The Stasi's Romeo Agents (Pt 1) - School for Seduction
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What’s the best way to spy on your enemies? Sleep with their secretaries. In part one of this two-part series, new evidence is unearthed of East Germany‘s ruthless blueprint for Cold War sexpionage, revealing for the first time stories of the agents sent to seduce young women working for West Germany’s top politicians.
You can read Oliver Moody's article here.
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Guests:
- Gunnar Take, historian at the University of Stuttgart.
- Katja Hoyer, historian and Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London.
Host: Oliver Moody, Berlin Correspondent, The Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today's episode of Stories of Our Times is the first of a special two-part podcast |
| 0:07.7 | presented by my colleague, the Times Berlin correspondent Oliver Moody, and your |
| 0:13.0 | Infra-Treat at the dawn of the Cold War. East Germany's secret police, the |
| 0:27.4 | Stasi, hatched one of the most notorious, brutal and ingenious espionage |
| 0:32.4 | programs in modern history. It relied not on electronic surveillance or blackmail |
| 0:38.0 | but on the vulnerabilities of the human heart. The Stasi-trained romeos, smooth, |
| 0:44.8 | emotionally intelligent men, burst in the art of seduction, to go beyond the |
| 0:50.3 | wall and ensnare lonely women who worked in the anti-chambers of power, women, |
| 0:56.3 | privy, to office gossip, and momentous secrets of state. |
| 1:01.7 | You're listening to Stories of Our Times from the Times and Sunday Times. I'm Oliver Moody, |
| 1:10.1 | the Times's Berlin correspondent. This is the first episode of a two-part |
| 1:15.8 | podcast. Today, the Stasi's Romeo Agents, part one, school for seduction. |
| 1:32.7 | I want to introduce you to a world of subterfuge and false identity, of competing |
| 1:39.8 | ideologies of the history that has shaped the city and country I now report from. |
| 1:44.8 | Over the course of two episodes, I'm going to tell you the previously unheard stories |
| 1:54.8 | of the East German spy agencies' first two Romeo Agents, men who charmed women working |
| 2:02.1 | in the West German chance tree who had access to the highest levels of Western intelligence. |
| 2:08.7 | These women, known as Julians, unwittingly fell in love with men who had the full force |
| 2:14.5 | of a totalitarian state supporting them in ringing out all the information they could. |
| 2:21.3 | The story reconstructed for the diligent detective work of German historian Guna Taka |
| 2:27.1 | can now be told in full for the first time. |
| 2:38.7 | The program started in the 1950s a few years after Germany had been split in two following |
... |
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