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

Gorbachev was the most important Western agent employed by the oper- ational unit for the “protection of the economy,” known as Department XVIII, and provided the lion’s share of all scientific and technical mate- rial collected there. The reason for this bureaucratic anomaly was that the precursor department (Department III – renamed and reorganized in 1964) for protecting the economy had been responsible for company espionage in the West as well as economic security. Some of Department III’s agents were transferred to HV A, but Gorbachev was not.20 He was

Agent Gorbachev 17

recruited during a time of bureaucratic flux before foreign intelligence and domestic security/counterintelligence merged under the common roof of the Ministry for State Security.

Of course, most scientific and technical espionage was the responsibility of another division of the Stasi, the HV A’s Sector for Science and Tech- nology. This was the group from which Werner Stiller defected in 1979, and also the group to which all Gorbachev’s documents were referred for evaluation.

Gorbachev provided the Stasi with blueprints, plans, scientific docu- ments, and some prototypes from two leading West German firms. Between 1957 and 1959 he worked at Telefunken as head of the Depart- ment for Small Transmitters and passed on material related to radios and transmitters. After that, he headed up the Department of Automation at AEG until his retirement in 1977. He had the key to the company archive both times.

The MfS had a systematic method for collection and evaluation based on the state’s economic plan. Industrial representatives could give the MfS a wish list of plans or hardware needed, and it would attempt to acquire the material. The evaluation department played the important role of intermediary between industry and agent. Not only did it funnel the industry wish lists to its agents, keeping in mind the country’s economic needs and each agent’s capabilities, but it also analyzed each item collected by the agents, “neutralized” them (in MfS lingo) so that the source would not be known, and passed the information back to industry or to research institutes. Agents could also bring unsolicited material if they thought it would be of interest, but this material was separated from the requested material.

Gorbachev delivered an unusually copious amount of material. The height of his cooperation seems to have been from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. In 1960, the year before the Wall was built, a case officer reported that Gorbachev delivered 505 documents. This seems to have been his record; in most years, unless meetings ceased for operational reasons, he averaged about 200. In 1968 he contributed 202 of the 289 documents acquired by Department XVIII. As he approached retirement in 1977, Gorbachev’s deliveries dropped significantly. In the 1980s he was still working for the MfS, but instead of passing on secret documents, he was intercepting Western intelligence’s radio messages and finding out their broadcast frequencies.21

The material Gorbachev delivered received high marks. In the Stasi’s meticulously organized system, the evaluation department graded every piece of material on a scale of I to V, with I being the highest rating: “very

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