union nor East Germany could stop him from trying to unseat Brandt. An electoral mechanism in the West German constitution, Article 67, permitted a constructive vote of no confidence in the chancellor. “It was really important [whether] to pass those treaties,” recalled Joseph Wippl, the former CIA officer. “I must say I give Barzel credit for rolling the dice on the no-confidence vote.”32

Barzel aimed to reverse, by ballot and at the eleventh hour, the policies of Ostpolitik.

Interference in the vote of no confidence had little to do with ideology—Brandt was no Communist—but much to do with the interests of the Soviet Union. “Many in Moscow saw in Chancellor Willy Brandt and his coalition partners for their policies,” Barzel, the opposition leader, later wrote.33

Moscow worked through Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s feared and elusive spymaster. “I knew Wolf personally,” said Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general. “West Germany was totally infiltrated by the East Germans, and Markus Wolf in that sense was their number one man.” Wolf led the Stasi’s foreign intelligence directorate for more than three decades. In his memoirs, published in 1997, Wolf detailed how he manipulated his targets—most famously, by planting so-called Romeo Spies inside West Germany, who then seduced women with access to state secrets. “The link between romance and espionage is no invention of mine,” he wrote. “But if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.” Wolf was comfortable crossing boundaries to achieve his objectives. And, like many in East Germany, he valued Brandt, whom he described as an “engaging, intelligent, [and] morally upright man.”34

In early 1972, as Brandt’s domestic standing faltered, Wolf and other Eastern leaders lent a helping hand. Brezhnev announced that he would consider recognizing the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union—a tactical move meant to bolster support for the Moscow Treaty, détente, and Brandt. In February, the East German Politburo temporarily implemented its transit accord with West Germany; more than a million residents of West Berlin then visited the other side of the Iron Curtain. Such maneuvers, all meant to showcase the benefits of Brandt’s policies, intensified after Barzel told his colleagues, on April 19, that he would call for a vote of no confidence. Wolf referred to the subsequent week as the “Protect Brandt Week.” On April 25, the East German Politburo offered concessions in ongoing treaty discussions to enhance Brandt’s reputation as a negotiator. Barzel, by this point, had cried foul. “As Barzel complains, the numerous steps taken by the Soviets or East Germans in the last several weeks have cumulatively had effects on German opinion,” a U.S. embassy official in West Germany reported.35

Washington watched closely. “This is the first time in the whole postwar history that anyone has attempted a vote of no confidence. It shows how weak [Brandt’s] government is,” Kissinger, still the national security adviser, told Nixon.36 Just a year and a half earlier, these two men had attempted to interfere in another parliamentary electoral process, in Chile, to prevent Salvador Allende’s confirmation. But on this occasion, America’s puppeteers were reduced to spectators.

The Soviet Union, though, was at the center of this saga. Brandt believed that Brezhnev had “staked his entire reputation” on the treaties, while Kissinger predicted that “Brezhnev will be finished if the treaties don’t get ratified.” For Moscow, the stakes were indeed high—too high, in fact, to manipulate minds and hope for the best. Ballots had to be bought. “Everyone was buying votes,” Wolf said in 1996, with a touch of exaggeration and self-exoneration.37

The KGB had tried to interfere directly in the vote. In a closed-door meeting, a Soviet representative had asked Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, why he was not “buying parliamentarians,” and then signaled that Moscow could provide any needed funds. Bahr learned later that the KGB was ready to deliver a “suitcase full of money” for buying votes.38 Presumably for a host of reasons—both ethical and practical—Bahr refused the advance.

Moscow, desperate to protect Brandt, also activated the Stasi. “We received a directive from Moscow … to do everything we could to keep Brandt in power,” Kopp explained, an account confirmed by Wolf and KGB archives.39 The Soviet Union, lacking the relationships to approach conservative lawmakers directly, had to work through Bahr, a middleman. The Stasi, by contrast, had spent decades penetrating West German society. “The Stasi was everywhere,” said Bobby Inman, the former CIA deputy director. Porter Goss “feared the Stasi” while stationed in Europe as a CIA officer in the 1960s. “I would not have put anything past them,” he said. “They were thugs with files on everybody.”40

Because Barzel called the motion just days before it was held, the Stasi had to move quickly. Manipulating an electoral process was not the norm for the Stasi, which focused on information gathering abroad and mass surveillance at home.41 Rigging the vote presented major risks, including detection. But to protect Brandt, East German officials could not just watch—they had to act.

The Stasi had two aces up its sleeve: Steiner and Wagner, the corrupted lawmakers.

As the vote approached, Horst Kopp and his colleagues concocted a plan: to offer both Steiner and Wagner 50,000 deutschemarks (roughly $97,000 in 2020 values) to abstain from the vote of no confidence. The final tally would be close, and robbing Barzel of two votes—Steiner and Wagner belonged to his coalition—could prove pivotal. Kopp, though, was worried about exposing Wagner. “I was partly against using Wagner because I did not want to burn him,” he said. But ultimately, he and his colleagues felt they had no choice. Moscow had issued an order, and sustaining Brandt’s government was “a question between war and peace,” Kopp told himself, because “if the Eastern contracts didn’t get ratified, then [Ostpolitik] is finished.”42

The Stasi next moved to secure Steiner’s and Wagner’s cooperation. Both men had, by this point, already compromised their integrity, increasing the likelihood that they would accept the bribes. Steiner agreed almost immediately. When pressed by Fleissman, Wagner did as well. “His debts, his position, everything was on the line” in the vote, Kopp said, because “without the money from us, he would have already been bankrupted.” The pressure took a toll on Wagner. Ahead of the vote, he took “strong stimulants” to help him remain “above water,” according to Benedikt Schwarzer, his grandson.43

The day of the vote, Wagner and Steiner joined their colleagues in the Bundestag. By all accounts, Brandt was prepared for his government to collapse. Later, he wrote that he had “accepted the possibility of defeat.”44 But unbeknownst to him, when Wagner and Steiner cast their anonymous ballots, they abstained in service of a foreign power.

Once lawmakers had taken their seats, the president of the Bundestag announced the results: “Dr. Barzel, proposed by the conservatives, has not achieved the majority of the votes.” The motion had failed. Only 247 lawmakers had cast their ballots against Brandt—2 short of the 249 required. Members of Brandt’s coalition embraced. A few even attempted to hoist him into the air. Barzel, meanwhile, shook his head in disbelief. “Brandt Defeats Move to Oust Him,” read the front page of The New York Times.45

Wagner’s and Steiner’s betrayals had cost Barzel the chancellorship. Covert electoral interference, sometimes used to generate change, had in this instance prevented change from taking place. While Brandt celebrated, so did the Stasi. “We were all very happy and proud,” recalled Kopp, who received a medal for his efforts. High-ranking politicians alluded to the operation privately. Just before the vote of no confidence, East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, had told Egon Bahr that Brandt would persist “not least with our support and thanks to our measures.”46 Then, in May 1972, Honecker wrote to Nicolae Ceauşescu, the head of Romania, about the effectiveness of his government’s methods:

We took several measures to support the Brandt government shortly before the vote of no confidence that had been presented to the Bundestag by the CDU/CSU… . We proceeded because this government is obviously more convenient for all of us than a government under the leadership of Barzel and Strauss.47

For Moscow, maintaining Brandt’s government came with immediate benefits. Three weeks after the vote failed, the Bundestag ratified the treaties with Warsaw and Moscow. Confidence in Barzel’s leadership plummeted. A year later, he resigned as the leader of the conservative bloc. “His stock dropped dramatically when he forced a no-confidence vote against Mr. Brandt in April 1972 and lost by two votes,” explained a New York Times feature titled “Exit Mr. Barzel.”48

Brandt, meanwhile, rose to new heights. In the November 1972 election, his coalition secured 272 seats, compared with just 224 for the conservatives, giving Brandt a “firm mandate,” according to one press report, “to continue [his] bold Eastern policy of normalizing relations with the Communist states of Europe.”49 The opportunity to reverse Ostpolitik had come and gone. “That second election confirmed the legitimacy of the former vote,” Joseph Wippl, the former CIA officer, said. “It re-stabilized the government, and it showed that the majority of Germans were on Brandt’s wavelength regarding Ostpolitik.”50

Relatively simple covert electoral interference operations can alter the course of nations. Consider what would have happened had the Stasi done nothing. In the immediate term, Brandt would have fallen from power, and his treaties with Moscow and Warsaw would not have been ratified. Ostpolitik would have collapsed as a failed and radical foreign policy gambit. As time progressed, Barzel’s government would have isolated East Germany anew. The two superpowers, without the groundwork of Ostpolitik, would have struggled to achieve a period of détente. Brezhnev, as Kissinger predicted, might have been ousted as the Soviet leader. And in the long term, the reunification of Germany, precipitated by deepened ties between East and West Germany, would have unfolded entirely differently, as would the trajectory of Soviet history. The very arc of the Cold War, therefore, might have been transformed—if not for covert action.

Today, Brandt is rightly remembered as one of the Cold War’s pivotal leaders. “In Willy Brandt,” writes historian Timothy Garton Ash, “Germany has a historical figure at least touched with greatness.”51 And yet Brandt owes his legacy, at least in part, to a foreign intelligence service. Despite his talents as a diplomat, he needed the Stasi’s help to preserve his chancellorship and, ultimately, to change the world.

Nearly everyone had expected Brandt to be ousted. When he wasn’t, suspicions immediately arose that someone had paid members of the opposition to abstain. “One or more Christian Democrats … obviously voted against Dr. Barzel,” read an article the morning after the vote of no confidence.52 Joseph Wippl encountered ceaseless speculation about interference in the contest. “I knew that a couple of people were bribed in the vote,” he recalled. “But I didn’t know where the money came from.”53

The losing side, lacking evidence of foreign interference, was left paranoid and bitter. Franz Josef Strauss, a conservative leader, called the vote’s failure “one of the biggest scandals in the history of [West Germany].” In his memoirs, Barzel lamented that “vote buying and national treason were in the game when it got to the stalemate between Brandt and me in the German Bundestag on April 27, 1972. This is how politics was done. Without this illegality, German history, and also my personal life, would have taken a different course.” Even Brandt, who benefited from the Stasi’s operation, suspected foul play. “Since the ballot was secret, it will never be known how the voting went,” he wrote in 1976. “My conjecture that ‘corruption’ had been at work during the run-up to the vote could not be definitely substantiated, but the whole affair left an unpleasant aftertaste.”54

Brandt, critically, knew nothing of the Stasi’s operation. A foreign power can—and often does—affect electoral processes without coordinating with the beneficiary. It would have been self-defeating to involve Brandt in the scheme. Had his participation been uncovered, his electoral legitimacy would have collapsed—the exact outcome that Moscow hoped to avoid. In 1972 at least, it was in Moscow’s interests to preserve the ignorance of its preferred candidate.

A weakness of the Stasi’s operation, then, was that its officers could not ensure the silence of Wagner and Steiner, whose self-destructive behavior made them useful before the vote but potential liabilities in its aftermath.

If the Stasi’s operation had a fall guy, it was Steiner, whose treasonous behavior was nearly uncovered a year after the vote of no confidence. What is now known as the Steiner Affair was sparked, rather predictably, by Steiner’s own indiscretion. During a May 1973 interview with Der Spiegel, he said that Barzel had been unfit to serve as chancellor—a scandalous statement from a member of Barzel’s coalition. Steiner then claimed that he had abstained from the vote of no confidence as a matter of conscience.55

One of the two abstainers had unmasked himself. Days later, reports emerged that Steiner had actually been paid to abstain from the vote; right-wing papers like Rheinischer Merkur, Bild, and Die Welt proclaimed a “Watergate in Bonn.” Der Spiegel reported, “Once again, corruption seemed to be involved, this time in the coalition. A member of parliament who only a few insiders knew weeks ago had caused doubts and excitement, accusations and denials.”56

Steiner covered up his lies with more lies. Abandoning his initial story, he next claimed that Karl Wienand, a lawmaker in Brandt’s Social Democratic Party, had given him 50,000 deutschemarks to abstain. Der Spiegel confirmed that the day after the vote of no confidence, Steiner had, in fact, deposited 50,000 deutschemarks into his personal bank account. In a June interview, Steiner insisted that he had received the bribe in Wienand’s office and that he regretted accepting it.57

By this point, the Stasi had no more use for Steiner. His every move was now under scrutiny, his reputation tainted by scandal. Politicians who betray their country lack security; in the blink of an eye, Steiner was left to fend for himself. For the Stasi, his downfall amounted to perhaps the only cost of its interference operation. It was an acceptable loss. Wolf later called Steiner a “mediocre source of information.” Kopp, too, dismissed Steiner’s value: “No one cared for him anymore, in the West nor in the East.”58

Of more serious concern for East Germany was whether the Steiner Affair would expose its broader operation. As the press scrutinized Steiner, the Stasi watched closely. The agency’s files include press reports alleging that Steiner was one of the two defectors from Barzel’s camp, as well as step-by-step coverage of the ensuing scandal.59 On June 15, 1973, the Bundestag launched a formal inquiry into Steiner. This bipartisan committee aimed to determine “who bribed whom and by what means before Barzel’s vote of no confidence in Chancellor Brandt.” The Stasi noted in its files that the committee would investigate, in part, whether “foreign intelligence services played a role during the vote and before Steiner’s abstention.”60

But the work of the committee soon stalled. Over the summer, its members struggled to make sense of conflicting witness accounts. “At no point has Mr. Steiner received any money from me,” Wienand said in July. Wienand’s colleagues came to his defense, testifying that he did not enter his office after the vote, as Steiner claimed. “First round of examination goes to Wienand,” reported the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.61 The committee presented its final report in March 1974. Its members had reached no firm conclusions. The Stasi’s file on Steiner notes specifically that the inquiry had “not determined whether there [were] any connections” between him and the Stasi.62

Even with the powers of a special committee, the Bundestag failed to discover the hand of the Stasi, which had used untraceable tools like cash and in-person meetings. By blaming Wienand, Steiner had misdirected the investigation, which devolved into a partisan squabble. Brandt’s allies charged that the real agenda of the inquiry was to tarnish the chancellor’s electoral legitimacy. “The aim of the Steiner affair is to try to drag the Chancellor into it,” Horst Ehmke, one of Brandt’s advisers, said in September 1973.63 In hindsight, the committee’s existence was more than justified—the vote had indeed been sabotaged—but when the prospect of electoral interference is raised, the parties that might have benefited naturally fear that investigating a vote’s legitimacy means risking their own.

It can take decades, not years, to uncover the full extent of a covert electoral interference operation. And sometimes, key participants in such operations face no consequences.

Wagner’s relationship with the Stasi persisted after the vote of no confidence. In 1975, when reports of his disastrous finances finally emerged, he stepped down as parliamentary managing director. He left the Bundestag late the next year.64 Sometime before then, Wagner had approached Fleissman in search of money, and the relationship between the two men resumed. Between late 1975 and 1983, Wagner continued to work as an informant, leveraging his enduring access to conservative circles. The Stasi’s files, which list Kopp as Wagner’s handler, contain forty-one entries summarizing the materials Wagner provided in this period.65

The information sharing between Wagner and Fleissman, unlike the 1972 operation, fit the Stasi mold. East German intelligence was uniquely positioned to penetrate West German society because of the two countries’ shared culture, language, and history. In the 1950s, Wolf had planted spies throughout West Germany, including one who advised Brandt closely and whose unmasking led to the chancellor’s resignation in 1974.66 Because of his network and status, Wagner proved useful to the Stasi. “He delivered great information, information nobody else had about the developments within the party,” Kopp said. “He was an exceptional, top source.”67 As Wagner’s supervisor, Kopp is not without bias, but it is indisputable that Wagner was a high-ranking and influential conservative lawmaker.

In 1980, Wagner appeared in court on fraud charges; prosecutors subsequently uncovered that he had received 50,000 deutschemarks from an unknown source in 1972, just around the time of the vote of no confidence.68 Then the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunified, and former intelligence officers started talking. In 1993, Markus Wolf revealed that his men had purchased Steiner’s vote. KGB archives likewise document that Steiner abstained from the vote “on instruction” from the Stasi.69 In 1995, Fleissman was found guilty of spying for East Germany. He died soon after. And in 1996, Wolf disclosed that in addition to Steiner, the Stasi had bribed a second lawmaker.70

Then came the biggest revelation of all: In 2000, Der Spiegel reported that Germany’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor believed Wagner was the other abstainer. By then eighty-one years old, Wagner announced that he would relinquish his remaining affiliations with the CSU. “I do not want the party to be burdened by these allegations,” he told the press. He denied the accusations until his death a few years later.71

Since then, German officials have concluded that the Stasi used Wagner to rig the vote of no confidence. A government report from 2013 found that Wolf’s team knew of Wagner’s financial troubles early and, through Fleissman, paid him to abstain. By bribing Wagner and Steiner, the report concludes, the Stasi caused the motion against Brandt to fail.72

Few people ever knew the real Wagner, who kept his subversive activities secret until well after the Cold War had ended. His life underscores the range of characters who can participate in foreign interference operations. A leading conservative, Wagner was willing to betray his own party, even when the stakes were as high as deciding the leader of West Germany. In countries like Italy and Chile, the CIA had manipulated the masses. The Stasi, by contrast, studied and manipulated two parliamentary voters. Kopp’s life, meanwhile, illuminates what drove Eastern intelligence officers. He had one overriding motive: “to achieve something meaningful.”73

Kopp called the 1972 operation, especially his oversight of Wagner, the greatest accomplishment of his life.

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