Word: stasis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Markus Wolf, 83, suave spymaster known as the "man without a face" for his ability to elude photographers during most of his 34-year reign over the foreign-intelligence division of the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police; in Berlin. Rumored to be the model for John le Carré's shadowy Karla (a suggestion the author has denied), Wolf placed his 4,000 spies in such enemy territory as NATO headquarters, cannily converted West German agents to his team, and famously touted the "Romeo method"--the wooing of lonely government secretaries to gain access to confidential files. Among...
...DIED. Markus Wolf, 83, suave spymaster known as the "man without a face" for his ability to elude photographers during most of his 34-year reign over the foreign-intelligence division of the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police; in Berlin. Rumored to be the model for John le Carré's shadowy Karla (a suggestion the author has denied), Wolf placed his 4,000 spies in such enemy territory as NATO headquarters, cannily converted West German agents to his team, and famously touted the "Romeo method"-the wooing of lonely government secretaries to gain access to confidential files...
...central front in the Cold War, traumatized by Naziism and defeat, with plenty of families and loyalties divided between East and West, Germany was a target-rich environment for espionage. Wolf's foreign intelligence section of the Stasi (he claimed not to be involved in its pervasive organs of domestic repression, though critics doubted this) ran as many as 4,000 agents at a time. They penetrated the top ranks of business, government, parliament, the military and the intelligence services in West Germany and beyond. Wolf developed a particularly effective line in "Romeo" spies, handsome men who would befriend lonely...
...more than a decade after the conflict had ended, several German movies indicate a toughening of opinions about the G.D.R. A handful of new releases, including one by the makers of Goodbye Lenin! called The Red Cockatoo, explore the G.D.R. and its 100,000-strong secret-police force, the Stasi, not as the subject of comedy but of cruelty and farce. The Lives of Others, which swept the prestigious Lola German Film Awards this month in Berlin, is going strong at the German box office with its story of a successful stage actress whose life is destroyed by a lecherous...
Another day, another unmasked East German spy. That ho-hum attitude greeted news that Bernd Runge, the head of U.S. magazine publisher Condé Nast's German business, worked for the hated Stasi secret police as a young East German journalist in the 1980s. Last week two German magazines, Focus and Der Spiegel, revealed that Runge, now 43, informed on fellow students and his own family, and spied on Western journalists. What's fascinating is that Germans barely raised an eyebrow, and Runge's American boss said his past has "no relevance." It's a far cry from the 1990s...