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The Triumph of HUMINT: The GDR foreign intelligence services’ collection of defense intelligence, 1951–1989

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journal contribution
posted on 2025-03-03, 15:02 authored by Paul MaddrellPaul Maddrell

During the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic (GDR)’s foreign intelligence agencies collected much defense intelligence from human sources in West Germany. By the mid-1960s, the two services had created agent networks in their principal targets in West Germany’s government, armed forces, industry and universities. For the next 25 years, these agent networks supplied a wealth of varied and valuable military intelligence and scientific and technological intelligence. At their heart was a small number of outstanding human sources. The GDR’s intelligence agencies significantly strengthened the Soviet Bloc’s intelligence collection. The intelligence they obtained was more valuable to the Warsaw Pact than the GDR’s armed forces and would have been of great benefit to the Pact if war had broken out. Their success ran counter to the trend of military intelligence collection at that time, which was to rely increasingly heavily on technical collection.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Published in

International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence

Volume

38

Issue

1

Pages

48 - 71

Publisher

Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Author(s)

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

Publication date

2025-01-02

Copyright date

2024

ISSN

0885-0607

eISSN

1521-0561

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Paul Maddrell. Deposit date: 16 August 2024

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