Word: blackmail
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Other Germans disagree. "You cannot build a new start on a lie," says Barbel Bohley, a leading civil rights activist from Eastern Germany. She warns of the possibility of a "corruptible parliament with members susceptible to blackmail" for their Stasi past. Says Karl-Dietrich Bracher, a political scientist at the University of Bonn: "If we were to have a general amnesty, there would be a general disgust with politics. Some kind of purification is necessary...
That could be difficult to prevent. Some former top Stasi officials may have fled to the KGB or other intelligence services with a wealth of incriminating information that could be used for blackmail or to besmirch the characters of prominent persons. Still others may be offering to keep quiet in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Wolf's successor as head of the intelligence agency, Werner Grossmann, was arrested on Oct. 3 but was freed the next day without being charged. Fischer said Grossmann had probably made an "arrangement" with the West Germans...
After the U.S. suffered through two oil shocks during the 1970s, politicians vowed never again to let the nation be vulnerable to petroleum blackmail. That brave promise has gone unfulfilled. America today is as dangerously dependent on imported oil as it was a decade...
...voluminous dossiers. "Only they know how to find things," explains Werner Fischer, chairman of the citizens' committee. Some Germans want to preserve the files as a valuable historical archive. Fischer wants to see them destroyed on the ground that they could serve as a source of leaks and blackmail. "I am in charge of it," Fischer says, "but I don't want to see it. What if you find out about friends who informed on you? What if you find out that your wife was having an affair? Some things are better not known...
...estimated 5 million individuals. The supervision has not been leakproof: two prominent politicians were ruined by disclosures that they served as Stasi informants, and ex-agents are suspected of providing the damaging leaks. There are also rumors that a ring of former Stasi agents is using the files to blackmail ex-informers...