Kohl Barred Plan to Watch Aide Who Defected to East

An Interior Ministry official said Wednesday that Chancellor Helmut Kohl last month rejected the West German counterintelligence agency’s request to put under close surveillance a secretary in his office who defected over the weekend to East Berlin.

State Secretary Hans Neusel, the top aide to Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann, said Kohl turned down the request to tap the telephone and intercept the mail of secretary Herta-Astrid Willner because the evidence of her involvement in spying was not strong enough.

Interior Ministry officials had an “uneasy feeling” about Willner, 45, and her husband, Herbert, 59, a defense policy analyst for a research institute here, but “no hard evidence,” Neusel said. “You cannot act on feelings, but on hard facts.”

Before Kohl rejected the official surveillance request on Aug. 28, the ministry itself twice denied similar requests from its investigators for action against the Willners, Neusel said.

“Perhaps the wrong decision was made,” said Neusel. In such cases, he added, there are always “two elements in combat. There is counterintelligence that wants urgent action, and there is the ministry that has to abide by the constitution and its provisions respecting the rights of citizens.”

Neusel said the chancellor, in rejecting the request, acted on the advice of Interior Minister Zimmermann, the official in charge of national security, who has been under attack by the political opposition ever since the West Germany spy scandal broke last month. Kohl has refused to fire Zimmermann and turned back an opposition campaign against him in Parliament.

Both Willners fled their home in a Bonn suburb last weekend and announced in letters from East Berlin that they were resigning from their jobs. In his letter to his employers at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a think tank associated with the Free Democratic Party, Herbert Willner denied that he was a spy but said he did not want to have to endure arrest and a trial.

An espionage investigation has been launched, and the government reported Wednesday that incriminating equipment had been found in their home. A Bonn newspaper said that among the items found during a search were a powerful short-wave radio and containers that could be used for smuggling film.

Meanwhile, the daily Bild newspaper reported in this morning’s editions that five more secretaries in the West German government are under serious investigation as spies and another dozen are being investigated.

The newspaper quoted an unidentified senior official who said, “We count on more agents defecting to the East or being arrested in the next few days.”

Neusel, the Interior Ministry official, said that Herbert Willner had aroused official suspicions because of the kinds of questions he was asking Western military attaches in Bonn through his post at the research institute.

In July, 1983, the authorities began an investigation of his activities and his history in East Germany before he came west in 1961. They also scrutinized the activities of his wife, who had worked in the chancellor’s office since 1973.

Not Enough Evidence

But Neusel said there was insufficient evidence to merit further investigation, let alone the bringing of criminal charges against the Willners.

However, officials in the counterintelligence agency were said to still be suspicious of the Willners and sought a “G-10” order, which allows security officers to tap a suspect’s phone, intercept his mail and place him under surveillance.

Because of concern for civil rights, G-10 orders are not easily granted and, according to Neusel, Kohl did not think the evidence against the couple was strong enough to approve the procedure.

“The chancellor said he found a G-10 inopportune at that time but asked for extensive investigations to be carried out,” Neusel said.

As a staff member of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Herbert Willner was thought to be privy to most of the policy-making decisions of the Free Democratic Party, a junior partner in governing coalitions here since 1969.

Herta-Astrid Willner worked in an office in the chancellery that dealt with internal matters, and Bonn officials sought to disclaim reports that she may have had access to secret papers concerning West German participation in the Strategic Defense Initiative, President Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense program.

The German spy scandal has involved three other secretaries, two of whom have defected to East Germany. The third, Margarete Hoeke, who worked in the office of President Richard von Weizsaecker, has been arrested on charges of espionage.

The greatest blow to the West German government came with the defection last month of Hans Joachim Tiedge, the head of a department in the counterintelligence agency. Political sources in Bonn speculated that he might have warned the Willners from East Berlin that they were under suspicion and could be arrested, thereby triggering their hasty flight to East Germany.