Gerhard Wessel, a spy for Nazi Germany who went on to head West Germany’s espionage agency, died on July 28 at his home in suburban Pullach. He was 88.
Gen. Wessel’s death was announced by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.
He is regarded as the founder of West Germany’s counterintelligence service, which he headed for seven years in the late 1960s through the mid-’70s. As the successor to Reinhard Gehlen as chief of the agency–known as the BND, for Bundesnachrichtendienst–he is credited with modernizing German intelligence gathering and curbing some abuses.
Under Gen. Wessel’s tenure, the BND began to have open houses. He attended so many events and parties that Herbert Wehner, a leader of the Social Democratic Party, called him “the cocktail general.”
He hired academic analysts and electronics experts to serve alongside agents, and ordered spies to stop shadowing Germans inside Germany. His demand for greater openness was reflected in orders for agents to stop wearing the dark glasses favored under Gehlen’s leadership. He listed the BND in the phone book.
In 1968, he instituted government demands for reforms. The BND was to work only on foreign intelligence and avoid domestic surveillance. Recruitment from outside the intelligence area was intensified.
Gen. Wessel’s agency had many successes. It informed the government three months in advance of the Soviet Union’s plans to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968. It also gathered early information about dissatisfaction among shipyard workers in Gdansk, which eventually led to upheaval in Poland in the 1980s.
On the other hand, there were a number of incidents of East Germans infiltrating the West German government, particularly intelligence agencies, on Gen. Wessel’s watch.
Most significant, the BND knew that a top aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany was an East German agent a year before the agent’s existence was disclosed in 1974 and did not tell Brandt, who was forced from office as a result.
During the espionage trial of Markus Wolfe, the former chief East German spy, in 1993, Wolfe’s lawyer made the charge that the BND had not shared that information.
Gerhard Wessel was born in the Holstein city of Neumuenster, the son of an Evangelical pastor who had been held at one time by the Gestapo for statements he had made from the pulpit. The son joined the army in 1932, directly after his high school graduation.
Mr. Wessel is survived by his wife and two children.
