In the Operation Area

During the early 1990s, Wolf and his former officers claimed that HV A had acted no differently from the West German foreign intelligence service, the BND. Historians of the Stasi have tended to stress the differences while opting to omit the parallels between the actions of the BND and HV A. In contrast to HV A, the BND is presented as a foreign intelligence service protecting a democratic republic using secret service methods within the framework of legality and parliamentary accountability. ¹ However, studies of the BND have drawn quite different conclusions, pointing to structural similarities with HV A. Particularly during the early years of the Bonn Republic, the BND's relationship with parliamentary democracy was at best ambivalent. The BND was the only West German authority to have an unbroken line of continuity with the Nazi era. Continuity was particularly pronounced during the Gehlen era (1942—68). Gehlen, the first head of the BND, had headed the Nazis' intelligence apparatus in the East and many of his personnel shared a similar past. The organisation's objectives also remained rooted in the Third Reich's pronounced anti-cominunism, substituting the organisation's constitutional duty to serve democracy with its own hostility to the West German mainstream left, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and trade unions. Particularly before the reforms initiated in 1967, hundreds of files were built up on SPD and trade union leaders. Throughout the life of the old Federal Republic, West German citizens' postal correspondence and telephone conversations to and from the GDR, and more generally the Eastern bloc, were randomly monitored. During the 1970s, it is estimated that some 10,000 letters were sent each day for intelligence evaluation by the BND. ² In theory, the BND had no West German 'unofficial collaborators' on their books; however, in practice, information flowed to the BND from as many as 5,000 194sources, who functioned as de facto agents. ³ The extent of the BND's operations against West German citizens led one commentator on the West German foreign intelligence during the 1970s and 1980s to conclude that:

Exerting influence on the trade-unions, directing the press, infiltrating research institutions, or secret co-operation with the church, was part of the BND's every day activities. In some important areas of society there are more agents employed than salaried staff In this respect the BND's success is less that it proved itself an efficient foreign intelligence service, than it succeeded in establishing itself, largely undetected, as the fifth power in the state along with the three official state authorities and a genuinely free media. ⁴