Kohl’s Secretary Had Spy Tools in Home, Paper Says

Investigators discovered spy equipment in the apartment of a chancellery secretary and her husband who defected to Communist East Germany, one newspaper reported today, while another insisted that the woman had access to secret “Star Wars” information.

The influential Bonn daily Die Welt reported that federal investigators searching the apartment of Herbert and Herta-Astrid Willner found a shortwave radio capable of receiving messages.

Also found in the apartment in suburban Bonn were a container suitable for concealment of microfilm or sensitive documents, as well as a large amount of money, the newspaper reported.

Access to Secrets

The daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, meanwhile, said Herta-Astrid Willner’s job as assistant to the head of the chancellery’s Third Department meant she saw secret papers on all technological projects.

“It is evident that her department had access to research information on the American SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) project and Eureka (the European high-technology program),” the newspaper said.

Just after the Willners’ defection was announced Tuesday, government sources said she had access to secret reports on the Star Wars program.

But they later retracted their remarks and said that they had established that such documents passed through a different channel. The Frankfurter Allgemeine, which is normally well informed on government matters, gave no source for today’s report.

Office’s First Case

The disappearance of Herta-Astrid Willner, 45, marked the first spy case to hit the office of the chancellery, West Germany’s highest office, since the 1974 scandal that toppled then-Chancellor Willy Brandt.

The Willners were the sixth and seventh suspected spies who have fled to East Germany or been arrested in the last six weeks in what the opposition Social Democratic Party charges has been West Germany’s worst espionage scandal ever.

Herbert Willner, 59, worked in a Bonn research foundation closely connected with the Free Democrats, the junior party in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s coalition government.

The husband, who had emigrated from East Germany in 1961, once belonged to that country’s ruling Communist Party.

In Political Section

The wife, a 12-year employee of the chancellor’s office, worked in the internal political section, officials said. Television reports said the section handled domestic, social, research and science policy.

Meanwhile, a Bonn security source said Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann was warned that the secretary’s husband was behaving suspiciously as early as May, but rejected a request to tap the man’s phone and monitor his mail.

The source said Willner had been under suspicion for years.

Die Welt newspaper reported today that counterintelligence officers had put Willner under “official notice” in February for “peculiar” behavior, such as typing reports at the office well into the evening hours and keeping notes on Free Democrat meetings.