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A. Our agency and I myself had nothing to do with the Red Army Faction. The P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat were recognized by East Germany as representing a state, and there were agreements on military and security training. We provided some of that training, but at no time did our agency work on terrorist activities. I cannot say anything definitive about the Ministry of State Security as a whole, but I can say that every effort was made to avoid terrorist activities being initiated from East Germany. It has become known that Arab individuals did prepare certain activities in East Germany that were then carried out in West Berlin.
Q. You are referring to the bombing of La Belle discotheque in Berlin ((in 1986, killing three people, including two U.S. soldiers))?
A. Yes, La Belle. This is one example. But I do not believe that the Ministry of State Security or the foreign intelligence agency was informed in advance about it. After the bombing they were able to reconstruct what happened.
Q. You come from a family of intellectuals. Did you and your late brother Konrad ((a leading East German filmmaker)) become so involved with the system that you became totally blind to its faults?
A. This is, for me, the central question, more important than even the criminal prosecution that I may be facing. Nobody who had a prominent position can be free of responsibility for the wrongs that occurred and for the failure of the experiment of socialism on German territory. My father, who died in 1953, believed in this experiment. Some people have asked how someone who had experienced the Moscow trials of the 1930s could remain silent. I believe that one develops an ability to ignore, an ability that my brother and I developed. We believed that in our own areas of work -- my brother in the arts, I in the intelligence service -- we could achieve something. We simply ignored what was happening around us. In the years before my brother's death ((in 1982)), I began to reflect more deeply. We did not use the word Stalinism to describe it, but we did believe that the socialist system had been deformed. We wanted to introduce reforms similar to those of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union -- glasnost and perestroika. It was at this time that my opposition to the regime began.
Q. In what way?
A. With my first book, Troika, in which I tried to present ideals of humanism or tolerance. I am working on another book to try to examine what happened and why and also to examine our responsibility. Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Yeltsin were fortunate in that they had an opportunity to reflect on what had happened and also to introduce reforms. We had no opportunity to prove that we too could learn from the past. But we did in fact want to move along a path toward democracy.
Q. Do you still consider yourself a communist?