Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World Review

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(More customer reviews)"Seduced by Secrets" is a study of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (MfS), or the "Stasi", from the point of view of a science and technology historian. The fall of East Germany created a unique opportunity to understand and analyze a modern intelligence agency, once powerful and now defunct, as four decades of the MfS' confidential records were thrown open for all to see. Author Kristie Macrackis sifted through thousands of those files and interviewed former East German agents to piece together a technological history of the MfS' domestic and foreign intelligence operations. Aimed at interested laymen, historians, and intelligence professionals, "Seduced by Secrets" peers behind the Iron Curtain to illuminate the challenges and accomplishments of modern high-tech espionage.
The book is divided into two parts and addresses the role of technology in Cold War espionage in two different senses. The first part, called "High-Tech", discusses East Germany's efforts to acquire technology and technological information from the West, which was its primary goal, in order to save domestic companies research and development costs and to create an indigenous microelectronics industry. Macrakis includes a history of the Sector for Science and Technology (SWT), which was charged with the task of stealing Western technologies. As industrial intelligence was primarily gathered by humans, this part of the book is about the people -the SWT elite, the agents, double agents, defectors, their operations and their goals.
While the first part of the book consists mainly of stories -histories, operations, agents- the second part, called "Spy-Tech", is more dense and technical. It describes the technologies created by the Technical Operations Sector (OTS) for use in spying and their applications. There are chapters on containers and the gadgets that they concealed, invisible inks and secret writing, observation and surveillance photography, radio intelligence and counterintelligence, smell science, and the use of chemical or radioactive substances to track people. There are stories here too, but the emphasis is on the technologies themselves and how they were used.
The MfS tends to be remembered in the West for its Orwellian domestic spying, but "Seduced by Secrets" is an eye-opener on its foreign intelligence programs. Macrakis does not take asides in East-West or communist-capitalist politics, but presents intelligence operations on both sides in a neutral tone. Because espionage is a cat-and-mouse game, we gain some insight into CIA and NSA operations also. Kristie Macrakis starts out by questioning "the ability of intelligence and security to solve a nation's problems", using East Germany's self-perpetuating spy culture as an example of too much cost, risk, and loss of liberty for too little reward. The content of "Seduced by Secrets" only indirectly addresses that issue but gives the reader an abundance of information from which to draw your own conclusion.

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More fascinating than fiction, Seduced by Secrets takes the reader inside the real world of one of the most effective and feared spy agencies in history. The book reveals, for the first time, the secret technical methods and sources of the Stasi (East German Ministry for State Security) as it stole secrets from abroad and developed gadgets at home, employing universal, highly guarded techniques often used by other spy and security agencies. Seduced by Secrets draws on secretfiles from the Stasi archives, including CIA-acquired material, interviews and friendships, court documents, and unusual visits to spy sites, including "breaking into" a prison, to demonstrate that the Stasi overestimated the power of secrets to solve problems and created an insular spy culture more intent on securing its power than protecting national security. It recreates the Stasi's secret world of technology through biographies of agents, defectors, and officers and by visualizing James Bond-like techniques and gadgets. In this highly original book, Kristie Macrakis adds a new dimension to our understanding of the East German Ministry for State Security by bringing the topic into the realm of espionage history and exiting thepolitical domain.

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