pragmatist, he succeeded Markus Wolf in 1986 as head of the HVA
and deputy minister of the MfS. One of his most notable acts was to
obtain the consent of the citizens’ committees to destroy the bulk of
the HVA files in 1990. He also eluded prosecution because of the
1995 high court ruling that exempted MfS personnel if their activities
had been confined to the German Democratic Republic. Grossmann’s
memoirs, Bonn in Blick (Bonn in View), appeared in 2001 but dis-
cussed only cases already known to the public.GRUNERT, ROLF. A West German police official with ties to the
Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), Rolf Grunert was a senior
detective in the Hamburg police force as well as chair of the Bund
Deutscher Kriminalbeamter (Federation of German Detective Of-
ficers). Close observation of his movements by the Bundesamt für
Verfassungsschutz led to his arrest in May 1977. Found guilty of es-
pionage on behalf of the HVA, Grunert received a prison sentence of
two and a half years in December 1978. Eight years later, he moved
to the German Democratic Republic.
GUILLAUME, GÜNTER (1927–1995). Known as the “chancellor
spy” in West Germany’s most dramatic espionage affair, Günter
Guillaume was born in Berlin on 1 February 1927, the son of a musi-
cian from a family of Huguenot origin. Possessing only a rudimentary
education, Guillaume became a technical editor and photographer for
the East Berlin publishing house Volk und Wissen. Recruited and
trained by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in 1955, Guillaume
(code name hansen), along with his wife, Christel, immigrated the
following year to Frankfurt am Main. By registering beforehand
with his mother-in-law, a Dutch woman who lived in Frankfurt, he
avoided the espionage check that political refugees faced in the emer-
gency shelters. Guillaume took over his mother-in-law’s small coffee
and tobacco shop in the center of town, while Christel (code name
heinze), whose recruitment as an agent did not occur until 1958,
found employment as a secretary.
Among the radio messages he soon began receiving from East Ber-
lin was a request that he and his wife align themselves with the right
wing of the local Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD).
Posing as an unabashed anticommunist and engaged initially as a
152 • GRUNERT, ROLF