Jul 29, 2021
Guest host Steven Minegar chats with author Ralph Hope about his
latest book.
What do you do with a hundred thousand idle spies? By 1990 the
Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service
folded.
For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in
manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a
hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers
with access to highly personal information, found themselves
unemployed overnight.
This is the story of what they did next. Former FBI agent Ralph
Hope uses present-day sources and access to Stasi records to track
and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy
sector to the police and even the government department tasked with
prosecuting Stasi crimes.
He examines why the key players have never been called to account
and, in doing so, asks if we have really learned from the past at
all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for
thirty years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many
today don’t want spoken.
The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time
when governments the world over are building an unprecedented
network of surveillance over their citizens. Ultimately, this is a
book about the present.