The Triumph of HUMINT: The GDR foreign intelligence services’ collection of defense intelligence, 1951–1989
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 CounterIntelligenceVolume
38Issue
1Pages
48 - 71Publisher
Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLCVersion
- 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
2025-01-02Copyright date
2024ISSN
0885-0607eISSN
1521-0561Publisher version
Language
- en