Science and the Stasi

摘要

In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklaerung) -the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.rnThe spoils - released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to me in 2005 -have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police. An analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.rnIt is not uncommon for nations seeking to catch up in technology to spy - they are often seduced by the possibility of turning secrets into products. History abounds with examples of countries that copied and then improved on foreign technology. In the eighteenth century, France spied on, and stole, Britain's textile technology. The Soviet Union stunned the world with its theft of American atomic-bomb secrets in the twentieth century.