|
Wolfgang Vogel
Wolfgang Vogel (30 October 1925 – 21 August 2008) was a German lawyer active in East Germany at the time of the Cold War who had brokered some of the most famous swaps of spies or exchanges against ransom of political prisoners between the Soviet bloc and the West. A bridge between two worlds during three decades, he came to symbolize the ambiguity of his time and environment, and his career was cited as material worthy of Len Deighton and John le Carré. Personal life Vogel was born on 30 October 1925, in Wilhelmsthal (now Bolesławów, Poland), a small mountain village roughly 75 miles (130 km) to the south of Breslau in Lower Silesia: he studied law in Jena and Leipzig after World War II and graduated as a lawyer. In April 1946, he married his first wife Eva, with whom he had two children, Manfred and Lilo. The couple were divorced in 1966. In 1974, Vogel married his second wife, Helga Fritsch. Originating from Essen after meeting Vogel in 1968 she moved to East German ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bolesławów, Lower Silesian Voivodeship
Bolesławów is a village (former town) in the administrative district of Gmina Stronie Śląskie, within Kłodzko County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland. It lies approximately south of Stronie Śląskie, south-east of Kłodzko, and south of the regional capital Wrocław. It is located within the historic Kłodzko Land. History It is a former town. It was granted town rights in 1581 and was deprived of them in 1894.Robert Krzysztofik, ''Lokacje miejskie na obszarze Polski. Dokumentacja geograficzno-historyczna'', Katowice 2007, p. 20-21 (in Polish) In the 16th century the town became the center of a metal mining and industrial region. In the 17th century it became part of an estate, centered in Stronie Śląskie, which from 1838 was owned by Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. In the 18th century it was annexed by Prussia and from 1871 to 1945 it was part of Germany, and after the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II it passed to Poland. Sights Amo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deutsche Welle
Deutsche Welle (; "German Wave" in English), abbreviated to DW, is a German public, state-owned international broadcaster funded by the German federal tax budget. The service is available in 32 languages. DW's satellite television service consists of channels in English, German, Spanish, and Arabic. The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence. DW is a member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). DW offers regularly updated articles on its news website and runs its own center for international media development, DW Akademie. The broadcaster's stated goals are to produce reliable news coverage, provide access to the German language, and promote understanding between peoples. It is also a provider of live streaming world news which can be viewed via its website, YouTube, and various mobile devices and digital media players. DW has been broadcasting since 1953. It is headquartered in Bonn, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Center For The National Interest
The Center for the National Interest is a Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank. It was established by former U.S. President Richard Nixon on January 20, 1994, as the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom. The group changed its name to The Nixon Center in 1998. In 2001 the center acquired ''The National Interest'', a bimonthly journal, in which it tends to promote the realist perspective on foreign policy. The center's president is Dimitri K. Simes. In March 2011, the center was renamed the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI or CNI). The change was due to a conflict between leadership of the Center and the Richard Nixon Family Foundation and was part of "a long-running battle over former President Richard Nixon’s complicated legacy," with Foundation members criticizing the center's president for "attacking their party’s presidential candidate, John McCain, for his denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia," and "discomfort at the Center over the Foundati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Karl Koecher
Karl František Koecher (21 September 1934 in Bratislava) is a Czech mole known to have penetrated the CIA during the Cold War. Early life Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, his father was a Viennese-born Czech and his mother Irena, a Slovak Jew. As the son of an Anglophile, Koecher gained his language skills from an early age attending an English grammar school and later French lyceum before the war. Prior to his entry to university, his anti-state activities in his teen years attracted the attention of the Czechoslovakia State Security after the Communists took over in Czechoslovakia in 1948. As remembered by some of his classmates, from early age he showed strong analytical capabilities, high intelligence and individualistic nature. Due to his unlikeable character, in later years, his former classmates would not invite him on annual class meetings. He studied physics and mathematics at Charles University as well as film at the Academy of Performing Arts. After universi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anatoly Shcharansky
Natan Sharansky ( he, נתן שרנסקי; russian: Ната́н Щара́нский; uk, Натан Щаранський, born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky on 20 January 1948); uk, Анатолій Борисович Щаранський, group="Note" is an Israeli politician, human rights activist and author who spent nine years in Soviet prisons as a refusenik during the 1970s and 1980s. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018. Sharansky currently serves as chairman for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), an American non-partisan organization. Biography Sharansky was born into a Jewish family on in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk) in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. His father, Boris Shcharansky, a journalist from a Zionist background who worked for an industrial journal, died in 1980, before Natan was freed. His mother, Ida Milgrom, visited him in prison ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Günter Guillaume
Günter Guillaume (1 February 1927 – 10 April 1995) was a German spy who gathered intelligence as an agent for East Germany's secret service, the Stasi, in West Germany. Guillaume became West German chancellor Willy Brandt's secretary, and his discovery as a spy in 1973 led to Brandt's downfall in the Guillaume affair. Early life Günter Karl Heinz Guillaume was born on 1 February 1927, at 31 Choriner Straße in Prenzlauer Berg, then a working-class district of Berlin. He was the only child of Karl Ernst Guillaume, a pianist who played in bars and theatres, where he provided background music for silent films, and Johanna Old Pauline (), a hairdresser. His parents, who had married four months before Günter's birth, were both native to Berlin. Due to the combination of the Great Depression and the introduction of sound films, the Guillaumes suffered financial hardship. These experiences made the extremist policies being presented by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Party attractive t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel (russian: Рудольф Иванович Абель), real name William August Fisher (11 July 1903 – 15 November 1971), was a Soviet intelligence officer. He adopted his alias when arrested on charges of conspiracy by the FBI in 1957. Fisher was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England in the United Kingdom to Russian émigré parents. He moved to Russia in the 1920s, and served in the Soviet military before undertaking foreign service as a radio operator in Soviet intelligence in the late 1920s and early 30s. He later served in an instructional role before taking part in intelligence operations against the Germans during World War II. After the war, he began working for the KGB, which sent him to the United States where he worked as part of a spy ring based in New York City. In 1957, the U.S. Federal Court in New York convicted Fisher on three counts of conspiracy as a Soviet spy for his involvement in what became known as the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederic Pryor
Frederic LeRoy Pryor (April 23, 1933 – September 2, 2019)Richard Sandomir ''New York Times'' (September 11, 2019). was an American economist. While studying in Berlin during the partition of the city in 1961, he was imprisoned in East Germany for six months, then released in a Cold War " spy swap" that also involved downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He spent the bulk of his career as a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, as a professor of economics. Early life and education Frederic LeRoy Pryor and his twin brother Millard were born April 23, 1933, in Owosso, Michigan, to Millard H. and Mary S. Pryor, but spent most of their childhood in Mansfield, Ohio, and graduated in 1951 from Mansfield Senior High School. He attended Oberlin College, where he received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1955. He then spent a year in South America and Europe, which included three months living and working on a commune in Paraguay. He studied economics at Yale Univer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Gary Powers
Francis Gary Powers (August 17, 1929 – August 1, 1977) was an American pilot whose Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down while flying a reconnaissance mission in Soviet Union airspace, causing the 1960 U-2 incident. He later worked as a helicopter pilot for KNBC in Los Angeles and died in a 1977 helicopter crash. Early life and education Powers was born August 17, 1929, in Jenkins, Kentucky, the son of Oliver Winfield Powers (1904–1970), a coal miner, and his wife Ida Melinda Powers (; 1905–1991). His family eventually moved to Pound, Virginia, just across the state border. He was the second born and only male of six children. His family lived in a mining town, and because of the hardships associated with living in such a town, his father wanted Powers to become a physician. He hoped his son would achieve the higher earnings of such a profession and felt that this would involve less hardship than any job in his hometown. Education and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stasi
The Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the (),An abbreviation of . was the state security service of the East Germany from 1950 to 1990. The Stasi's function was similar to the KGB, serving as a means of maintaining state authority, i.e., the "Sword and Shield of the Party" (). This was accomplished primarily through the use of a network of civilian informants. This organization contributed to the arrest of approximately 250,000 people in East Germany. The Stasi also conducted espionage and other clandestine operations abroad through its subordinate foreign intelligence service, the Office of Enlightenment, or Head Office A (german: Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung). They also maintained contacts and occasionally cooperated with West German terrorists. The Stasi was headquartered in East Berlin, with an extensive complex in Berlin-Lichtenberg and several smaller facilities throughout the city. Erich Mielke was the Stasi's longest-serving chief, in power for 32 of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friedrichsfelde
Friedrichsfelde () is a German locality (''Ortsteil'') within the borough (''Bezirk'') of Lichtenberg, Berlin. History The locality was first mentioned in a document of 1265 with the name of ''Rosenfelde''. In 1699 it was renamed Friedrichsfelde after the Prince-Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg. It was an autonomous municipality of the former Niederbarnim district until 1920, when it merged into Berlin under the "Greater Berlin Act". Geography Located in eastern suburb of Berlin, Friedrichsfelde borders with the localities of Lichtenberg, Rummelsburg, Karlshorst, Marzahn and Biesdorf (both in Marzahn-Hellersdorf district). In its south-eastern corner is situated the "Tierpark Berlin", the second zoo of the city. Transport As urban rail, Friedrichsfelde is crossed both by ''S-Bahn'' and ''U-Bahn''. The stations serving the locality are Friedrichsfelde Ost (lines S5, S7, S75), Friedrichsfelde ( U5), Tierpark (U5) and partly Rummelsburg Rummelsburg () is a subdivision o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_(cropped).jpg "Click for more on -> Deutsche Welle")
.jpg "Click for more on -> Anatoly Shcharansky")
