Das deutsche Watergate

April 11, 2022 12:48 PM

Klaus-Dietmar Henke, a spokesperson for the research group looking into the spy agency’s history, likened the scheme to the Watergate scandal in the US, when Richard Nixon planned to have ex-CIA and FBI agents bug the headquarters of the Democratic party. Unlike Nixon’s bungled break-in, however, Adenauer’s infiltration of his rival party was a success – and until now had eluded historians. The Guardian (EN)

They allowed Adenauer to prepare in advance for motions the opposition planned to submit or for lines of attack that were being readied against his team, such as one raising the role his chief of staff, Hans Globke, had played in drafting the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws.

Also in:

Das deutsche Watergate - Süddeutsche Zeitung (DE)

BND forschte jahrelang Adenauers wichtigsten politischen Gegner aus
- Deutschlandfunk (DE)

Allemagne : le chancelier Adenauer, aurait fait espionner ses adversaires du SPD - Le Figaro (FR)

Németország egykori kancellárja egy évtizeden keresztül kémkedett a legjelentősebb politikai riválisai után - Mérce
(HU)

posted by kmt (4 comments total)

I only know a little bit about espionage in this time period. While losing its empire, Britain sent Special Branch and MI5 staff to train police in former-colony nations for counter-insurgency purposes. Plus also the parliamentary committee that had to ask the security services if they still had the File created decades previously logging the new Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's activities when he was a student member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
posted by k3ninho at 4:35 PM on April 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Noel Annan, who served as a British military intelligence officer in postwar Germany, has a vivid character-sketch of Adenauer in his book Changing Enemies:

Adenauer was cunning, sometimes ruthless, always an authoritarian, most unlike his countrymen in his scepticism towards -- indeed contempt for -- ideas, very tenacious, yet at the same time never rigid, conscious of his goals and above all a man of limitless patience. Like Roosevelt, he set his most able political supporters at each other's throats; he had no scruples about selecting scapegoats and scuppering rivals.

the File created decades previously logging the new Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's activities when he was a student member of the Communist Party of Great Britain

This is an absurd claim to make about Macmillan, but perhaps you meant Denis Healey, who was a member of the CPGB at Oxford in the late 1930s?
posted by verstegan at 5:40 PM on April 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, sorry, I confused past Prime Ministers: not Harold Macmillan but Harold Wilson was Labour and the official history of the Security Service, MI5, says they kept the File updated during his time in office and hidden under a pseudonym.
posted by k3ninho at 11:12 PM on April 11, 2022

Extreme anti-Communist views were pretty normal during the Cold War. Politicians could justify anything by saying they were fighting the USSR. Today we have Trump and QAnon crazies, back then we had Goldwater and John Birchers.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:37 AM on April 12, 2022