The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, an abbreviation of Staatssicherheit, was the state security service of East Germany from 1950 to 1990.
Cold War espionage describes the intelligence gathering activities during the Cold War between the Western allies and the Eastern Bloc. Both relied on a wide variety of military and civilian agencies in this pursuit.
Erich Fritz Emil Mielke was a German communist official who served as head of the East German Ministry for State Security, better known as the Stasi, from 1957 until shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
On 5 April 1986, three people were killed and 229 injured when La Belle discothèque was bombed in the Friedenau district of West Berlin. The entertainment venue was commonly frequented by United States soldiers; two of the dead and 79 of the injured were Americans.
Markus Johannes Wolf, also known as Mischa, was head of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, the foreign intelligence division of East Germany's Ministry for State Security. He was the Stasi's number two for 34 years, which spanned most of the Cold War. He is often regarded as one of the best-known spymasters during the Cold War. In the West he was known as "the man without a face" due to his elusiveness.
Tempelhof-Schöneberg is the seventh borough of Berlin, formed in 2001 by merging the former boroughs of Tempelhof and Schöneberg. Situated in the south of the city it shares borders with the boroughs of Mitte and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in the north, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf and Steglitz-Zehlendorf in the west as well as Neukölln in the east.
The Federal Intelligence Service is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinate to the Chancellor's Office. The BND headquarters is located in central Berlin. The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries. In 2016, it employed around 6,500 people; 10% of them are military personnel who are formally employed by the Office for Military Sciences. The BND is the largest agency of the German Intelligence Community.
A radio listening station is a facility used for military reconnaissance, especially telecommunications reconnaissance by "intercepting" radio transmitter communications. In contrast to the original eavesdropping on an acoustic speech conversation, radio eavesdropping stations are used to eavesdrop on the information transmitted wirelessly using radio technology. For this purpose, highly sensitive radio receivers and suitable receiving antennas are used.
Mariendorf is a locality in the southern Tempelhof-Schöneberg borough of Berlin.
Who's Who in CIA is a book written by the East German journalist Julius Mader and published in East Berlin in 1968, under Stasi auspices and probably with KGB assistance. Mader was employed by the East German military publishing house and apparently had access to some information on CIA officers that was not publicly available. The book purported to identify about 3,000 active agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. It was modeled after other Who's Who guides.
Robert Glenn Thompson is a former U.S. Air Force clerk who confessed in 1965 to passing hundreds of photos of secret documents to the Soviet Union since 1957 while he was based in West Berlin, at the Office of Special Investigation at Tempelhof Air Base. He served there from December 1952 to December 1958. He became an Airman Second Class.
James W. Hall III is a former United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.
The Stasi Records Agency was the organisation that administered the archives of Ministry of State Security (Stasi) of the former German Democratic Republic. It was a government agency of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was established when the Stasi Records Act came into force on 29 December 1991. Formally it was called the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic ; the official German abbreviation was BStU. On June 17, 2021, the BStU was absorbed into the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv).
Francis Xavier Taylor was the Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nominated by President Obama in 2014. In that role, he provided the Secretary, DHS senior leadership, the DHS components, and state, local, tribal and private sector partners with homeland security intelligence and information they need to keep the country safe, secure and resilient. DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis is a member of, and the Department’s liaison to, the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Daniel S. Butler is the second Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Source (ADDNI/OS). As such, he is responsible for developing strategic direction, establishing policy and managing fiscal resources for open source exploitation as well as document and media exploitation for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
John O. Koehler was a German-born American journalist and executive for the Associated Press, who also briefly served as the White House Communications Director in 1987 during the Reagan administration.
Marienfelde refugee transit camp was one of three camps operated by West Germany and West Berlin during the cold war for dealing with the great waves of immigration from East Germany, especially between 1950 and 1961. Refugees arriving in West Berlin were sent to the reception centre located in the Marienfelde district, where they received medical treatment, food, identification papers, and housing until they could be permanently re-settled in the West.
Hüseyin Yıldırım is a Turkish-American auto mechanic who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for his courier role in the espionage activities of U.S. serviceman James Hall III during the Cold War era. Yıldırım was later pardoned and extradited to his homeland, where he was sentenced to 17 years in prison but served only one day.
Francis R. Dillon was a United States Air Force brigadier general who served as the 11th Commander of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), Bolling AFB, Washington, D.C. As the AFOSI Commander, Dillon was responsible for providing commanders of all Air Force activities independent professional investigative services regarding fraud, counterintelligence and major criminal matters by using a worldwide network of agents stationed at all major Air Force installations and a variety of special operating locations.
Relations between East Germany and the United States formally began in 1974 until the former's collapse in 1990. The relationship between the two nations was among the most hostile during the Cold War as both sides were mutually suspicious of each other. Both sides conducted routine espionage against each other and conducted prisoner exchanges for their respective citizens which included spies for both the Americans and Soviets.
