The Stasi beyond East Germany
The reach of the Stasi within East Germany was extensive, but it was far from limited to just the confines of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Their arms extended all over Europe – particularly, and unsurprisingly, into West Germany – and their influence was felt at the very highest echelons of government. Similarly to the KGB, the Ministry of State Security was not just responsible for internal security, it was also the foreign intelligence agency, a CIA and FBI and House Un-American Activities Committee all rolled into one.
Their infiltration of institutions in West Germany and particularly West Berlin was massive. Those who had studied in the East were often recruited and sent back to the West and groomed for decades, waiting for the moment at which they would become useful to the DDR regime. The Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter system that was in place across East Germany would be replicated over the border, with the same methods of coercion, blackmail and bribery used to keep agents onside. It is estimated that, while the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the foreign intelligence section of the Stasi, employed around 4,000 people, a similar number of people were thought to be on their contact book and in their sphere of influence beyond their borders.
They were supplemented by East Germans with travel privileges to the West – academics, students and artists, for example, were tasked with reconnaissance. High profile known Stasi agents in the West included Gabriele Gast, deputy head of the Soviet section of the West German intelligence agency and Günter Guillaume, personal secretary to Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of West Germany.
The Stasi was born as an offshoot of the KGB, and thus they shared many methods of intelligence gathering. There is an argument to be made that the Stasi never gained full independence from the KGB, certainly in the international departments, and as late as 1978, KGB officers possessed the same powers inside East Germany as they did inside the Soviet Union. Even the armed section of the Stasi – responsible for protection of high-ranking dignitaries and the government of the DDR – was named for Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, forerunner to the KGB.
As they had been formed under the auspices of the KGB, so Stasi agents built secret polices in other communist nations. They aided the governments of Cuba under Fidel Castro, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah, as well as in Ethiopia, Uganda and Syria. Their loyalty was not just to the cause of communism, however: money was funnelled to neo-Nazi groups in West Germany with the intent of undermining their neighbours, while they also funded the Rote Armee Fraktion, a leftist guerrilla group that attacked businessmen and politicians in West Germany.
