ABSTRACT
For most of the 1950s, Berlin was the spy capital of the world. Even before the cold war broke out, the city had transformed into a cloak-and-dagger Eldorado. It was the major hub for intelligence seeping out of the Iron Curtain. The Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko argued: ‘There is no other place in the world where the intelligence centers of [the capitalist] countries are more at home. The East German authorities formed the infamous Stasi out of pre-existing secret-police units in 1949. Its creators deliberately designed it to act as the ‘sword and shield of the party’. It came into existence in spite of an Allied Control Council ban on political policing in Germany. The West Berlin police received an unsolicited flood of denunciations, mostly accusing neighbours of being spies. Often the evidence was flimsy: they had visited their aunties or the opera in East Berlin or had received letters from Dresden.
