Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (review)

Because of the almost complete destruction of files from the foreign espionage branch (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—HV A) of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the tumultuous fall of 1989 (with the blessing, it must be said, of East Germans participating in the “Round Table” process), scholars face a tremendous challenge when writing the history of Stasi operations abroad. Kristie Mackrakis has painstakingly pieced together her narrative from scant documentation (including the skeletal files of the System for Information, Research, and Evaluation and the Rosenholz files on Stasi agents in the West obtained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency through unknown means); from inferences in other Stasi record groups; and from interviews. The result is a detailed examination of the Stasi’s use of technology and its efforts to forestall economic collapse by targeting Western science.

Part One of Seduced by Secrets discusses the Sector for Science and Technology (Sektor Wissenschaft und Technik—SWT), which was responsible for stealing scientific know-how from the West. Mackrakis illustrates the work of SWT through several case studies of individual spies: Stasi agents who worked in the West, as well as two U.S. citizens stationed with the military in Berlin who spied for the Stasi. Although much of the information the author provides in the chapter on Werner Stiller is well known, it illustrates the extent to which his 1979 defection dealt a devastating blow to SWT’s network of agents in the West.

Part One ends with an investigation of the Stasi’s efforts to acquire Western computer technology, a Stasi priority from the late 1970s when the East German regime realized that a severe lag in this area would have serious consequences for industry. Macrakis is at her strongest here, demonstrating the limits of knowledge obtained in an underhanded fashion. As she summarizes: “A scientific establishment based on pirated and cloned technology can never be a leader, especially in such a fast-moving field as computer technology” (p. 140)

Part Two deals with Stasi gadgets employed to obtain knowledge from the West (and sometimes used against East Germany’s own population), including invisible ink, miniature cameras, telephone taps, and microrecorders. Much of this information will be of interest to the amateur spy buff, although the insertion of the author and her students into the narrative will not be to the liking of some. Historians of East Germany will find Macrakis’s information on the close ties between the Stasi and other aspects of East German state and society, such as industry and the postal service, of particular interest. She illustrates the common Stasi practice of planting informants in sensitive scientific industrial areas and working closely with industry to determine needs. In this way, as Macrakis reminds her readers, the secret police had considerable influence in the machinery of state and society and almost unfettered access to information on citizens held in other branches of the state apparatus. Even though historians of late have moved away from describing East Germany as totalitarian, it is worth remembering that the Stasi had total access to state institutions and industry in order to accomplish its tasks.

Although Macrakis offers a flood of fascinating “insider” information, the book is not structured around a tightly argued thesis. She appears to argue that the Stasi “became so caught up in the great game of espionage that it lost sight of its initial goals” (p. 3), yet we hear little about this stance elsewhere. From her own account, other overriding factors limited the Stasi’s ability to save the sinking economy, including a Stasi that had grown from its modest roots into a bloated organization with overlapping jurisdictions, like those of SWT, internal security, and Department XVIII, which was responsible for protection of economic installations. Macrakis does not differentiate between a normal increase in the sophistication of the Stasi’s work—something one would expect from an organization in its third decade—and an obsession...