After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West Germans were desperate to prevent the Stasi's top codebreakers from falling into the wrong hands. They hatched a cunning plan that involved setting up a front company to hire the East German cryptographers. This photo shows a T-130 device, which East German officials used to encode their telex messages. Jens Raeder / NVA Museum HarnekopFormer Stasi Cryptographers Now Develop Technology For NATO -- Spiegel Online
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West Germans were desperate to prevent the Stasi's top codebreakers from falling into the wrong hands and set up a company to hire the East German cryptographers. Now the former Stasi scientists develop technology used by Angela Merkel and NATO.
Every morning, while going to his office in Berlin's Adlershof district, Ralph W. passes a reminder of his own past, a small museum that occupies a room on the ground floor of the building. The museum could easily double as a command center run by the class enemy in an old James Bond film. A display of coding devices from various decades includes the T-310, a green metal machine roughly the size of a huge refrigerator, which East German officials used to encode their telex messages.
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My Comment: A fascinating look into how former intelligence officers can be incorporated into the West.