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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, AUGUST 30, 1985
cesses against their Communist compatriots during the last four
years. It also would explain why the East Germans could proudly
announce that they had caught 168 West German spies during the
past 12 months...•
Whether Tiedge was a mole or a traitor, the damage is gargantuan.
With his arrival in East Berlin, the West German network in East
Germany was "burned" in toto. Now, during his debriefing, there
are lots of other choi"ce presents that he surely will deliver,
such as the ways and means of other Western intelligence ser
vices, which he learned in regular top-secret conferences••••
In the end there's not much that can be done to forestall further
such disasters. The Federal Republic•••is spy heaven. Before
the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, 3 million East Germans escaped
to the Western half. Today thousands come across legally every
year, and they are West German citizens from Day One. They look
like West Germans, they speak like West Germans••..
How many of them will re-emerge in East Berlin tomorrow as proud
servants of the Peasant and Worker State?••. It is easy to be a
spy when all you have to do is cross from Germany into Germany,
and then into the most liberal political system that the Germans
have ever known.
In espionage, the East Germans will win hands down every time. Because of
the Nazi period, West German society is regulated by stringent civil liber-.
ty regulations, the kind that East German authorities don't have to contend
with. One cannot help but think that someda � , someone will demand that
individu'ar liberties be constrained---rn-the national interesIT This br"I'rigs
us to another articleabout West German life titled "West Germans Do It A.11
by the Book," written by Tyler Marshall in the June 5 LOS ANGELES TIMES. It
gives a good insight into the German character, reformed only slightly by
liberal democracy. The article packs a wallop at the end:
Intricate, often petty regulations and laws••.envelop nearly
every West German•••• It is something that sets modern West Ger
many apart from other Western democracies. Today, federal West
German law regulates when a homeowner can cut his lawn, the angle
of the staircase inside his home and the number of wall plugs
allowed in his bedroom. The mountain of rules governing housing
construction has become legendary, with 660 separate regulations
spanning about 8,000 pages of detailed, turgid German bureau
cratese governing just the interior construction••••
"German bureaucracy stifles individual initiative," charged Ralf
Dahrendorf, a prominent political figure here in the early 1970s,
who recently returned to West Germany after 10 years as head of
the London School of Economics.
Even in the most personal family matters, such as the name for a
new baby, government regulations define the limits•.•• A Frank
furt couple who wanted to name their child after the Peanuts
character, Schroeder, went to court after city officials refused
to register the baby's name. The .family lost. A superior court
judge backed the bureaucrats' assessment that Schroeder was a