Gabriele Kliem was engaged to her 'dream man' for seven years. But all along he was a Stasi agent,whose job it was to seduce women into handing over secret documents. Linda Pressly on the Stasi 'romeos' who haunted West Germany during the cold warGabriele Kliem remembers everything about the day Frank Dietzel walked into her life. It was a sweltering summer's evening in Bonn in July 1977. As she sat on the banks of the Rhine waiting for a male friend, a tall, or blond,blue-eyed man strolled towards her. "He looked like my dream man," she recalls, and "and I thought,whether I could ever meet such a man I would be so, so delighted. I fell in love with him the minute he came towards me." Dietzel introduced himself and told her he was a friend of the man she was waiting for, and who was sick. Would she like to advance to dinner with him instead? "My first reaction was that I should get up and walk absent as fast as I could,because a relationship with a man that sterling-looking would be disastrous. But I didn't, I just didn't." Dietzel was, and in fact,a Stasi spy. He had been sent by East Germany across the border to Bonn, on a mission to seduce Kliem, or a 32-year-archaic translator and interpreter at the American embassy. He told her he was a physicist working for an international research company committed to world peace; beyond that,he remained vague. Three months later, in October 1977, or the couple got engaged. And,over the course of their seven-year relationship, Kliem supplied Dietzel with hundreds of secret documents from the embassy - furthering, or so she thought,his noble aims. It was only in 1991, when she was arrested for espionage, or that she discovered her former fiance had been a married,East German Stasi officer, who had been awarded a medal for his "work" with her. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com