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Attack is the best defense - also and especially for spies whose camouflage wobbles.
At least if they have very good nerves.
Like Adolf Kanter.
At the beginning of 1986, the former Bonn-based lobbyist for the Düsseldorf Flick group went on the offensive - against WELT.
Because on January 22nd, the newspaper, based at the time in the federal capital Bonn, published a note in the wording that the then President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Heribert Hellenbroich, had written on December 5th, 1984.
It was the time of the Flick affair, the largest party donation scandal in the Federal Republic.
In order to get tax advantages of almost one billion DM for the sale of shares in 1975, the Flick Group paid together almost two million DM to the CDU, CSU, FDP and - to a much lesser extent - to the SPD.
In the course of investigations from 1981 onwards, it emerged that Flick had even passed on a total of around DM 25 million to political parties within eleven years for “political landscape maintenance” - all illegally.
The two texts from WELT from January 22nd and February 8th 1986
Source: WORLD archive
In Hellenbroich's note it said: “Are there any indications of active influence in connection with the donation affair?” In addition, the BfV President responsible for counter-espionage had handwritten a name.
"Canter".
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Die WELT explained: "The marginal note 'Kanter' is also an indication that it was not about the person of Brauchitsch", ie the Flick managing director and confidante of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU), Eberhard von Brauchitsch.
The article in this newspaper also stated: "'Kanter', blown up some time ago, was an employee of the Flick Group who is said to have spied there for an Eastern secret service."
Former Flick lobbyist and Stasi spy Adolf Kanter (1925-2010) in 1993 in Bonn
Source: MARC DARCHINGER
Adolf Kanter reacted immediately - with a letter to the editor that appeared in WELT on February 8, 1986: “On the other hand, I only find the untruths that were rumored in that article about myself and my personal circumstances as absurd.
As a 'spy for Eastern secret services' I was 'blown' some time ago, they claim. "
It is suggested, Kanter further criticized, "I am an illegally smuggled agent".
Then followed the fundamental denial: "Of course, I do not know who sucked such nonsense out of their fingers ... In other words: The WORLD seems to have fallen victim to strange fantasies."
Friedrich Karl Flick in 1984 on the way to the investigative committee of the Bundestag in Bonn
Source: picture alliance / Roland Witsch
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From a distance of more than three decades, it is no longer possible to reconstruct how the editorial team's answer printed below came about: “Our reader is right.
His name was brought into this context due to an oversight.
Die WELT regrets that. ”The editorial note was not signed.
In reality, however, the coverage of January 22, 1986 was largely true, while Kanter's denials showed astonishing chutzpah.
In fact, Hans Adolf Josef Kanter (he meets under different first names) was one of the most important Stasi spies in Bonn.
This has been public knowledge since May 1994;
The following year Kanter was sentenced to only 24 months' probation for espionage in a strikingly inconspicuously organized trial.
The case, which has been known for a quarter of a century, is now the Berlin magazine for political culture "Cicero" again in the cover story of its December issue - under the headline "Code name Fichtel.
How the spy Adolf Josef Kanter bought the Bonn Republic ”.
There are good reasons to doubt whether this is really “the last secret of the GDR”.
The case of Kanter is definitely a worth considering example of the secret service work of the Stasi against the democratic Federal Republic.
The December issue of "Cicero"
Source: Cicero
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Exactly from where the WELT got the information in early 1986 that Kanter was "blown up" as a spy can no longer be determined.
However, there are indications that BfV employees had already discovered a covert connection between Kanters and East Berlin at the end of September 1983: a suspected Stasi courier with the code name “Jennrich” had used Kanter's private apartment - with a key.
The Federal Criminal Police Office began to investigate, but the proceedings were apparently discontinued after questioning the Flick lobbyist.
In the final report of the Bundestag investigation committee on the Flick affair, which was in the final editing department at the beginning of 1986, Kanter's name appeared 63 times, but not once with any evidence of agent activity.
The report, however, quoted a letter from him to his superior von Brauchitsch dated March 21, 1978: “With Franz Josef Strauss's 'shop steward in Bonn', Dr.
V., I have a particularly good relationship.
He believes that information he gives me is only intended for you personally (which he is right about!);
hence the openness. "
Eberhard von Brauchitsch as a witness before the Flick investigation committee
Source: picture alliance / Ulrich Baumga
Of course that was a lie, because Kanter passed everything he learned about Bonn politics on to East Berlin.
For the Stasi expert Helmut Müller-Enberg, the “Fichtel” source was “the undisputed top” of all Stasi sources in Bonn.
Kanter delivered 1835 registered reports in 20 years of active espionage, that is, one every third day.
As early as 1970, around 5,400 sheets were collected, and by the end of his activity in the 1980s, a total of 14,400 sheets.
According to Georg Herbstritt, another MfS expert in the Stasi records archive, Kanter's 13-page report "On the influence of the Flick Group's top management on politics in the FRG" from May 1977 should attract the "special attention" of the East Berlin intelligence agents have awakened.
That was exactly the time when the illegal tax advantages were being discussed internally through ministerial approval.
The Stasi expert Hubertus Knabe, who was hired by the red-red-green Senate in Berlin, called Kanter in his book “The Infiltrated Republic” one of “the top suppliers of the Stasi”.
After the beginning of the Flick affair, "Fichtel" became even more important because he now had direct contacts with Helmut Kohl's Chancellery.
Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1984 before the Flick committee of inquiry
Source: picture alliance / Peter Popp
Hans Adolf Josef Kanter, born in 1925, was certainly a top spy.
Since 1948 he worked as a communist agent, since the establishment of the main administration A (HVA), the foreign intelligence service of the Stasi, a little later for their boss Markus Wolf.
Kanter belongs in a row with the well-known Chancellery spy Günter Guillaume or the two agents recruited in GDR prisons, William Borm, a top FDP politician who was only exposed posthumously, and Götz Schlicht, who betrayed the secrets of GDR refugees to the Stasi from 1957 to 1989.
No other MfS informant in the West had as much chutzpah as he did.
When, for example, the camouflage of the HVA agents Armin Raufeisen in 1979 or Lorenz Betzing and Erika Reissmann and Johanna Olbrich in 1985, they all fled to the GDR.
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Kanter, on the other hand, felt so secure that he aggressively countered the presumably accidental exposure in the WELT with a letter to the editor.
Conspiracy theorists may assume that he had enough knowledge to make the then Kohl-Genscher government compliant.
Or did he just have particularly good nerves?
You will never know: Hans Adolf Josef Kanter died in 2010, and his IM files were completely destroyed by the HVA in 1989/1990.
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This article was first published in 2019.