Free Republic

E. Germans drew blueprint for Cuban spying A once-jailed Cuban exile's research reveals how East Germany exported its repressive Stasi security system to Cuba, where it lives on today. MICHAEL LEVITIN BERLIN -- In the cavernous underground jail once run by East Germany's notorious Stasi security agency, Jorge Luís Vázquez leads a visitor into a dank, tiny, pitch-black cell, then slams the iron door shut. The world vanishes into darkness. Moments later, the door swings open and light returns. ''Well, how was it?'' asks Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in one of these very Stasi cells in 1987,...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall a German company plans to give the Trabant, a stinky two-cylinder car that became the symbol of communist East Germany, a new lease of life. The new Trabants will no longer have tiny engines, noxious fumes and plastic bodies but will retain the iconic design of the original -- like Volkswagen's new Beetle or the new Mini. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in the former East Germany and was produced without major changes for nearly 30 years. Known in the West as a "spark plug...

BERLIN — Researchers have discovered a Cold War “shoot-to-kill” order in what amounts to the clearest evidence yet that East German troops were given a licence to fire on people fleeing to the West, the Times of London reported. The written order, issued to Stasi secret service agents, states: “Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past.” It was found by a researcher in a regional archive of Stasi documents in the city of Magdeburg.

BERLIN _ The agency that manages the records of former East Germany's dreaded secret police has uncovered an order for border guards to fire on escaping citizens that is far more explicit than others on record, an official said in remarks published Saturday. Though the official East German border regulations said use of a firearm was to be considered an ''extreme measure in the use of force,'' the Oct. 1, 1973 order to border guards from the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, is much less reserved, Magdeburg's Volksstimme newspaper reported. ''Do not hesitate with the use of a firearm,...

I return from one week’s leave from my column, grateful for my old roost and in the mood to repay a favor by granting one, or attempting to do so. You must have the narrative of what happened one day last week. I was at work, with an assistant, on a long project, a book about the Goldwater campaign and the events leading up to it. At noon I had an e-mail from my oldest friend, a historian-belletrist, a knighted Englishman, whose message was that I must interrupt whatever I was wasting time on in order to catch a particular...

CHILDREN in formerly communist eastern Germany are to be given lessons next year about the dreaded Stasi secret police amid fears that their horrors have been forgotten. Feelgood films like Goodbye Lenin!, TV shows, books and a soon-to-open theme park dedicated to the lost socialist state of the German Democratic Republic have had an impact on children who were not born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Some fear a rose-tinted view of what was a hideous tyranny has warped the entire German perspective of the state that was Moscow's most fervent eastern bloc ally in the Cold War....

German spymaster buried in Berlin Nov 26, 2006 Several hundred people gathered at a cemetery in east Berlin on Saturday to bury Markus Wolf, the legendary East German spymaster who died earlier this month at the age of 83. As head of the elite foreign intelligence division of the communist state's Stasi secret police, Wolf masterminded some of the Cold War's most audacious operations. He planted an agent close to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, a move which led to Brandt's downfall when the spy was exposed in 1974. "Markus Wolf was a true and loyal friend of my country,"...

Markus Wolf, known as Cold War spymaster, dies at age 83 By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo. WARSAW, Poland — Markus Wolf, the spymaster who epitomized Cold War espionage as head of the brutal and inventive East German foreign-intelligence service, died Thursday at his Berlin home. He was 83. The cause of death was not announced. Suave and elusive, Mr. Wolf was such an enigma that Western intelligence agencies didn't know exactly what he looked like during tense decades when a...

Markus Wolf, the sinister East German spymaster who spun his web across Western Europe, has died peacefully in his sleep — taking with him some of the darkest secrets of the Cold War.A solitary red rose was deposited by a sympathiser yesterday on the doorstep of his Berlin apartment block. But few tears were being shed for the 83-year-old Stasi general who dispatched some 30,000 agents to seduce Nato secretaries, buy up politicians, vacuum up secrets and train terrorists. Normally voluble politicians contacted for comment yesterday refused to utter a word, as if Mr Wolf were a demonic presence. “Let...

Markus Wolf, the former head of communist East Germany's foreign intelligence service, has died at the age of 83, his family says. Wolf kept such a low profile that Western intelligence services did not have his picture. But as a key figure in the feared Stasi security ministry, he was a highly influential figure in the Cold War. He was interviewed by the BBC last year over his role as a journalist at the Nuremburg trials in 1945-6. He said witnessing the evidence of the Nazis' crimes "influenced my later life because anti-fascism became the raison d'etre of my life".

“There can be no peace without honestly and maturely confronting the past.” --Joachim Gauck[1] It’s the middle of May, and I’m having breakfast at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.[2]  I’m in Germany with other journalists on a visit sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke, a Berlin-based organization that promotes German-American friendship.   This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Helmut Holl, former state secretary for Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.  Dr. Holl and I discuss the German Democratic (sic) Republic (sic) (GDR), which subjugated eastern Germany from 1949 to 1990 after National Socialist subjugation from 1933 to 1945.   A short walk from the Adlon is...

BERLIN - The official German archives released Wednesday a communist file that describes former West German leader Willy Brandt as an intelligence source, but experts said it was clear that Brandt was unaware he was being pumped for information. Brandt was one of 45 members of the West German Bundestag parliament in the 1969-1972 period who is named in a directory of East Germany's foreign espionage network. Historians say three Bonn parliamentarians were definitely communist spies at that time. Files on 16 persons were released. Most of the rest, like Brandt, who was chancellor 1969-1974 and died in 1992, were...

In most parts of Berlin today, one has to look hard to find the double strand of bricks embedded in sidewalks, >snip< the Berlin Wall was one of the most visible, despised, politically and ideologically charged boundaries on earth. It was also the quintessence of an unnatural border, one drawn not by nature, language, ethnicity or colonial hubris, but an artificial, man-made and deliberate cleaving of a culturally and linguistically homogenous society.  >snip<  very simply, no major world city had been cleaved in half so abruptly and violently. >snip< What happened in East Germany, many Germans are  realizing, was not...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

Earlier this year, Congress launched an investigation into the sale of cell phone records after the FBI and Chicago Police warned that Web-based firms could sell their officers' calling lists to criminals. Now some of the companies under investigation for fraud are telling Congress they have provided personal information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. On Monday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., blasted the FBI after learning that Advanced Research Inc. sent Congress a letter saying the firm did work for the bureau. Attorney General Lisa Madigan has sued Advanced Research for allegedly using fraud to obtain Illinois consumers'...

A great many people still do not understand why turning down the DP World deal was a bad step for the United States. The issue actually has several levels of significance, and most people never saw beyond one or two of them. I won’t go into a prolonged discussion about why DP World did not threaten National Security, or why the policies of the U.A.E. post-9/11 are so much more important than their pre-9/11 policies. For this article, I will simply present a real-world example of the limits of paranoid security concerns: The Stasi. East Germany was not a fun...

BERLIN -The former East German secret service considered Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, one of the most dangerous critics of communism and spied on him starting in 1974, a leading weekly reported Sunday.The Bild am Sonntag released excerpts of vast files showing that the secret police, or Stasi, closely watched Ratzinger for years, collecting biographical details, information from spies and expectations of his next moves.Ratzinger's friendship with Polish-born Pope John Paul II - who Poles today largely credit with giving them the courage to challenge communism -was viewed by the Stasi as particularly dangerous."Since the mid-70s, Ratzinger has...

Secret police spied on pope 02/10/2005 13:59 - (SA) Berlin - The East German secret police spied on the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI for 15 years, targeting him as one of the Vatican's fiercest opponents of communism, according to a report published on Sunday. From April 1974 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the feared Ministry for State Security kept close tabs on the then theology professor Joseph Ratzinger, according to documents from the so-called Stasi archives printed in the weekly Bild am Sonntag. "Ratzinger is seen at the Vatican as one of...

Germany's new Left party, which could play a crucial role in deciding the next chancellor, faced acute embarrassment yesterday amid claims that at least seven of its MPs had collaborated with the Stasi, the East German secret police. The head of Germany's state-held Stasi archive, Marianne Birthler, said she had documents to prove the MPs had worked as "inoffizielle mitarbeiter" (unofficial collaborators). The public had a right to know which MPs had collaborated, she said, adding: "It's a question of trust." The revelation came as the Left party held its first meeting as a parliamentary group after Sunday's inconclusive general...

TOP secret computer disks have revealed the huge extent to which East German Stasi spies were able to infiltrate the West during the Cold War.The Rosewood file reveals that universities, national sports and the civil service had many more East German spies on their payrolls than previously believed. Now the authorities are under pressure to out former spies who continued to work in their jobs after reunification. The file was acquired by CIA spies in the heady days after the Berlin Wall fell as the Stasi's paper shredders worked overtime to destroy 90% of the records detailing its activities over...