You're listening to be. Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We're joined today by Dr. Paul Medrell of the University of Eberistwyth in Wales, the United

Kingdom. Paul is an expert on the Stasi, the East German Communist Intelligence Service, and he's also the author of an important book,

Spying on Science, Western Intelligence in Divided Germany in 1945 to 1961.

Paul has been working a lot in the Stasi Archives and we'll talk a little bit about that today.

What we can actually learn about the operations of intelligence services in East Germany from the documents of the day.

So Paul, welcome to the International Spy Museum.

Thanks, Mark.

It's a pleasure to be here and what a fine museum it is.

Well, thank you.

We like it. First off, can you just tell us a little bit about what the Stasi

was? What was this organization? Stasi stands for Ministerium for Stasi Heide, Ministry of State Security, which is just a German translation

of the name of the Russian State Security Ministry when it was created at the beginning

of the 1950s.

Minister Sva Gossa Gosferni Bizapastisti, Ministry of State Security.

So he just created a German clone originally of the Soviet State Security Ministry, which

was a vicious political police force, which went around arresting and interrogating and incarcerating political opponents of the regime, including spies.

So they have a very large archive of records on Western spies, spies of the major Western Secret

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