Adams,
Jefferson. "Crisis and Resurgence: East German State Security."
International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 2,
no. 4 (Winter 1988): 487-512.
The crisis referred to here is the 1953 uprising. Adams provides a quick look at the earlier history of MfS and its growth after 1953.
Adams, Jefferson. "The Strange Demise of East German State Security." International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 18, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1-22.
During the fall of 1989, the MfS experienced "increasing isolation and internal division.... As the protests intensified, the country's security forces ... lost their sense of common purpose and splintered into its component parts.... Unable to formulate a new institutional rationale -- and unwilling to mount a coup d'etat -- the MfS thus entered an end phase of atomization."
Ash, Timothy Garton.
The File: A Personal History. New York: Random House, 1997.
The author lived in East Germany for a good part of the 1980s, working as a writer and journalist for serious Western periodicals. After the fall of East Germany, he was given the opportunity to view his Stasi file. The leads he followed from that file are the stuff of this book about life in the security state. See the review by Mapother, History 26.3. McPherson, Wilson Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Winter 1998), notes that as files go, "Ash's is not remarkable; it is his evacuation of it that fascinates."
Barkleit, Gerhard.
Die Rolle des MfS beim Aufbau der Luftfahrindustrie der DDR. Dresden: Hannah Arendt Institute für Totalitarismusforschung, 1996.
Examines the MfS' relationship to the GDR's effort to develop an aeronautical industry (1955-1961). Adams, IJI&C 13.1/23.
BBC. "Fearsome Stasi Held Nation in Its Grip." 18 Sep. 1999.
[http://news1.thls.bbc.co.uk]
"The Stasi earned a frightening reputation for thoroughness as East Germany's secret police. At its height it employed 85,000 full-time officers, had records on five million East German citizens -- one third of the entire population -- and had several hundred thousand informers.... One of the abiding images of German reunification is Germans ransacking the Stasi buildings in a bid to remove all traces of the hated secret police's records. However many files were left intact and allegedly among them, were those on Hull University lecturer, Dr Robin Pearson."
Bruce, Gary. "Aufklärung und Abwehr: The Lasting Legacy of the Stasi under Ernst Wollweber." Intelligence and National Security 21, no. 3 (Jun. 2006): 364-393.
Wollweber headed the Stasi during the "decisive years" of 1953-1957. The author concludes that "[a]s early as the 1950s, we see that the foreign espionage branch of the Stasi was so tightly integrated into domestic surveillance and the regional structures of the Stasi that it was not as 'ordinary' an intelligence gathering branch as its former officers would have us believe."
Bruce, Gary. "The Prelude to Nationwide Surveillance in East Germany: Stasi Operations and Threat Perceptions, 1945-1953." Journal of Cold War Studies 5, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 3-31.
"This article explores the conduct and threat perceptions of the MfS [Ministry for State Security or Stasi] from the time of its embryonic predecessors in the 1940s to the eve of the mass uprising that swept through East Germany in June 1953."
Capps,
Ronald N. "Shadow Army: The Internal Security Forces of the DDR."
Military Intelligence, Jul.-Sep. 1989, 19-22.
Childs,
David, and Richard Popplewell. The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service. New York: New York University Press, 1996. London: Macmillan, 1996.
For Sarotte, I&NS 12.4, this book allows readers "to get up to speed with secondary literature on the Stasi from the first five years after unification." It provides a "concise summary" of the history of the Ministry of State Security (MfS) and "effectively places the East German service in its historical context.... Readers with knowledge of German will find the[] work less useful," because it does not cite any files from the Stasi archive.
Krisch, APSR 92.2, is less positive about the work, calling it "disappointing." Much of this disillusionment is related to the authors' almost exclusive reliance on secondary and journalistic sources and the absence of any sign that work was done in the East German archives. The reviewer finds that the opening chapter is "a grab bag of facts out of context" and other chapters "appear to have been 'filled' with material whose relevance to the topic is dubious.... More seriously, Childs and Popplewell are careless with accusations unsupported by evidence."
Friend, History 26.4, finds that Childs and Popplewell "thoroughly describe[] the origins, organization, and capabilities of the East German state security." However, "[s]ome of the authors' conclusions are questionable, in terms of both the information available to them and that which subsequently became available."
Cobain, Ian.
1. "The Chatham House Spy." Times (London), 16 Sep. 2000. [http://www.the-times.co.uk]
Evidence that the East Germans had a spy at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) is found in "two sources within the files of the Stasi's foreign intelligence division, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung" (HVA).
"After the Berlin Wall came down, most of the files were destroyed.... A few fragments survived, including the archives of its Leipzig outstation....
"Even more revealing is a coded index known as Sira, short for System for Information Research of the HVA, intended as a guide to the mountains of paper files. Stasi librarians encrypted the Sira index and transferred it to magnetic tape shortly before the collapse of the communist regime....
"After six years of effort,... the code has now been cracked by a former telephone engineer working for the German Government Commission for the Stasi Archive, the organisation responsible for collating the data gathered by the intelligence agency.
"The Sira index ... list[s] the titles of intelligence reports from countless Stasi agents around the world, including those that British moles submitted to their handlers at the London embassy."
2. "The Stasi Spy from St James's." Times (London), 16 Sep. 2000. [http:// www.the-times.co.uk]
As revealed by newly decoded files in Berlin, a Stasi spy "worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for at least six years during the 1980s, coming into contact with Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, and countless other statesmen.
"Operating under the codename Eckart, he supplied the Communist leadership in East Germany with a stream of sensitive information from the influential think-tank.... The files show that Eckart also secretly supplied intelligence briefings on forthcoming Royal Navy manoeuvres and Nato planning, and handed over a number of documents apparently stolen from Chatham House."
3. "Archives Reveal Sheer Scale of Stasi Spy Ring." Times (London), 18 Sep. 2000. [http://www.the-times.co.uk]
"The enormous scale of East German espionage in Britain has been laid bare with the decoding of the archives of the secret police, the Stasi. At least 28 highly placed spies worked for the Communist regime during the last days of the Cold War, providing sensitive information on almost every area of British life."
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