- 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.
-
- 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 Barth-olomew'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."
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
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- More at: StrahlenschutzPraxis (vol 3, p 25)
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