ABSTRACT
Self-assurance Espionage reports by the BND after the fall of Reinhard Gehlen and in the era of BND president Hans-Georg Wieck (1985-1990) show1 that the staff at Pullach concentrated 40 percent of their attention on the GDR, and equally intensively on the Soviet Union and her satellites, including Yugoslavia. Nearly the same values can be applied to the BND both in 1957, when the service employed 1,245 personnel, and the operations of the then 6,750 persons in 1989. A look at the six-step intelligence priorities of the BND2 for the 1980s confirms these findings,3 though stating that the Soviet Union as the leading power within the Warsaw Pact drew slightly more attention than the GDR. In practical intelligence work, however, the close-range reconnaissance directed at the GDR ranked first because of the language advantage. The GDR was the core business of the BND, with the main priority being military issues, e.g. the deployment, disposition, defense technology and combat strength of ground forces. With the start of the social-liberal coalition and the enforcement of the Ostpolitik, intelligence coordinator Horst Ehmke transferred more and more political tasks into the control of the Federal Chancellery, but the information flow on military issues remained dominant. The (planned) economy always came third.
