Kissinger to Nixon on Brandt's fall: the blackmail reports (May 1974)

Willy Brandt resigned as West German chancellor on 6 May 1974, twelve days after his party aide Günter Guillaume was arrested as an East German spy. Within days Henry Kissinger sent President Nixon a memorandum under the subject line "Brandt Resignation—Possibility of Sex Scandal." It is undated; the volume prints it after an embassy telegram of 7 May, and Brent Scowcroft initialed it on Kissinger's behalf. It was classified Secret, Sensitive, Eyes Only, and marked "Outside the System"¹.

What it says

The memo opens by setting the public explanation, that Brandt resigned out of a sense of duty to bear responsibility for the spy case, against new reports in the German press that "the threat of blackmail" by Guillaume had been a major factor. Those reports, it says, alleged that Guillaume knew Brandt was having extramarital relations and threatened to expose him unless he was released to East Germany without prosecution¹.

It adds that the opposition CDU/CSU and its supporters, including the Springer press, were said to hold the details behind the reports, and that a campaign against Brandt was "quite possible." Those possibilities, Kissinger wrote, "may well have moved" Brandt to resign¹.

The third paragraph is the reason the memo exists. The White House had its own source: "a German security official who has been participating directly in the Guillaume investigation." According to that official, the security-group officers who had served as Brandt's bodyguards were questioned under oath, and their statements described women being brought to Brandt's quarters at home and in hotels while he traveled, often at night, with Guillaume present on most occasions. The guards could not identify most of the women¹. No woman is named in the document.

Set against the embassy's account

The volume prints, immediately before it, the US embassy in Bonn's assessment of 7 May. Sources close to Brandt told the embassy that he decided on Sunday 5 May, while his advisers were drafting a government report on the spy case, and that he saw the case as "simply the last factor" in a bad situation: poor local election results, inflation, troublesome party youth, and a stalled foreign policy. One source said the decisive element was "the feeling of loneliness and non-support" from close colleagues². That telegram does not mention blackmail.

How to read it

This is a channel for intelligence gossip as much as an assessment. It reports what the press alleged and what one unnamed German official said the bodyguards had testified; it does not say that Guillaume made any threat, and no released document shows that he did. In December 1975 a German court sentenced Guillaume to 13 years for treason³. Brandt remained chairman of his party until 1987 and died on 8 October 1992^4,5.

The memo was published in 2014 in an electronic Foreign Relations volume, from Kissinger's office files at the National Archives¹. The story of the spy himself is on our page on the Guillaume affair.