THE STASI AND THE PEACENIKS - 1

I'd clocked David Leigh's piece in the Guardian earlier in the month on Anthony Glees's book on the Stasi's activities in the UK (click here) - but I'm afraid the story, about East German spooks hanging around Chatham House and getting various establishment has-beens to be nice to them, left me cold. Not so cold, however, that I didn't pick up the book - The Stasi Files: East Germany's Secret Operations against Britain (Free Press, £20) - at which point I discovered that it includes rather a lot of material on the 1980s peace movement that is very interesting. The Stasi were obsessed with European Nuclear Disarmament, the anti-Soviet and anti-Nato current in the peace movement (for which I worked for three years as deputy editor of END Journal), and Glees has turned up some fascinating stuff. There's one big problem, though: his presentation of his Stasi archive findings is laughably sensationalist and poorly researched at the Brit peacenik end. But there's definitely more to come on this . . .