Bonn Adds 6th Suspect as Spy Scandal Spreads

BONN — Authorities today added a sixth person, a military purchasing employee, to their list of suspected spies, and politicians and the press stepped up demands for resignations over the growing espionage scandal.

Alexander Prechtel, a spokesman for Chief Federal Prosecutor Kurt Rebmann, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview that authorities were investigating an employee of an army office in Koblenz that handles purchases of sophisticated equipment and arms. Prechtel declined to provide the man’s name.

Authorities announced Sunday that a secretary in the office of President Richard von Weizsaecker was the first person to be arrested in the spy affair. (Story, Page 5.) The government has said that four people in addition to the army employee are under investigation.

Movements Monitored

The Cologne-based Express newspaper reported that counterintelligence agents are monitoring the movements of three Bonn secretaries around the clock and expect to make three espionage-related arrests in the next few days. Officials declined to comment on the report.

The mass-circulation Bild daily newspaper reported that about a dozen Bonn government clerical workers are being investigated on suspicion of espionage.

In a report for its Tuesday editions telexed to news organizations today, the paper said one of the secretaries works in Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s office. Bild did not list any sources, and the report could not be independently confirmed.

Kohl Consults Party Leaders

Chancellor Helmut Kohl spent four hours today with leaders of his Christian Democratic party before meeting Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann for a detailed analysis of the affair.

As the government prepared for fierce questioning in Parliament’s Security Control Committee on Tuesday, opposition leaders stepped up demands for resignations over the scandal. Indications that the first victim would be the country’s intelligence chief, Herbert Hellenbroich, were strengthened today when Kohl’s coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats, accused him of making unpardonable errors.

Hellenbroich, 48, has been head of the secret service since last month. Until then he was chief of the counterintelligence service where top counterspy Hans Joachim Tiedge worked before his defection last week.

Knew of Alcoholism

Hellenbroich has confirmed that he knew that the defector suffered from alcoholism. Financial Free Democrat parliamentary leader Wolfgang Mischnick said in a radio interview that Hellenbroich had made “an unforgivable mistake in leaving a man who was so physically and psychologically unstable in such a post.”

Opposition Social Democrat leader Hans-Jochen Vogel today demanded the resignation of Zimmermann himself.

“A minister who after three years in office still doesn’t know what is going on in one of the most important areas of his responsibility disqualifies himself for that post,” Vogel said in a statement.

West German investigators said today they were continuing the interrogation of Margarete Hoeke, 51, the secretary from the president’s office who was arrested over the weekend on suspicion of being a spy. Hoeke was the third female secretary exposed as a suspected spy this month, and authorities are also hunting for a former army messenger believed to be an agent for one of the secretaries.