Stasi Finally, a concise, readable history of the Stasi. John Schmeidel has done a wonderful job. Western intelligence agencies agreed that the Stasi was the most efficient and successful of the former communist intelligence services. The number of damaging East German spies uncovered after the fall of the wall confirmed this. Why should one care today? Not only because the Stasi once trained radical Latin American, Asian, Middle Eastern and African intelligence organizations still active in 2007. Since 1990, former Stasi officers have gone into business as ‘security consultants’ around the world to governments, private industry, organized crime and terror groups. Stasi skill has improved the lethality of modern terrorism. Richard Palmer, CEO of Cachet International twenty-year CIA operations veteran and former Chief of Station in Europe This book is a detailed new examination of one of the most feared and efficient secret services the world has ever known. The East German Stasi was a jewel among the communist secret services, the most trusted by its Russian mother organization the KGB, and even more efficient. In its attempt at ‘total coverage’ of civil society, the Ministry for State Security came close to realizing the totali- tarian ideal of a political police force. Based on research in archival files unlocked just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and available to few German and Western readers, this volume details the Communist Party’s attempt to control all aspects of East German civil society, and sets out what is known of the regime’s support for international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, German politics and international relations. John C. Schmeidel is a graduate of Bowdoin College, Columbia Law School, the London School of Economics, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in modern history. He was employed as a banker in Europe, worked in occasional journalism, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia. He is presently a criminal prosecutor in northern Arizona. Studies in intelligence series General Editors: Richard J. Aldrich and Christopher Andrew ISSN: 1368–9916 The growing interest in intelligence activities and the opening of hitherto closed archives since the end of the Cold War has stimulated this series of scholarly monographs, wartime memoirs and edited collections. With contributions from leading academics and prominent members of the intelligence community, this series has quickly become the leading forum for the academic study of intelligence. British Military Intelligence in the Intelligence Investigations Palestine Campaign 1914–1918 How Ultra changed history Yigal Sheffy Ralph Bennett British Military Intelligence in the Intelligence Analysis and Crimean War, 1854–1856 Assessment Stephen M. Harris Edited by David Charters, A. Stuart Farson and Glenn P. Hastedt Signals Intelligence in World War II Edited by David Alvarez TET 1968 Understanding the surprise Knowing Your Friends Ronnie E. Ford Intelligence inside alliances and coalitions from 1914 to the Cold War Intelligence and Imperial Defence Edited by Martin S. Alexander British Intelligence and the defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 Eternal Vigilance Richard J. Popplewell 50 years of the CIA Edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Espionage Christopher Andrew Past, present, future? Edited by Wesley K. Wark Nothing Sacred Nazi espionage against the Vatican, The Australian Security Intelligence 1939–1945 Organization David Alvarez and An unofficial history Revd. Robert A. Graham Frank Cain Policing Politics War, Strategy and Intelligence Security intelligence and the liberal Michael I. Handel democratic state Peter Gill Strategic and Operational Deception in the Second World War From Information to Intrigue Edited by Michael I. Handel Studies in Secret Service based on the Swedish Experience, 1939–45 Codebreaker in the Far East C.G. McKay Alan Stripp Dieppe Revisited Intelligence for Peace A documentary investigation Edited by Hesi Carmel John Campbell Intelligence Services in the More Instructions from the Centre Information Age Top secret files on KGB global Michael Herman operations, 1975–1985 Christopher M. Andrew and Espionage and the Roots of the Cold Oleg Gordievsky War The conspiratorial heritage Controlling Intelligence David McKnight Edited by Glenn P. Hastedt Swedish Signal Intelligence Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real 1900–1945 Intelligence C.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman Edited by Wesley K. Wark The Norwegian Intelligence Service Security and Intelligence in a 1945–1970 Changing World Olav Riste New perspectives for the 1990s Edited by A. Stuart Farson, Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth David Stafford and Wesley K. Wark Century Edited by Heike Bungert, A Don at War Jan G. Heitmann and Michael Wala Sir David Hunt K.C.M.G., O.B.E. (reprint) The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War Intelligence and Military Calling the tune? Operations Hugh Wilford Edited by Michael I. Handel Our Man in Yugoslavia Leaders and Intelligence The story of a Secret Service operative Edited by Michael I. Handel Sebastian Ritchie Understanding Intelligence in the Mussolini’s Propaganda Abroad Twenty-First Century Subversion in the Mediterranean and Journeys in shadows the Middle East, 1935–1940 Len Scott and Peter Jackson Manuela A. Williams MI6 and the Machinery of Spying The Politics and Strategy of Philip H.J. Davies Clandestine War Special operations executive, Twenty-First Century Intelligence 1940–1946 Edited by Wesley Wark Neville Wylie Intelligence and Strategy Britain’s Secret War against Japan, Selected essays 1937–1945 John Robert Ferris Douglas Ford The US Government, Citizen US Covert Operations and Cold Groups and the Cold War War Strategy The state–private network Truman, secret warfare and the CIA, Edited by Helen Laville and 1945–53 Hugh Wilford Sarah-Jane Corke Peacekeeping Intelligence Stasi New players, extended boundaries Shield and Sword of the Party Edited by David Carment and John C. Schmeidel Martin Rudner Special Operations Executive A new instrument of war Edited by Mark Seaman Stasi Shield and Sword of the Party John C. Schmeidel First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 John C. Schmeidel All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-01841-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-36589-9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-01841-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-36589-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-01841-5 (ebk) Contents Foreword viii Acknowledgments x Abbreviations xii 1 Origins and development of the East German secret police 1 2 The Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter informant system 25 3 Stasi and the churches 54 4 Stasi penetration of the artistic community and universities 79 5 Foreign espionage operations 109 6 Cooperation between the Red Army Faction and Staatssicherheit 142 Appendix 163 Notes 164 References 196 Index 204 Foreword This monograph is six thematic chapters focused upon one organization and its specialized activity of secret policing and foreign espionage, the former East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, or Ministerium für Staatssicherheit of the German Democratic Republic, universally known to Germans as the Stasi. It is based in structure and inspiration upon my doctoral thesis a decade ago, when the reunification of the Federal Republic with the DDR was a fresh memory. The atmosphere in Berlin in the early 1990s is hard to recapture now, in a city so transformed by rebuilding and a conciliatory effort to paper over ideological divisions grounded in the Cold War. That conflict is history for the current gen- eration. The partisan atmosphere in Germany of that time was based upon a Wall that had just collapsed and fierce infighting amongst former supporters and opponents of a communist regime, who found themselves equally overtaken by events none had foreseen. That neither the supposedly omniscient Ministry nor the East German Com- munist Party saw it coming is not surprising. The huge apparatus of the Amer- ican CIA was equally blind sided, and as far as we can judge at second hand, so were the Russian services of the then-named KGB and military GRU. The polit- ical actors in Germany in the east and west were equally nonplussed by the speed of unification, both the organized political parties and the improvised mass movement of the dissidents who contributed so signally to driving the SED into the ground. From my own point of view in revising a text, the difficulty is the happy one of being spoiled for choice, compared to the early 1990s, when I began research upon the radical left wing Red Army Faction (RAF), its support by the Stasi, and RAF’s connective tissue with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This interest metastasized into a fuller study of the Stasi itself. The amount of primary and secondary material has over fifteen years grown exponentially, in the idiom of the bridge of the starship Enterprise. Primary materials that were available in 1992 only as chance nuggets from the overworked Gauck Authority or as kind donations from individuals who had secured their own files are now reprinted in trade editions, or issued and annotated by the tireless full-time employees/scholars of the Authority itself, in its Department of Education and Research.