TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/04230012.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 77 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 42

Dieter: A Former Spy's Story


    Call him Dieter. Do not expect much in the way of personal
data -- his exact age, his address, his last name. As far as
Dieter is concerned, the only fact that has any meaning these
days is that until a few months ago, he was a member of the
Staatssicherheitsdienst, the now defunct secret-police force
known and reviled by East Germans as the Stasi. Once employment
by the elite Stasi was a way of life. Now it is the curse of
Dieter's existence. "Everybody has forgotten that we worked to
make this country safe," he says. "We were the true believers,
and now we are left with no jobs, no security, no safety net."

    What Dieter is left with is his anger, his bitterness and
his fear. As the young man chain-smokes acrid Club cigarettes
and glances nervously at passersby in an East Berlin hotel
lobby, he notes that common citizens are now policing the former
Stasis. Many tradesmen refuse service to ex-agents. Gasoline
stations have posted signs denying them petrol, and job notices
often specify that dismissed Stasis need not apply. When three
ex-agents showed up at an East Berlin slaughterhouse in search
of jobs, workmen locked them in a storage refrigerator for two
hours. The Stasis no longer feel safe even in their own homes.
"My friends have had their windows smashed, and they get
threatening letters," says Dieter. "If they report it, the
police don't investigate."

    Though the Stasis propped up an unpopular Communist regime
for more than four decades and were notorious for their
disregard of privacy and occasional beatings of prisoners,
Dieter cannot understand why so much loathing is aimed his way.
He insists he was only a maintenance man in a Stasi center, a
mere speck in an elaborate organization that not only offered
full-time employment to 85,000 people but also provided pocket
money to a network of 109,000 citizens who snooped on their
neighbors and co-workers.

    The Stasi has been disbanded, although a few dozen former
officials remain on the payroll to help a 100-member citizens'
oversight committee supervise storage of dossiers on an
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.

    Unlike most of his former colleagues, Dieter has found work
-- this time as a regular policeman in East Berlin. He has
started walking a beat, and earns a monthly wage of 1,600 East
German marks, which is worth about $330 in buying power and is
almost equal to his Stasi pay. (A few former agents have even
found employment as policemen in West Germany.) But Dieter has
lost a packet of coveted perks, among them paid vacations at
choice resorts along the Baltic coast. Because the Stasis were
in a special category set apart from the typical East German
civil servant, he received no unemployment pay.

    For Dieter, the revolution has been a betrayal. He says he
feels let down both by the old-party Stalinists who "misused us
as tools for their private purposes" and by his superiors. "Most
of them grabbed state pensions and disappeared," he says. "They
have little people like me to bear their burdens."