Word: chancellor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Complained Walter Kohl '89 of Germany, the son of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, "I don't know how to measure 18 inches exactly because I'm used to dealing in centimeters...
...West German officials announced that a husband-and-wife team of suspected spies had fled to East Germany. The pair were identified as Herbert Willner, 59, a defense expert influential within the Free Democratic Party, and his wife Herta-Astrid, 46, a secretary in the office of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Their defection came four weeks after Hans Joachim Tiedge, one of Bonn's top counterespionage officials, had fled to East Germany, along with three other suspected Communist agents. The Willner case prompted renewed demands for the resignation of Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermann, who oversees Bonn's domestic intelligence...
That tangled web of espionage might have made for amusing reading had it emerged from the pages of a spy novel. Instead it leaped from the headlines of West German newspapers last week, as the country's most serious spy scandal in more than a decade grew even wider. Chancellor Helmut Kohl found the revelations anything but amusing. In an effort to limit the damage, Kohl last week dismissed Heribert Hellenbroich, 48, chief of the Federal Intelligence Service...
...disclosures from undermining efforts by the two Germanys to improve relations. With Kohl's blessing, Franz Josef Strauss, the Bavarian conservative leader, planned to visit East Germany this week for the annual Leipzig trade fair and a meeting with East German Party Boss Erich Honecker. In addition, former Chancellor Willy Brandt intends to see Honecker in East Berlin later in the month. In that sense, though the spies may have been real, officials in both countries seemed at least partly willing to treat them as fiction...
Espionage rivalry between the two Germanys has long been intense. Last year 24 suspected East German agents were arrested in West Germany, and 18 were convicted on espionage charges. For Bonn, the week's events add up to the most serious spy scandal since 1974, when then Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after an aide, Gunter Guillaume, was arrested on charges of being an East German agent. Says Richard Meier, former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution: "It is a catastrophe that can set us back years...