I read any more of this stuff and I will become Brad or Leo! (Allusion to a jibe from Planet Proyect, a previously undiscovered zone from which strange, hallucinatory electro-magnetic pulses have been observed emitting orders to purge from polite company the editors of NACLA, The Nation and NLR for committing the sin of petty-bourgeois academic marxism under direction of the George Soros Left-Liberal Civil Society Conspiracy.)
Michael Pugliese, "Can I pet your bourgeoisie?"
"God, the Beast Near Bit Off My Hand!"
-----Original Message----- From: Kevin Dean <qualiall_2 at yahoo.com> To: marxist at egroups.com <marxist at egroups.com> Date: Wednesday, January 03, 2001 4:30 PM Subject: [marxist] Cold war, hot secret
Cold war, hot secret Radioactive tags were used to track dissidents behind the Berlin Wall
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns9999289 East German dissidents probably didn't spot the plain-clothes agent with the vibrating armpit. But agents could track suspected political opponents without even seeing them. They just followed a trail of radioactivity shed by their unwitting quarry.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the German Democratic Republic's secret police - the Stasi - frequently labelled suspected dissidents with highly radioactive chemicals so that agents wearing concealed Geiger counters could keep tabs on them, according to a paper by Klaus Becker, a leading radiation protection expert.
So that targets would not hear the clicking of the counter at close range, Stasi agents wore the detector strapped under one arm, while a vibrating alarm was slung under the other arm. Bizarrely, this 30- year-old invention mirrors the vibrating "silent ringers" on today's pagers and cellphones.
Evidence of the radioactive tracking exercise was found in the vast Stasi archives by officials of the Berlin-based Gauck Commission, a government agency investigating the former secret police. "It is a remarkable story. It's the first well-documented case of such a thing," says Becker.
Cancer deaths
It has long been suspected that the Stasi used radiation as a weapon. Becker reports that "unusual non-medical X-ray machines" in former political prisons could have been used for covertly irradiating inmates.
Large doses of X-rays are thought to be behind the deaths from cancer of a number of prominent dissidents. "I wouldn't be surprised if it was true, but I suspect it will never be officially proved," says Becker.
But no one knew about tracking people with radionuclides. "It really is the stuff of James Bond movies," comments Barrie Lambert, a radiobiologist at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. "It's an unpleasant thing to do. The risk is not limited to the person being tagged. You'd be exposing other people, such as a spouse."
Spray and decay
The Stasi files reveal that dissidents were labelled with radioactive substances in a number of ways. If people could not be sprayed with a radioactive solution the spies would label their cars, documents or paper money, Becker reports.
A favourite radio-nuclide was the beta and gamma emitter scandium-46. If floors in dissident meeting rooms were treated, he says, the Stasi could follow anybody who attended. And the Stasi also developed an airgun that could fire radio-labelled silver wire into a car tyre from 25 metres away.
While victims received radiation doses of around 150 millisieverts per action, the Stasi looked after its own, ensuring that its agents were not exposed to any more than the internationally recommended maximum - 1 mSv per week at the time.
But Michael Clark, spokesman for Britain's National Radiological Protection Board, says that there would be "inherent uncertainty" in any dose calculation and that actual doses could have been anywhere between 50 and 500 mSv.
Tainted money
Becker left East Germany in 1951, aged 18. He later became head of radiation dosimetry at the Jülich Nuclear Research Establishment in West Germany.
He says that while doses were usually below what would seriously harm or kill, there were mishaps. "The Stasi marked West German deutschmarks with large amounts of scandium to see how they circulated, to whom and for what purpose. While they expected to retrieve them, they didn't and the notes disappeared without trace," he says.
The Stasi later calculated that if more than one note was in a man's pocket, the effect on his fertility "came close to castration," Becker says. More at: StrahlenschutzPraxis (vol 3, p 25)
Correspondence about this story should be directed to latestnews at newscientist.com
1900 GMT, 3 January 2001
Debora MacKenzie, Mick Hamer and Paul Marks
"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." --Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31
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