East German

WASHINGTON -- Information from the files of the former East German intelligence service aided an American inquiry that led to the arrest of Aldrich H. Ames on espionage charges, government officials said Saturday night.It was not clear what the precise nature of the information was or the extent to which it helped the inquiry, but the officials said it helped narrow their search for a mole at the CIA.The information was provided to the United States sometime after a joint inquiry was begun in 1991 by the CIA and the FBI. The investigation into Mr. Ames, an officer at the intelligence agency, did not get under way until last May.The East German assistance was first reported in yesterday's issue of the Washington Post, and government officials confirmed it later.

East German female swimmers with impossibly broad shoulders. European cyclists who roared over the Pyrenees without ever seeming to tire. A Canadian sprinter whose thighs looked as big as a normal man's torso. Twenty years ago, our images of sports dopers dwelled on foreign competitors snatching titles and medals from U.S. athletes believed to be clean. It made for an easy hero-villain dichotomy. But with Marion Jones' admission yesterday that she lied in denying steroid use before the 2000 Olympics, the old story line was driven deeper into the past, and another prominent American athlete was implicated in the drug scandals sweeping sports.

WASHINGTON -- Three one-time student radicals at the University of Wisconsin were charged yesterday with spying for Communist intelligence services since the 1970s.The FBI said in a 200-page affidavit that the three had been trying to penetrate the upper echelons of the U.S. government, with decidedly mixed results, since meeting on campus as self-styled hard-core Communists in the days of student protests.The FBI said it had identified the three by analyzing the files of the former East German intelligence service.

In the opening moments of Doug Wright's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, I Am My Own Wife, actor Jefferson Mays comes through a doorway in the guise of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, looks at the audience, then turns around and goes back through the door. Though this entrance smacks of timidity, in the next two hours at Washington's National Theatre, the unassuming-looking actor delivers a tour-de-force performance in Wright's one-man show. It's a virtuosic feat that justifiably scooped up a slew of awards on and off-Broadway, including the Tony.

Berlin -- On the noontime television news, the well-dressed brokerage executive gave his cool analysis of the stock market's secrets. Few viewers realized he also was clearing up one of the Cold War's big mysteries.The investment expert, it turns out, was the celebrated East German double agent Werner Stiller, whose 1979 defection dealt his bosses at the Stasi intelligence agency a blow from which they never recovered.After disappearing from view for 13 years and setting off wild speculation over his fate, Mr. Stiller is back.

BERLIN -- A scandal swirling around medical practices in East Germany under the fallen Communist regime has evoked memories of the horrid human experiments performed during Germany's Nazi era.German investigators are looking into evidence that in the campaign to develop gold-medal-winning super-athletes, East German doctors implanted teen-age girls with male hormones.The experiments are described in a once-secret document obtained by The Sun and a German newspaper, entitled "Themes for State Plan 14.25 in Olympic Cycle 1984-1988."

TACOMA, Wash. -- The United States turned down an Eas German offer to trade wounded U.S. POWs for Soviet spies, according to State Department records.Lee Quang Khai, a Vietnamese Foreign Ministry defector, corroborated the report, saying U.S. prisoners of war had been sent from Vietnam to hospitals in East Germany.The fate of the wounded POWs remains unclear.The proposed POW swap is detailed in 1967 State Department telegrams from Washington to Bonn, Berlin and other locations. Some of the documents were released this month, but records detailing the final outcome of the offer have not been made public until now.The records contradict repeated Vietnamese and Pentagon denials that any U.S. prisoners were shipped from Indochina to Eastern Europe.

MERSEBURG, Germany -- Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Lothar Drewitz has lost his job, his marriage and his hope in the future. Now, the 50-year-old engineer who once toiled for a state-owned metal firm in the rigid East German system fears he may never again find steady work in a unified Germany."

BERLIN -- For sure, his pointy little beard looks a bit like Lenin's, and there's no denying that in the old days he once visited Red Square and led a "Pioneer" club parade of Young Communists.But the little television character known as the Sandman has never been anything but a winsome puppet with an innocent mission: to send German children off to bed with a story and a wave.For that reason he has prospered after reunification, even as the rest of East German popular culture has dwindled to little more than a rusting fleet of Trabant cars and a few brands of cigarettes and beer.

BERLIN -- In front of the memorial to the victims of fascism and militarism, East German honor guards have stopped goose-stepping to and fro. Now they just march.This change is the most visible sign that the East German National People's Army is transforming itself as it prepares for its place in a unified German army. The composition and budget of this future army, due to be formed in October, is still controversial, but it is planned to be without the NPA's sometimes questionable traditions.

ATHENS - The three swimmers stood poolside, hopping and embracing repeatedly. The other, Kaitlin Sandeno, stayed in the pool, beaming, and tried to twirl, which is also awfully difficult to do in a swimming pool. The four women - Sandeno, Natalie Coughlin, Dana Vollmer and Carly Piper - won the 800-meter freestyle relay last night at the Olympic Aquatic Centre. While doing so, they removed a 17-year-old record, a mark once seen as inglorious and tainted. Until the American quartet swam 800 meters in 7 minutes, 53.42 seconds, the former East Germany held the record.

BERLIN - Germans proudly passed a post-unification milestone yesterday by shuttering a police investigative unit that sought to bring communist abusers to justice, from sports officials who doped young athletes into ill health and infamy to border guards who shot at those trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. Declaring its work done, the Central Investigative Office for Government and Unification Crimes quietly slipped into history after nine years and more than 20,000 cases taken up on behalf of citizens of the former East Germany who were victims of the Cold War-era regime's physical, psychological and financial abuse.

GERMANS are at odds over claims that harsh potty training is to blame both for Nazism and modern thuggery.A friend of mine is convinced that the German national character in all its complexities can be traced back to Germans' rigorous potty training.Teutonic infants, he claims, are made to sit on their lowly thrones for hours on end, until pronounced spiffy clean, usually at a remarkably tender age.Out of this early purgatory of life emerges a nation of precision engineers obsessed with waste disposal, with an unquenchable yearning for order and authority.

WITH THE communist German Democratic Republic falling apart in late 1989 and 1990, the CIA was suddenly presented with an extraordinary opportunity to acquire the operational files of the government's foreign-espionage service. Whether a Russian or an East German sold the files to Americans remains a mystery, but the price for what has come to be known as Operation Rosewood is said to have been $1 million to $1.5 million. The files were shipped to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.For the money, the agency got an invaluable trove: three separate card files listing most, if probably not all, agents of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklaerung, or HVA, the foreign-espionage division of the Ministry for State Security, otherwise known as the Stasi.

MERSEBURG, Germany -- Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Lothar Drewitz has lost his job, his marriage and his hope in the future. Now, the 50-year-old engineer who once toiled for a state-owned metal firm in the rigid East German system fears he may never again find steady work in a unified Germany."

Hans Conrad Schuhmann, 56, a former East German soldier immortalized in a photograph as he leapt across a barbed wire fence to freedom in West Berlin, hanged himself Saturday. He left no note, and police said the motive was unclear.He was serving in an East German army unit assigned to stop people from escaping when he fled across the border himself. He was in uniform and clutching his rifle when he was photographed jumping over a three-foot barrier of barbed wire Aug. 14, 1961 -- one day after Communist authorities closed the border and began construction of the Berlin Wall.

As the two Germanys come together once more German-Americans in Baltimore are rallying around their flag.Bill Barr, general manager of Flags, Banners and Pennants on Park Avenue, reported an upsurge of phone calls about German flags yesterday, just as the East German flag with its emblem of two compasses and a hammer was lowered from flag poles in Berlin, where it had waved since 1959. Now the simple black, red and gold striped flag that has represented West Germany since 1949 will ripple across the reunited nation.

NEUBRANDENBURG, Germany -- In Europe's biggest tank workshop, the new German army has found an unlikely symbol: a 45-ton armored firetruck.Built on the chassis of a Soviet T-55 tank, the "water buffalo" is a mixture of East and West, built in the East German workshop but now integrated into united Germany's Western-equipped army.And with proposals calling for the tank to be sent to catastrophes around the world, it also exemplifies the army's plans to be active overseas.This and other signs of the East and West German armies' smooth integration have confounded many critics who expected the 41-year archenemies to mix like water and oil.In fact, the West German Bundeswehr has managed to absorb the East German National People's Army more easily than the two countries themselves are integrating.

WASHINGTON -- Three one-time student radicals at the University of Wisconsin were charged yesterday with spying for Communist intelligence services since the 1970s.The FBI said in a 200-page affidavit that the three had been trying to penetrate the upper echelons of the U.S. government, with decidedly mixed results, since meeting on campus as self-styled hard-core Communists in the days of student protests.The FBI said it had identified the three by analyzing the files of the former East German intelligence service.

"The File," by Timothy Garton Ash. Random House. 224 pages. (( $23.The Stasi were most sinister in their ordinariness.In East Germany, the police made their presence known. They stopped cars and searched the trains. They walked muzzled, leashed dogs past the tourists. But not the Stasi, the secret police with their vast network of informers. Their terrifying power came from being indistinguishable. Anyone might be a spy - the baker, the bus driver, the next-door neighbor.As it turned out, many were.