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"Add the LHO file to the other real KGB files I would love to see: Bill Clinton, Richard Holbrooke, Strobe Talbot, Al Gore Sr. and Jr. and a couple of hundred others!"

You may just get your wish ...

Scientists 'unshredding' files of East German secret police
November 22, 2003

BY KATE CONNOLLY

BERLIN -- It is the most complex jigsaw puzzle in the world, 600 million shreds of paper that contain the secrets of decades of communist espionage.

Now German scientists have developed a highly sophisticated machine that will "unshred" the files of the East German secret police, the Stasi. All could be revealed within five years.

The E-Puzzler, developed by Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Design Technology, will seek to rebuild the spy records that were shredded by hand into 16,000 sacks during the final days of the communist regime after shredding machines broke down.

For the past eight years, 15 workers -- a mix of ex-Stasi employees and clerks from a defunct asylum seekers' center -- have been painstakingly sticking paper shreds together with tape and tweezers.

Working at a rate of around 10 documents a day, 500,000 pages -- 250 sacks -- have been manually reconstructed since 1995. Experts estimated it would take them 400 years to complete the thankless task.

The E-Puzzler is set to reduce that to around half a decade at an annual cost of nearly $12 million, if the government approves. Its software works by identifying the characteristics of the paper scraps and grouping them together.

Once pieced together, the documents, largely the records on the 174,000 unofficial employees of the Stasi and the estimated 6 million they spied on in the 1970s and 1980s, are expected to be of huge significance.

Historians say they are likely to reveal everything from the crimes committed by the secret police to love affairs between agents. They will probably tarnish a number of reputations in the process.

Daily Telegraph