WEST GERMANY: The Returncoat

At the check point between East and West Berlin, the blue Ford sedan of Danish Newspaperman Henrik Bonde-Henriksen was too well known to draw the special attention of the Communist police. Seated beside him as he drove through one evening last week was a man puffing furiously at a pipe, his hat pulled down over his eyes. The guard waved them on. Otto John, onetime head of West Germany’s counter-espionage organization, was on his way back to the West.

At a critical moment in the EDC debate 17 months earlier, John had stunned the West by defecting to the Communists. Later, at an East Berlin press conference, he had charged that the Nazis were taking over the West German Republic, and accused the U.S. of creating a “hysterical fear psychosis.” John had given no sign that he was under duress. Said a newsman: “Not a single person who attended the conference left with any doubt that his defection was voluntary.”

Ten Years After. The most charitable explanation of John’s conduct was that he was laboring under some kind of perverted patriotism or pique. In 1944 John had been a member of the famous Von Stauffenberg conspiracy to kill Hitler. When the plot failed, John’s brother was shot; John himself fled to England. Many Germans regarded John as a traitor for joining the British when Germany was fighting for her life. The U.S. and West German intelligence agencies did not trust him. Largely at British insistence, he got the secret-service job.

In West Berlin, on the tenth anniversary of the attempt on Hitler’s life, John met with a bunch of his old “resistance” pals to celebrate. Later that night he had taken a taxi to the house of Dr. Wolfgang (“Wowo”) Wohlgemuth, an old friend—as well as a suspected Communist. Together they had been seen driving into East Berlin.

Tell, Tell, Tell. After surrendering himself to the West German police last week, John was held in close custody, but Correspondent Bonde-Henriksen had a world scoop. Otto John’s story, according to Bonde-Henriksen, was that he had visited Wowo that night to “get some support for a widow of an executed anti-Nazi underground leader,” and had been persuaded to go to his other flat in West Berlin … “I woke up two days later in Karlshorst [Russian army headquarters]. A female doctor was sitting at my bedside and … I got one injection and later on another, and I didn’t feel clear in my mind . . . Right after the conference with the world press, I was flown to Moscow and was held in custody for two weeks. They kept asking me questions all the time … I didn’t betray any secrets, but of course I had to tell, to tell, to tell. . I have never been very good at remembering names, and in that I was very lucky.”

In Bonn (where there is a treason charge standing against him), Otto John’s story of drugged kidnaping and clever fencing with the MVD interrogators was deemed altogether too romantic. The West, having had time to take stock of his defection, had found the loss to Western intelligence less than expected. Strictly concerned with operations inside West Germany, he had had few intelligence secrets to tell the Russians. His propaganda value exhausted, the Communists had given him less and less to do, plainly showing that they also distrusted traitors.

How West Germany now felt about him could be judged by the way Konrad Adenauer broke the news to his Cabinet: “I have a little news here that will amuse you …” Said Opposition Socialist Leader Erich Ollenhauer: “The John affair is a case for the psychiatrists rather than for the politicians.”