The Grey Men: Pursuing the Stasi into the Present with Ralph Hope

<p>What do you do with a hundred thousand idle spies? By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded.<br /> <br /> For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight.<br /> <br /> This is the story of what they did next. Former FBI agent Ralph Hope uses present-day sources and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes.<br /> <br /> He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks if we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for thirty years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many today don’t want spoken.<br /> <br /> The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance over their citizens. Ultimately, this is a book about the present.</p>