Alison Lewis1; 1 The University of Melbourne, Australia
Discussion
The East German Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) was nothing if not methodical and professional in its official instructions for running its vast networks of unofficial collaborators (IM, inoffizielle Mitarbeiter). It issued 5 sets of guidelines for handling informants each of which sought to address the growing challenges of the Cold War. The last two of these guidelines, issued in 1968 and 1979, were particularly concerned to find ways of improving not just the quantity of information provided by informants but the quality of their work as well. The updating of both these guidelines was necessary in response to the events of the Prague Spring as well as of the ongoing process of East-West detente and the Helsinki CSCE. This paper examines key policies for recruitment and handling informers paying particular attention to the increasing reliance on the use of ‘Legenden’ or aliases/undercover stories. Drawing on evidence from the Stasi files of informers, it examines how the ministerial policy was implemented in practice, and what the challenges were for informers who were tasked with infiltrating underground political and literary circles. Many were required not only to invent plausible cover stories for their involvement in these milieu but also to invent biographical fictions that they in turn had to identify with and act out as if they were real.
