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Concept
Gabriele Gast
Summary
Gabriele Gast (born 2 March 1943) is a former double agent and East German spy. In 1973, Gast responded to a newspaper job advertisement purportedly placed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. On 1 November 1973, she started to work with the West German intelligence service (the Bundesnachrichtendienst/BND).
Background vetting undertaken by the BND had failed to identify that since 1968 Gast had been on the books of the East German HVA, the branch of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) concerned with "foreign" intelligence. For an unknown reason, it was not till 1990, when she was "betrayed by a defector", that the West German Intelligence Service became aware of her espionage activities.
Informants who passed information from the West to the East German intelligence services were often paid a fee. Gabriele Gast refused to accept payment and reportedly engaged in espionage for "love". It is theorised that after some time the "love" was matched and replaced as the driving force for her espionage work by a deep political commitment. Despite her changing circumstances, she never accepted payment from her East German spy chiefs. After the Cold War had ended with the fall of the USSR, and after she had served her sentence in West Germany, she presented herself as a spy "from conviction" ("aus Überzeugung").
The overall assessment is that Heinz Felfe was East Germany's most effective spy. However, a recent article from Sven Felix Kellerhoff ranked Gast as East Germany's fourth most damaging spy, one place ahead of Günter Guillaume.
Gast was born in Remscheid during the Second World War, approximately three months before most of the town was destroyed in a firestorm caused by aerial bombing. Her father, who died while she was very young, was a driving instructor. The youngest of three siblings, she grew up in a conservative Catholic household in what became, in May 1949, the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Intelligent and diligent in her studies, she became politically engaged and inherited her parents' political conservatism, joining the Association of Christian Democratic (i.
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