Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
About Gabriele Gast
- Gabriele Gast (born 2 March 1943) is a former East German spy.During 1973 she responded to a newspaper job advertisement placed, it said, by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
- On 1 November 1973 she started work with the West German intelligence service ("Federal Intelligence Service" / "Bundesnachrichtendienst" / BND).
- Any background vetting undertaken by the BND had failed to pick up on the fact that since 1968 Gabriele 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 whatever reason, it was not till 1990 (when she was "betrayed by a defector") that the West German Intelligence Service learned that she was "working for the other side".People who passed information from the west to the East German intelligence services were normally paid something.
- Gabriele Gast refused to accept any payment.
- With regard to the espionage, she did what she did, she said, for love.
- It is clear that after some time the love was matched and then replaced as the driving force for her espionage work by a deep political commitment.
- Regardless of her changing circumstances, she never accepted payment from her East German spy chiefs.
- After it was all over, and she had served her sentence, she was able to present herself perfectly convincingly as a spy "from conviction" ("aus Überzeugung").There are expert pundits who love to apply hyperbolic speculation to the relative damage that different Soviet bloc spies did to western intelligence services.
- Given the non-availability of hard facts, conclusions can never entirely move beyond speculation.
- It is nevertheless hard to argue with the assessment that Heinz Felfe was East Germany's most effective spy.
- Not very far down the list, however, a recent (light-hearted) contribution from Sven Felix Kellerhoff ranked Gabriele Gast as East Germany's fourth most damaging spy, one place ahead of Günter Guillaume.
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