“In the fall of 1982, six months after I arrived in Berlin, I started to have doubts about my job. Most importantly I felt we were engaging in certain activities to achieve specific intelligence goals without regard to the risk, no matter if it cost lives or pushed us closer to nuclear war. I felt we were sacrificing our morality for an end result. In the media we were presented with distorted statistics that gave the impression that the West was doomed and that we would be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers in the event of war. But it was never mentioned that those statistics were often negated by Western technology. ”
-Jens Karney
Jens Karney, code-named “Kid,” was one of a pair of agents the Stasi had used to infiltrate the US military in West Berlin during the 1980’s. American authorities estimated the damage that he had caused by betraying secrets at $14.5 billion.
Tags: DDR, GDR, Jens Karney, Wende