Tales of Nadis

With six thousand East German spies in West Germany (and an additional 1,500 Soviet, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Albanian, and God knows what spies), the West German counter-espionage, the Verfassungsschutz, has long been swamped by the sheer clerical effort of keeping track of so many foreign agents. When Chancellor Willy Brandt’s political aide Günter Guillaume was unmasked as a DDR (East German) agent in 1974, the West Germans realized they had to resort to drastic new methods to track down the spies, who appeared to be breeding like rabbits.

They were helped in this by two factors. 1) Most DDR spies were East Germans who had ostensibly come to the Federal Republic as refugees. 2) The DDR produced spies by the thousands, launching them against the West in waves, sending out more spies than the Federal Republic could possibly catch. As long as West German counter-espionage relied on traditional techniques it didn’t stand a chance. But because the spies were produced like automobiles, they all tended to behave the same way. Once in the West they would follow the same operating techniques, safe in the knowledge that they outnumbered their pursuers. Unmasking them was no longer a job for men in trenchcoats; it was a job for a computer.

With six thousand East German spies in West Germany (and an additional 1,500 Soviet, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Albanian, and God knows what spies), the West German counter-espionage, the Verfassungsschutz, has long been swamped by the sheer clerical effort of keeping track of so many foreign agents. When Chancellor Willy Brandt’s political aide Günter Guillaume was unmasked as a DDR (East German) agent in 1974, the West Germans realized they had to resort to drastic new methods to track down the spies, who appeared to be breeding like rabbits.

They were helped in this by two factors. 1) Most DDR spies were East Germans who had ostensibly come to the Federal Republic as refugees. 2) The DDR produced spies by the thousands, launching them against the West in waves, sending out more spies than the Federal Republic could possibly catch. As long as West German counter-espionage relied on traditional techniques it didn’t stand a chance. But because the spies were produced like automobiles, they all tended to behave the same way. Once in the West they would follow the same operating techniques, safe in the knowledge that they outnumbered their pursuers. Unmasking them was no longer a job for men in trenchcoats; it was a job for a computer.