Demand Renewed for Ouster of Kohl’s Aide

BONN â€”  Opposition political leaders renewed their demands Friday that Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann be stripped of his post because of his role in West Germany’s worst spy scandal.

As details of damage caused by the scandal continued to emerge, the Social Democrats accused Chancellor Helmut Kohl of protecting Zimmermann. They said that as the Cabinet minister responsible for the counterintelligence agency which is at the heart of the scandal Zimmermann should resign or be fired.

The Social Democrats demanded that Parliament’s defense committee hold an emergency meeting to investigate all aspects of the affair, which gained international dimensions last week when East Germany announced that the head of Bonn’s counterintelligence department assigned to catch spies from East Germany had defected to the German Communist state.

The opposition’s call was supported, in effect, by members of the Free Democratic Party, a junior partner in the government coalition. They said that the espionage revelations have seriously damaged the nation’s security.

At the same time, the former chief of the counterintelligence agency, Heribert Hellenbroich, who was fired by Chancellor Helmut Kohl from his new post as head of the Federal Intelligence Service for his role in the scandal, said that he assumes that East Germany has still more spies placed inside the West German government.

‘They Have Access’

Interviewed by the newspaper Bild, Hellenbroich declared: “Being realistic, I must say that they (the East Germans) have access. One simply has to assume this when one knows how their apparatus over there operates.�

Since firing Hellenbroich, Kohl has remained silent on the scandal, but political sources said that he is not likely to yield to demands that he get rid of Zimmermann because the latter is an influential member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union which operates in all other parts of West Germany.

Zimmermann blamed Hellenbroich for security lapses, accusing him of not keeping Zimmermann informed about problems within the Cologne-based Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the formal name of the counterintelligence agency.

Hellenbroich was criticized particularly for not taking action when Hans Joachim Tiedge, 48, head of the agency’s East German department, developed serious drinking, debt and family problems. East Germany announced Aug. 23, four days after Tiedge had failed to report for work in Cologne, that he had crossed the border and sought asylum in the East.

Without citing sources, the Milan, Italy, newspaper Corriere della Sera presented an intriguing report on the reason for Tiedge’s defection.

It said it was the result of the disappearance of Vitaly Yurtchenko, whom it described as a top Soviet intelligence agent. Yurtchenko disappeared from Rome on Aug. 1--19 days before Tiedge was last seen in West Germany.

Soviet Spy Network Panicked

The newspaper said the apparent defection of Yurtchenko, 50, caused panic in the Soviet spy network, threatening Tiedge and other East Bloc spies with exposure.

“The Soviets are literally going crazy over Yurtchenko’s defection,� Corriere said. “Yurtchenko is to the West what Tiedge is to the East. He knows the names of Soviet secret agents and those in the West who are double agents.

“Tiedge went to the East not because he wanted political asylum, but because after the defection of the KGB man (Yurtchenko) he found his cover blown.�