A reprint from American Scientist - Kristie Macrakiskristiemacrakis.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Gorbachev.pdf · not know he was selling secrets to the MfS, be-lieving he was selling

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American Scientistthe magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

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It is September 1961, a few weeks after thebuilding of the Berlin Wall on August 13. Aman of medium build, with slicked-back darkblond hair and a bit of a paunch, gets off theWest Berlin subway at Friedrichstrasse, the lo-cation of the main border crossing to EastBerlin. The cheap fluorescent lights give hisface a greenish pallor as he navigates the maze-like underground passages and walks up tothe cubicles of the East German border guards.Attracting the attention of one of the officers,he asks to be arrested.

Agent Gorbachev has crossed the bordermany times over the three years that he hasbeen passing secret documents to East Ger-many. But he has never done it quite like this.The newly constructed wall has made it moredifficult to get into East Berlin. Gorbachev isworried, because he hasn’t heard a word fromhis East German case officer since the Wallwent up, and he needs money.

Around midnight, Major Erich Pape, the caseofficer, finally arrives at the train station. He re-assures Gorbachev that the reason for the si-lence was to protect him. Gorbachev suggestsanother meeting to pass on more material hehas collected. Pape reluctantly agrees, butwarns that further meetings will have to waituntil the situation stabilizes. Later, in his noteson their midnight rendezvous beneath thestreets of Berlin, Pape writes that Gorbachevwas slightly drunk: He had needed a fewdrinks to gain the courage to make the journey.

As he filed his notes in Agent Gorbachev’sdossier, Major Pape surely never dreamed thatthey would one day become public record. TheMinistry for State Security (MfS), known collo-quially as the “Stasi,” was good at keeping se-crets. But in the aftermath of the fall of theBerlin Wall in November 1989, much of theStasi’s vast archive of secrets—containing overa hundred miles of files and 35 million indexcards—has become available for scholars andordinary citizens to peruse. I found Gor-bachev’s file there in 1997, while conductingresearch on the role of the spy agency in tech-nology transfer from West to East Germany.

Agent Gorbachev—actually a West Germanphysicist named Hans Rehder, who worked atTelefunken and AEG, roughly the West Ger-man counterpart of Westinghouse—was one ofthe Stasi’s most prized sources. He sold indus-trial and technical secrets to the Stasi for 28years without getting caught. He would re-main unknown today if not for a bureaucraticquirk. The Stasi’s foreign arm, the super-secretHVA, managed to destroy most of its recordsbefore the opening of the archives. But Gor-bachev happened to fall under the Stasi’s do-mestic intelligence, or “counterintelligence,”unit, by far the largest branch of the Stasi, andmost domestic-intelligence material was notdestroyed. Thus Gorbachev’s file, unlike thoseof many similar agents, was spared the papershredder and is now a unique window ontothe workings of scientific and technical espi-onage during the Cold War.

Agent Gorbachev was far from unique inother ways. Thousands of respectable Westernscientists, engineers and businessmen, includ-ing Americans, worked for the KGB and East-ern Bloc intelligence agencies during the ColdWar, tools of organizations that knew exactlyhow to turn ordinary human weakness to theirown ends.

Gorbachev’s case can also give us insight intoindustrial espionage even as it is practiced to-day. Since the end of the Cold War there hasbeen an increase in state-sponsored and orches-trated economic and scientific espionage. Coun-tries such as Japan have proved to be far morecapable of turning secrets into products thanEast Germany ever was. America has recentlydrawn fire from the European Parliament, whichalleges that Operation Echelon, a worldwidesystem used by the National Security Agency tointercept foreign communications, is used foreconomic and scientific espionage.

The Making of a SpyOne thing seems certain: Hans Rehder neverplanned to be a spy. He did not have a particu-lar ideological inclination toward Commu-nism. Born in 1912, he had joined Hitler’s Na-

534 American Scientist, Volume 88 © 2000 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproductionwith permission only. Contact [email protected].

The Case of Agent Gorbachev

East Germany acquired technology the old-fashioned way: by stealing it.But did it do their industrial enterprise any good?

Kristie Macrakis

Kristie Macrakis received herPh.D in the history of sciencefrom Harvard University.After spending a postdoctoralyear in Berlin, she joined thefaculty of Michigan StateUniversity, where she is cur-rently an associate professor.She has received grants andawards from the Institute forAdvanced Study in Princetonand the National ScienceFoundation as well asFulbright and HumboldtFoundation grants. Her booksinclude Surviving theSwastika: ScientificResearch in Nazi Germany(Oxford, 1993) and Scienceunder Socialism: EastGermany in ComparativePerspective (Harvard, 1999).She is currently writing a bookabout espionage, technology andthe Stasi. Address: MichiganState University, East Lansing,MI 48824. Internet:[email protected]

tional Socialist Party in 1931—more likely outof conviction than of necessity, because it wasat that time a minority party—and presumablyreceived plenty of anti-Communist indoctrina-tion. He had never set foot in East Germanybefore 1957, when he made his initial contactwith Stasi agents.

From the Stasi’s point of view, however,there was nothing accidental about Rehder’srecruitment. As early as 1956, the Central Com-mittee of the Communist Party had directedthe MfS “to support our economy and our re-search and development installations with allavailable resources.” Later that year, in anothertop-secret document, MfS chief Erich Mielkedetailed the objective: “The Ministry for StateSecurity has the goal of acquiring, in steadilyincreasing volume, scientific-technical infor-mation and documents from West Germanyand other capitalist countries.”

Toward this end, the MfS created an over-view of all major West German companies, inthe form of object files, and its officers begansystematic recruitment of leading personnel.The MfS had already established a network ofdomestic informants (called “unofficial collabo-rators” or IMs), and often used these to recruitWesterners through business contacts.

Rehder had been consulting for the (EastGerman) Ministry for Machine Building forseveral years. An informant code-named “Si-mon,” who worked at an East Berlin companythat made radio receivers, struck up an ac-quaintanceship with Rehder and found outthat he was deeply in debt. With a wife andfour children to support, Rehder, even in hisposition as department head for small trans-mitters at Telefunken, was having a hard timemaking ends meet. Simon passed the informa-tion on to his case officers, who set up a meet-ing with Rehder at the Hotel Adria. At thatmeeting, according to the Gorbachev file, Re-hder said he was “ready, inasmuch as he couldreconcile it with his conscience, to keep themabreast of the newest developments … againstan appropriate payment.” His first paymentwas 500 West German marks.

For his first two years as a spy, Rehder didnot know he was selling secrets to the MfS, be-lieving he was selling them to representatives ofthe Ministry for Machine Building. Stasi agentshad been using a cover story. Cover stories orfalse-flag operations—when intelligence officerstell a potential agent that they come from anoth-er country—were often employed when therewas a sense that the potential recruit was hostiletoward Communist countries.

It was not until January 1959 that Rehder’scase officers, including Major Pape, apparentlyrevealed to Rehder who they were. The filescontain no description of Rehder’s reaction tothis news; he simply continued, apparentlywith great eagerness, to pass on company se-

crets for money. Perhaps the best clue that theStasi had him in their pocket had come a fewweeks earlier, when Gorbachev bragged thathe had made an imprint of the key to the com-pany archive. “With this key,” he told the offi-cers, “I am in the position to access all compa-

2000 November–December 535© 2000 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproductionwith permission only. Contact [email protected].

Figure 1. Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse became a flashpoint for Cold War tensions on Oc-tober 23, 1961, when U.S. tanks came face to face with Russian tanks near CheckpointCharlie. The tanks retreated after three days, but a clandestine espionage war contin-ued for nearly three decades. Many secrets passed from West to East via the Friedrich-strasse subway station, several blocks north of Checkpoint Charlie in East Germanterritory. The files documenting the work of one East German agent, a West Germanphysicist code-named Agent Gorbachev who had crossed the newly constructed Wallat Friedrichstrasse to meet his handlers not long before the October confrontation,provide a window into scientific and technological espionage during the Cold Waryears in Germany.

Bettmann/Corbis

ny secrets.”The MfS quickly became Rehder’s personal

line of credit without repayment or interest. By1959 Rehder was considered so important thathe received a salary of 400 marks a month, inaddition to lump-sum payments for documentdelivery. During the 1960s, he would receivebetween 400 and 600 marks at each meetingwhere technical documents were delivered. Inthe course of his cooperation with the MfS, Re-hder and his family moved several times, andreceived 7,000 marks for moving expenses. Forthe Stasi, it was a bargain: Within their firstyear of meetings in East Berlin, Gorbachev hadpassed on an estimated 1 million West Germanmarks’ worth of technical documents.

On the long list of human weaknesses that

intelligence agencies have used to enlist newagents, greed has always been one of the mosteffective. Aldrich Ames, the U.S.’s most notori-ous traitor, carried out secret files from his CIAoffice and delivered them to the KGB ingarbage bags in exchange for millions of dol-lars. Klaus Kuron, West Germany’s head ofcounterintelligence, offered to spy for East Ger-many out of professional frustration and tohelp pay for his children’s education. ManyWest Germans spied for money; others spiedfor ideological reasons, for love or for adven-ture. It was more common for West Germancitizens to spy for money than it was for do-mestic East German informants, who did itmore often for ideological reasons or to ad-vance their careers.

Code names were usually assigned to orchosen by an agent to protect his or her identi-ty and often referred to characteristics of theagent. For example, a scientist’s code namemight contain the word “researcher.” Some-times the code name would be just anotherGerman name, say, “Hans Bauer.”

Rehder received his code name, “Gor-bachev,” in 1958, even before he officially be-came an agent. Of course, the future Sovietleader named Gorbachev was at this point un-known even in Russia. Although no direct ex-planation for the name is given in the file, aclue may come from the evidence that Rehderliked to drink. Early in his relationship withMfS officers, he would suggest going out for adrink or buying a bottle of sec. He arrived atthe Friedrichstrasse border crossing drunk atleast several times. Perhaps most tellingly, hedied of cirrhosis of the liver.

Before the Wall came down, “Wodka Gor-batschow” was regularly available in East Berlinforeign-currency stores. According to the label,the vodka has been manufactured in Berlinsince the end of the tsarist period and has been a“favorite drink among Berlin’s Russian colonysince the beginning of the 1920s.”

Building TrustGoing out for a drink was only one of manyways that the Stasi attempted to get into anagent’s good graces. If Gorbachev wanted a va-cation in East Germany, the MfS could arrange itfor him—for free. In 1958, Gorbachev expressedan interest in vacationing on the Baltic Sea withhis wife, Martha. The MfS financed a three-week vacation, arranged for hotel rooms andprovided them with false identity cards in thenames of Hans and Maria Schreiber.

On other occasions, the MfS invited Gor-bachev and his wife, code-named “Maria,” toall-day social meetings in safe houses. To theRehders, this may have seemed like generosity,but according to the file the meetings had aspecific purpose: to “build trust” and to tie theagent further to the MfS. By the fall of 1960,


Figure 2. Hans Rehder (top and right) and his wife Martha (left) were prized agents ofthe Ministry for State Security, also known as the Stasi, from 1957 until Rehder’sdeath in 1985. Rehder, a physicist at the West German firms Telefunken and AEG,transmitted technical secrets from company archives. In addition to passing on docu-ments related to his fields of expertise, small transmitters and industrial automation,he contributed valuable military information and material that helped East Germanycopy Western computers. (Eyes were blacked out by the staff of the Bundesbeauftragtefür die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes, the BStU or Stasi archive; pho-tographs courtesy of the BStU.)

“Maria” had been recruited to assist with theespionage work. The couple were invited tospend a day at a guest house in an East Berlinsuburb, Grünau. They were served breakfast,lunch, dinner and coffee. At this meeting theyreceived a 12-piece set of Meissner porcelain,just one of many gifts that officers presented toGorbachev over the years.

On several occasions, Gorbachev brought giftsfor his case officers. One officer told him that hecould not accept gifts, and Gorbachev becameupset and angry. Although gift giving for theStasi officers was part of the job, to Gorbachev itwas a token of appreciation and friendship.Surely, the rejection of a gift underlined for himthat the relationship was pure business.

1n 1964, the Rehders spent a couple of daysin September visiting several factories, oil re-fineries and the socialist city Eisenhüttenstadt.The trip also included a boat ride on the riverSpree and meals. The “goal of this trip,” re-ported Major Pape, was to “strengthen thetrust of the agents in our state” and to showthem the economic progress and building upof the German Democratic Republic.

The case officer–agent relationship was al-ways a complicated and ambiguous one. Tosome agents, the officer became a father con-fessor, a psychiatrist or a close friend. Gor-bachev typically met with his case officersonce every two weeks before the Wall wasbuilt, and about once a month afterwards, andthese meetings usually lasted four to sixhours. Although the details of personal con-versations are sketchy, some relationship wasbound to develop over these long hours. Inspite of the Stasi’s professionalism, the friend-ship must at time have gone both ways. Gor-bachev’s last case officer, Erich Lehmann, of-ten remarks on how lively and charmingGorbachev’s wife is, and he paid her a visit af-ter Gorbachev died in 1985.

A final way in which the Stasi built trust wasto bestow medals and honors on its agents. Forobvious reasons, the agent was not allowed totake these tokens of recognition home. Shortlybefore he retired, Gorbachev asked to see hisvarious medals. In the West, as far as we know,he was just another corporate manager. In theEast, he was (secretly) a hero of the state, theowner of a gold medal awarded by order ofColonel-General Erich Mielke himself.

By socializing with Gorbachev, showeringhim with largesse and presenting the East Ger-man view of politics (which made up a largepart of every meeting), the Stasi apparentlyconvinced Gorbachev that there was nothingwrong with what he was doing. Perhaps thereis nothing more chilling in the Gorbachev filethan to see the ease of the process by whichthe hesitant Hans Rehder of 1957, still strug-gling with his conscience, was transformedinto the confident agent Gorbachev of 1959,


Figure 3. Rehder’s code name “Gorbachev” derived, in alllikelihood, from Wodka Gorbatschow (shown here with amartini glass and a Stasi badge from the author’s collec-tion), a Berlin vodka manufactured since the 1920s. Gor-bachev’s file mentions his fondness for alcohol, and hisoccasionally showing up drunk for meetings with hisEast German case officers.

Figure 4. For his work as Agent Gorbachev Rehder re-ceived several medals and awards, including this 1971diploma given in recognition of his “active participa-tion and good results toward developing scientific-technical cooperation between the German Democrat-ic Republic and the Soviet Union.”

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Many WestGermans spiedfor money;others spied for ideologicalreasons, for loveor for adventure.

bragging about his pirated company key.

TradecraftHe may have been a purveyor of new technol-ogy, but Agent Gorbachev used less gadgetryin his spycraft than one would expect. He nev-er even used a radio transmitter or receiver tocommunicate with his case officers, althoughhe was an expert ham radio operator who hadtrained Nazi security agents in radio commu-nications. Instead, future meetings were usual-ly aranged at the meetings themselves, or bytelephone. After the Wall went up, a morecomplicated system was used whereby Gor-bachev would write the time of the next meet-ing in a cigarette pack and throw it out of thetrain every Wednesday at 19:05.

Gorbachev also was not trained in any otheroperational techniques, such as invisible ink orphotography, until very late, when he learnedmicrodot photography. In this respect, he dif-fered greatly from East Germans who weregroomed to become agents in the West. Gor-bachev generally carried documents across theborder in his normal briefcase (not one with se-cret compartments). For a brief period beforethe Wall went up, his wife transported undevel-oped film hidden in a container—in her case ashopping bag outfitted with a secret compart-ment. Gorbachev was given a different contain-er for transporting material and hiding film athome, but he preferred simply to bring the orig-inal documents over the border and bring themback to the office the next day.

Given the lack of disguise in his movements,it may seem surprising that Gorbachev nevercame close to being caught. “Western counter-intelligence could have easily caused consid-erable damage by concentrating more forces atthe Friedrichstrasse train station,” says Werner

Stiller, the most important officer from the for-eign intelligence division (HVA) ever to defectto the West during the Cold War. A Westerncounterintelligence officer with whom I havespoken agrees with Stiller’s assessment, butnotes that the very high volume of traffic at ametropolitan subway stop made it difficult totrack people even as they were leaving brief-cases in train-station lockers.

On one occasion, the MfS thought that Gor-bachev was in danger of being exposed. In Au-gust 1962, an MfS officer from the evaluationdepartment, Walter Thräne, fled to West Ger-many with his girlfriend, raising the possibilitythat the identity of East German agents wouldbe revealed to Western intelligence.

In preparation for such an event, the Stasi hadalready instructed Gorbachev and other agentson a procedure to be followed to permit a thirdperson to convey a warning. The stranger wouldgive the agent a badge showing the Russiangunboat Aurora, attached to a pin of the EiffelTower, and tell him, “I found this in front of yourdoor; is it yours?” If the agent answered “Yes,”then the stranger would report the news. Afterthe building of the Wall, the badge signaledmore serious news: It meant “Extreme danger,get out of town immediately.”

A few days after Thräne disappeared, anagent code-named “Angel” showed up at theRehders’ door with the Aurora badge. Aroundmidnight, the couple made their way toFriedrichstrasse, where they were picked up bythe Stasi and brought to a safe house. There,Stasi officers informed them of the situation andtheir belief that Thräne knew where Gorbachevworked, and perhaps what his real name was.Gorbachev was unfazed by the possible danger,pointing out that there were many other physi-cists at AEG, and that because of his position hewould not be immediately arrested.

The case officer urged Gorbachev and his wifeto move to East Berlin for safety and promisedthat all their material belongings would be re-placed. However, the couple declined to takesuch a life-altering step on such short notice. In-stead, after a quick review of what to do in caseof trouble, they returned home via Friedrich-strasse at 3:00 in the morning.

In the end, Gorbachev’s sangfroid turned outto be justified. Thräne was not a real defector; hehad left East Berlin for personal and profession-al reasons. His marriage was on the rocks, andhe had recently been demoted from his positionas acting head of a division for evaluation to arank-and-file informant job. Nevertheless, theStasi did not want to take the risk of havingThräne remain at large in West Germany. Theykidnapped him and brought him back to EastGermany, where they interrogated him and sen-tenced him to many years in prison.

Gorbachev’s Haul


Figure 5. Prearranged signalof danger to an agent wasthis unusual trinket combin-ing a badge of the Russiangunboat Aurora and a minia-ture Eiffel Tower. Gorbachevreceived this signal once,when the Stasi feared hemight have been exposed bya suspected defector. (Photo-graph courtesy of the BStU.)

Figure 6. After construction of the Berlin Wall, Friedrichstrasse station was the onlyborder crossing between East and West Berlin that was located at a subway stop. Itwas a popular crossing point for East German spies because the crowds made it diffi-cult for Western officers and agents to monitor suspicious activity. (Photograph re-produced from Werner Stiller, Im Zentrum der Spionage: Mit einem Nachwort von KarlWilhelm Fricke, Mainz: v. Hase & Koehler Verlag, 1986.)


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Figure 7. Foreign agents such as Gorbachev were only the first link in a complex network that delivered covertly acquired information to endusers who often did not realize it was stolen. The MfS’s Evaluation Department played the key role of intermediary between the agent and sci-entists and engineers. It “neutralized” items so that their origin would not be suspected, graded them according to usefulness for the economyand later to Warsaw Pact military preparedness (later the level of secrecy of the document was also considered), and then disseminated them tothe enterprises or research institutes that had requested them. Many documents, such as those related to military technology, were also deliveredto Soviet liaison officers. The scenario shown here depicts the system, which was later refined, during the early years of Gorbachev’s spy career.

Gorbachev was the most important Westernagent employed by the MfS operational unit forthe “protection of the economy,” known as De-partment XVIII, and provided the lion’s share ofall scientific and technical material collected bythat department. Of course, most scientific andtechnical espionage was the responsibility of an-other division of the Stasi, the HVA’s Sector forScience and Technology. This was the groupfrom which Werner Stiller defected in 1979, andalso the group to which all Gorbachev’s docu-ments were referred for evaluation.

Gorbachev provided the Stasi with blue-prints, plans, scientific documents and someprototypes from two leading West Germanfirms. Between 1957 and 1959 he worked atTelefunken as head of the department for smalltransmitters and passed on material related toradios and transmitters. After that, he headedup the department of automation at AEG untilhis retirement in 1977. He had the key to thecompany archive both times.

The MfS had a systematic method for collec-tion and evaluation based on the state’s eco-nomic plan. Industrial representatives couldgive the MfS a wish list of plans or hardwareneeded, and the MfS would attempt to acquirethe material. The evaluation department playedthe important role of intermediary between in-dustry and agent. Not only did they funnel theindustry “wish lists” to their agents, keeping inmind the country’s economic needs and eachagent’s capabilities, but they also analyzed eachitem collected by the agents, “neutralized” them(in MfS lingo) so that the source would not beknown and passed the information back to in-dustry or to research institutes. Agents couldalso bring unsolicited material if they thought itwould be of interest, but this material was sepa-rated from the requested material.

Gorbachev delivered an unusually copious

amount of material. The height of his coopera-tion seems to have been from the late 1950s tothe early 1970s. In 1960, a case officer reportedthat Gorbachev delivered 505 documents. This(the year before the Wall was built) seems tohave been his record; in most years, unless meet-ings ceased for operational reasons, he averagedabout 200. In 1968 he contributed 202 of the 289documents acquired by Department XVIII. Ashe approached retirement in 1977, Gorbachev’sdeliveries dropped significantly. In the 1980s hewas still working for the MfS, but instead ofpassing on secret documents he was interceptingWestern intelligence’s radio messages and find-ing out their broadcast frequencies.

The material Gorbachev delivered receivedhigh marks. In the Stasi’s meticulously orga-nized system, the evaluation department grad-ed every piece of material on a scale of I to V,with I being the highest rating, “very valu-able.” The grades also served as a means ofvaluing the information; in the mid-’70s, anevaluation of I meant that the document or ob-ject had a minimum value of 150,000 West Ger-man marks. In other words, this was theamount in hard currency the GDR would havehad to spend to develop the product itself or tobuy it. Gorbachev’s deliveries received manyIIIs, some IIs and an occasional I—a fairly typ-ical pattern for a good agent.

The most highly rated material that Gor-bachev delivered came, as one might expect,in the areas of military technology and thecomputer industry. In the mid-1960s, West Ger-many began producing a new tank, the Leop-ard 1, which, among other things, could be“sealed off” from nuclear radiation. In 1968,Gorbachev acquired and passed on anoverview of the construction of the Leopard 1,including the operation and maintenance man-ual. This material was personally delivered byErich Mielke to the Soviet Union.

In 1972, Gorbachev passed on a report fromAEG about product planning for small com-puters. The material included the complete in-formation for two AEG computers andmatched an order put in by industry. The eval-uator gave this material the top grade becausehe found “such strategic documents of greatvalue for the data processing industry.”

A large part of Gorbachev’s material—onaverage, one-third—was passed on to the So-viet Union’s liaison officer within the HVA’sevaluation department. In 1967, for example,the Soviet Union received the most materialfrom the topic of electronic data processingand process control (85 items). Since Gor-bachev’s area of expertise after 1960 was au-tomation, it is not surprising that the Sovietsalso received 46 items relating to automation innuclear power plants and machine presses.Probably the most interesting documents forthe Soviet Union were the eight items related


Figure 8. Specifications for the West German Leopard 1 tank were one of Agent Gor-bachev’s most important acquisitions for East German and Soviet intelligence. Thistank, which went into mass production in 1965, could shield occupants from radiationin the event of a nuclear attack. The Leopard 1 is still used by many countries, includ-ing Canada and Australia. (Photograph courtesy of MaK System Gesellschaft Gmbh.)

The [Stasi]evaluationdepartment …funneledindustry “wishlists” to theiragents.

to military technology, including six on theLeopard’s fire-control computer, which con-trolled the gun direction. Throughout the ‘60s,Gorbachev enthusiastically provided materialrelating to AEG’s work for NATO and the Ger-man army on the control of torpedoes. He oc-casionally provided other types of intelligence.In 1958, Gorbachev told his case officers thatAmerica was building a radar transmitter inTurkey to keep track of the Soviet missile pro-gram—information that was immediatelypassed on to the Soviets.

Occasionally Gorbachev’s work required himto receive additional scientific training. A par-ticular focus of East Germany’s economic espi-onage, from the late 1950s on, was the semicon-ductor industry. The GDR felt that it was behindthe West in this area and sought to pull itselfout of this backwardness by acquiring bothcompany secrets and embargoed goods. Theirprogram, conducted jointly with the SovietUnion, culminated in the duplication of the IBM360 computer. To educate Gorbachev in thisnew industry, his case officers invited him to aseveral-day visit at the semiconductor factoryin Frankfurt an der Oder in 1961. Thereafter heprovided valuable material relating to compo-nents for semiconductor research.

But Did It Help?There is no doubt that the East Germans dis-played outstanding espionage craft. Unfortu-nately, good espionage does not necessarilylead to good science. Gorbachev once made atelling statement to his case officer: “I’m givingyou the best technology available, why can’tyou use it?”

One “success story,” to which Gorbachevcontributed in small part, was the cloning ofthe IBM 360. A top-secret team in Moscow,with the assistance of East Germany’s Robot-ron Computer Center in Dresden, began work-ing on the project in 1968. By taking apartstolen IBM machines and reverse-engineeringthem, the Russians were able to bring theirown version, the “Ryad-1,” to market in 1972.East Germany also integrated high-tech espi-onage into its own computer industry. By 1970they had acquired, taken apart, and reverse-engineered at least a dozen computers, and by1973 Robotron was producing computers atthe rate of 80 to 100 per year.

But a scientific establishment based on pi-rated and cloned technology can never be aleader, especially in such a fast-developingarea as computer technology. The sense of trail-ing the West continued to gnaw at the EastGerman leadership, particularly after 1981,when the Reagan administration launched“Operation Exodus” to stem the flow of em-bargoed computer technology to the EasternBloc. The unrealistic goal of catching up, to-gether with the obstacles posed by the embar-

go, led to the greatest fiasco in the history ofEast German scientific espionage.

In 1981, Erich Honecker, the East Germanleader, announced a ten-point program to“draw the bulk of [the GDR’s] microelectronicneeds from domestic production by 1985.” Asthe decade wore on, one illusionary goalturned into almost an obsession: to demon-strate East Germany’s world-class status incomputers by developing a 1-megabit chip.

By the time East Germany collapsed in 1990,it had invested 14 billion marks into microelec-tronics and had not even come close to mass-producing a 1-megabit chip. The reasons werea gross overassessment of East Germany’s ownscientific capabilities, increased vigilance bythe West and a lack of cooperation from the So-viet Union. More than half of the materialsneeded to produce a 256-kilobit chip—thelargest one that actually made it past the draw-ing board—had to be imported in the face ofthe Western embargo. Even though East Ger-many did succeed in circumventing the em-bargo, the illegally imported goods came at ahigher price and only after significant delays.

Still, the GDR persevered. In March 1986,they reached an agreement with Toshiba—onthe company’s request, no contract was


Figure 9. In East Germany’s Robotron factory, locatedin Dresden, an engineer inspects a circuit board in this1990 photo. Semiconductors and the computer indus-try were a major target for East German industrial es-pionage. Most of the computers and computer chipsmanufactured in East Germany used technology andmaterials acquired illegally from the West. In the early1970s Robotron began producing computers designedby reverse-engineering Western computers.

Good espionagedoes notnecessarily leadto good science.

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signed—according to which Toshiba wouldprovide a complete original template for a 64-kilobit chip and would develop a specialsketch for a 256-kilobit chip that would differfrom their well-known one. Unfortunately forEast Germany, as the project was nearing com-pletion in 1987, Toshiba came under fire in theWest for its trade with the Soviet Union. TheU.S. Senate voted to ban Toshiba imports. Al-though nothing was said in Congress about thecomputer deal with East Germany, things weregetting too hot for the Japanese company, andit backed out of the agreement.

By 1989, East Germany had managed tomanufacture only 90,000 256-kilobit chips,while Austria, a smaller country, had produced50 million of them. East Germany had not pro-duced a single 1-megabit chip, although Japanhad been making them since 1986. As a public-relations gimmick, in 1989 Honecker presentedMikhail Gorbachev (the Russian leader) withthe first “sample” of a 1-megabit chip devel-oped in East Germany. It was a fraud: The chiphad been acquired from the West.

Science by espionage is not necessarilydoomed to fail. History abounds with exam-ples of small countries that were able to copyand then improve upon foreign technology. Inthe 18th century, France spied on Britain on alarge scale while importing its textile technolo-gy. In our era, Japan has taken a very disci-plined approach to industrial espionage, en-abling that nation to catch up and pass Westerncountries in electronic goods. But the Japanese

were blessed with a much stronger economythan the East Germans.

One might conclude that science could nothave prospered in a command economy and ina society poisoned by secrecy, where every for-tieth person was an informant and much of thepopulation was under surveillance by the se-cret police. But attractive as this line of reason-ing may be, it is not the only explanation forEast Germany’s failure. Clearly the embargoand the U.S. government’s efforts to enforceit—unpopular though they were in some cir-cles—also had an effect and may have madethe difference between the successful duplica-tion of the IBM 360 and the failure to produce a1-megabit chip. At a time when other coun-tries, like West Germany, could legally buycomputers and equipment for manufacturingchips, such as ion implanters, this option wasclosed to the GDR. East Germany may havesaved on research and development costs in theshort term, as was its espionage goal, but thissort of thinking led to long-term weaknesses inthe science system.

Gorbachev’s espionage may not have helpedEast Germany as much as it could have. Still,his work should not be dismissed as a harmlessgame. Western companies lost millions of dol-lars of business that they could have done withthe Eastern Bloc, because the GDR and SovietUnion were able to acquire the same goodsthrough espionage. The military secrets, such asthe design of the Leopard tank, could have beenused against the West had the balance of powerever changed and the Cold War turned hot. Fi-nally, and paradoxically, every document thatwas smuggled from the West weakened truescientific innovation in East Germany, by main-taining its dependence on the West and rein-forcing the power of the state security regime.

AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank the National Sci-ence Foundation and the Fulbright Commission forsupporting her unconventional research. Warmthanks to Heide-Marie Beidokat and WolfgangBorkmann at the Gauck-Behörde for their tirelesshelp in collecting material for the article. MarkNock’s incisive comments on an earlier draft led tothe way the article looks now.

BibliographyChilds, David, and Richard Popplewell. 1996. The Stasi:

The East German Intelligence and Security Service. NewYork: New York University Press.

Macrakis, Kristie, and Dieter Hoffmann, eds. 1999. Sci-


Figure 10. Minister for State Security Erich Mielke (left) and Erich Honecker, the EastGerman head of state, oversaw programs designed to catch up with Western technol-ogy largely by spying. Mielke personally delivered the Leopard plans to the SovietUnion. Although many lower-level functionaries were convicted and served time injail for alleged crimes under East German communism, Mielke and Honecker werecharged but never jailed. To date, 253 West Germans and 23 East Germans have beenconvicted of espionage out of a total of 7,099 legal investigations of officers and agentsby West German prosecutors. Agent Gorbachev was not one of these; he died in 1985,five years before German reunification. (Photographs courtesy of the Deutsches His-toriches Museum, Berlin.)

Links to Internet resources forfurther exploration of

“The Case of Agent Gorbachev”are available on the

American Scientist Web site:

http://www.americanscientist. org/articles/00articles/macrakis.html

East Germanymay have savedon research anddevelopmentcosts in theshort term …but this sort ofthinking led tolong-termweaknesses inthe sciencesystem.

ence under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Per-spective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.


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A reprint from American Scientist - Kristie Macrakiskristiemacrakis.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Gorbachev.pdf · not know he was selling secrets to the MfS, be-lieving he was selling