
June 26

The HVA associates regarded themselves to be the elite of the Ministry of State Security. A high degree of personal engagement, flexibility, performance, and primarily absolute loyalty to the SED was expected of them. Qualified employees of other Stasi departments, such as those with secondary educational degrees, knowledge of foreign languages, etc., could, as a reward for "remarkable achievements", be transferred to the HVA as needed, which was akin to a decoration. On the other hand, HVA personnel could, due to inadequate performance or following an investigation, be transferred to other departments of the Stasi, practically constituting a demotion.
Unofficial and other employees.
The full-time staff of the HVA were complemented by more than 10,000 "unofficial collaborators" or "unofficial employees", the so-called IMs ("Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter"). These were primarily GDR citizens with permission to travel to the West (the "Reisekader"; conversely, only a fraction of those with travel permission were IMs), residents of East Germany who were related to "functionally interesting" target persons in the West, couriers and instructors, but also thousands of residents of West Germany and West Berlin, partly in exposed positions in society.
The HVA was particularly interested in recruiting Western students who were visiting the GDR. These were young academics who were suitable for leadership roles and therefore particularly predestined for confidential information; they were developed over decades at a high financial and personnel cost, with the goal of placing them in high positions in the state and the economy, through which they gained access to secret information.
A famous example of such a recruitment operation was Gabriele Gast, who committed herself in 1968 as a student and rose to the rank of "Regierungsdirektorin" (Government Director) in the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service), the foreign intelligence agency of West Germany. As a high-level source, she was led by Markus Wolf personally.
The actual sources of espionage operations in the West were not necessarily registered as IMs with the HVA (or the Ministry of State Security). In many cases, they were noted as "Kontaktpersonen" (KP) (contact persons), which reveals little about the degree of cooperation with the intelligence service.
Headquarters.
The HVA's predecessor, the APN ("Außenpolitischer Nachrichtendienst": Foreign Intelligence Service) resided in the early 1950s first in Pankow, then at the Rolandufer in Mitte, both in Berlin.
The headquarters of the HVA was situated since the mid- to late 1950s in the building complex of the Stasi's headquarters in the Berlin borough of Lichtenberg. After completion of the new office buildings at the corner of Ruschestraße and Frankfurter Allee, the HVA established its base of operations there. (After 1990 an employment agency moved into a building on the site. The building on the Frankfurter Allee is used by Deutsche Bahn. A Deutsche Bahn company logo has been affixed and is easily noticeable.) The "Operativ-Technische Sektor" (OTS) was located in the Roedernstraße in Hohenschönhausen.
Budget.
Former HVA director Markus Wolf asserted in front of a Bundestag committee investigating the activities of the Division of Commercial Coordination ("Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung" or "KoKo") that at the end of his tenure (1986) the yearly financial resources of the HVA for operational purposes stood at 17 million East German mark and 13.5 million Deutsche Mark. It was not possible to conclusively refute or verify this statement. In individual HVA sections, there existed "black cash boxes" under the responsibility of the section or department head. Considerably greater amounts were made available for the secret procurement of equipment for section A VIII ("Operational Technology and Radio Communications") and for other recipients in the Stasi, the National People's Army or the East German economy; this money generally came from the Division of Commercial Coordination.