Active Measures by Thomas Rid

Author:Thomas Rid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In May 1983 at a peace rally in Williamsburg, Virginia, during a high-profile summit meeting of industrial nations, particularly shrewd and well-equipped protesters displayed a German-language banner in the background for replay by the German TV networks covering the summit.48 Of course, that banner could have been the work of genuine peace activists.

In early 1982, Markus Wolf spoke approvingly of the peace movement in front of his East Berlin staff. “We already achieved a lot,” he said, yet he saw a need to escalate. An increased effort was necessary “to strengthen through active measures the peace movement in West European states and to defend against attempts of division.”49 These comments were most remarkable. The MfS, and likely also the KGB, projected their own methods onto their adversaries. Stasi officers were so mired in conspiratorial thinking that their internal jargon even had a verb for uncovering a conspiracy: dekonspirieren, or “deconspire.” So the officers in the East assumed—wrongly—that Western intelligence agencies were themselves using the peace movement to infiltrate and divide the Eastern bloc.

The Stasi therefore both supported and subverted peace activists. When activists on the approved list traveled to East Germany, to visit the official peace council, for example, state security made sure that they received “especially preferred, polite treatment” at immigration checkpoints.50 Other activists, even in West Germany, would become the target of harassment. The Stasi targeted Jürgen Fuchs, a writer and peace activist in West Berlin, in an operation called OPPONENT; the goal of this “Zersetzung,” as the Stasi wrote in one particularly chilling memo, was to

coerce Fuchs to turn inward, to continuously occupy him with everyday annoyances in order to make him insecure, to discredit him in public, and eventually to incapacitate him with respect to his attacks against the GDR.51

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