Rosenholz files

The Rosewood files include 381 media (CD -ROMs) with about 350,000 files. This is mainly microfilmed index cards of the Main Intelligence ( HVA ), the foreign intelligence service of the GDR. An estimated 90 percent of these data is not IN the Stasi, but to people who came from the vicinity of the IM or acquired from others for the Stasi important reasons. Initially it was assumed that it is mainly RELATES at the files to clear names of agents who have worked on West German territory for the GDR foreign espionage.

Whereabouts after the turn

Purchase by the CIA

In the turn of time, the files came under unclear circumstances not just in the hands of the CIA.

According to the annals of the former Moscow CIA station chiefs Milton Bearden, the Rosewood files were not captured at the storming of the Ministry of State Security on 15 January 1990. Rather, only the Berlin CIA office was at the request of then-US President George HW Bush at the CIA chief puts in action.

The after the turn procured by the CIA microfilm index of the agents of the East German espionage department HVA come after statements by former CIA agents by a KGB officer. How should an employee of the American intelligence have made contact with him. The news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the KGB man was reported in 1992 at a U.S. Embassy in Eastern Europe and offered a bad one, but still readable copy of the microfilm for sale, for which he would have received $ 75,000.

One theory is that in December 1989, the HVA Lieutenant Colonel Rainer Hemmann was ordered to transport the microfilmed records file to Berlin -Karl Horst to them there handed over to the KGB liaison officer Alexander Prinzipalow because you had once been considered only in the to guarantee communist Soviet Union keep safe. This turned out, however soon as misjudgment out, as a CIA employee had very soon knotted contact with the stationed in East Berlin KGB colonel Alexander Sjubenko. This in turn made ​​the contact between Prinzipalow, the CIA employee and another KGB General forth. These three intelligence officials managed the microfilms during the tribulations that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1992 in the United States.

Sjubenko and Prinzipalow died soon after under mysterious circumstances. The Washington Post celebrated the CIA operation at the time as the biggest intelligence coup since the Cold War began.

Once the stocks were initially evaluated only in the U.S., this also happened in other countries.

Return to Germany

After long negotiations, in which the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution to have played a role, the media has been handed over to the Federal Republic of Germany in 2003. Because of the German domestic intelligence files now are called " Rosewood" - this was the name of the process under which they asked the CIA to publication of the media. Why the return took so long, is controversial.

Bearden sat down as head of the Bonn CIA station to ensure that the rosewood files were handed over to the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic ( Stasi ), for which he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit.

Disclosure and processing

The data were reviewed by the Stasi on translation and other errors and will be available in March 2004 of the population. Anyone who makes an application for personal access to the file in the Stasi may inspect the corresponding Rosewood data.

Formally, each can provide a subject to authorization request for access to appropriate Rosewood files in the Stasi. 350,000 records have been archived. Approximately 1000 to now not unmasked in West Germany working IN the former East German intelligence service are searchable.

2006 sharp criticism of the previous licensing practice was practiced. The time reported in " Who's Afraid of rosewood? " That of an announced opening of Rosewood files for science and stakeholders can be no question, as even scientists access is in reality only " very, very restrictive" granted so in Hubertus Knabe, director of the Stasi Memorial in Berlin- Hohenschonhausen, which for 192 provided by the Stasi in a period of two years, applications for access, only 15 permits were issued.

A scientific review of the data in a publicly accessible report by the Stasi itself would be delayed departmental internally, so that the employees involved in the BStU would Muzzles imposed. About the background for it is reported that the rosewood files, for example, call a considerable number (42 ) of members of the Bundestag, said to have been working as the GDR IM messaging service. Other people from industry and business associations are listed by name, about 39 percent of object sources of rosewood files work in these areas. The BStU represents that "residual doubt " about the IM activities of the persons mentioned made ​​a legally sound decision on access to such data very difficult.

On 2 August 2006, the Stasi announced that now first documents to Members of the 6th German Bundestag ( 1969-1972 ) are published on the relevant applications of media and science. They primarily affect the 16 deputies who are captured on "Rosewood " index cards with a so-called IMA note ( IM file A). From a demonstrated at " Rosewood" IM- file can not be closed on an IM activity, since the files are partially related to contact people who were not IM and unnoticed " skimmed off " usually were.