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."