The Grey Men
Pursuing the Stasi into the Present
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Narrated by:
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B. J. Harrison
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By:
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Ralph Hope
About this listen
By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next.
Former FBI Agent Ralph Hope uses critical insider knowledge and access to Stasi records to track and expose ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to the police and even the government department tasked with prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have never been called to account and, in doing so, asks whether we have really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who continued to fight the Stasi for 30 years after the Wall fell, and reveals a truth that many don’t want spoken. The Grey Men comes as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance over their citizens.
©2021 Ralph Hope (P)2021 Dreamscape Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Lazy Journalism in long narrative form
- By Jeremy on 02-14-21
By: Tom Burgis
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The Fall of the FBI
- How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy
- By: Thomas J. Baker
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have lost faith in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an institution they once regarded as the world’s greatest law-enforcement agency. Thomas Baker spent many years with the FBI and is deeply troubled by this loss of faith. Specific lapses have come to light and each is thoroughly discussed in this book: Why did they happen? What changed? The answer begins days after the 9/11 attacks when the FBI underwent a significant change in culture.
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We have to stop them
- By E B. on 07-01-23
By: Thomas J. Baker
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Betrayal in Berlin
- The True Story of the Cold War's Most Audacious Espionage Operation
- By: Steve Vogel
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Its code name was “Operation Gold”, a wildly audacious CIA plan to construct a clandestine tunnel into East Berlin to tap into critical KGB and Soviet military telecommunication lines. The tunnel, crossing the border between the American and Soviet sectors, would have to be 1,500 feet (the length of the Empire State Building) with state-of-the-art equipment, built and operated literally under the feet of their Cold War adversaries.
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Fascinating Book
- By Toni Bowes on 01-11-20
By: Steve Vogel
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Erdogan Rising
- The Battle for the Soul of Turkey
- By: Hannah Lucinda Smith
- Narrated by: Hannah Lucinda Smith
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Everyone has heard of Erdogan: Turkey’s bullish, mercurial president is the original postmodern populist. Around the world, other strongmen are now following the path that he has blazed. For the first time, Erdogan Rising tells the inside story of how a democracy on the fringe of Europe has succumbed to dictatorship. Hannah Lucinda Smith, Turkey correspondent with The Times of London, has witnessed all that has befallen Turkey and the wider region since the onset of the Arab Spring.
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Overall fascinating profile of Erdogan’s Turkey
- By Saul M on 09-18-20
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This Machine Kills Secrets
- How Wikileakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information
- By: Andy Greenberg
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The machine that kills secrets is a powerful cryptographic code that hides the identities of leakers and hacktivists as they spill the private files of government agencies and corporations bringing us into a new age of whistle blowing. With unrivaled access to figures like Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, and Jacob Applebaum, investigative journalist Andy Greenberg unveils the group that brought the world WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, and BalkanLeaks.
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Good writing, a little outdated by now
- By Sam on 08-08-15
By: Andy Greenberg
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Shadow State
- Murder, Mayhem, and Russia's Remaking of the West
- By: Luke Harding
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Moscow’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers, and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?
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The reader is mispronouncing words!
- By Jonathan on 07-20-20
By: Luke Harding
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Mengele
- The Complete Story
- By: Gerald Posner, John Ware, Michael Berenbaum - introduction
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 15 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on exclusive and unrestricted access to more than 5,000 pages of personal writings and family photos, this definitive biography of German physician and SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele (1911-1979) probes the personality and motivations of Auschwitz's "Angel of Death". From May 1943 through January 1945, Mengele selected who would be gassed immediately, who would be worked to death, and who would serve as involuntary guinea pigs for his spurious and ghastly human experiments (twins were Mengele's particular obsession).
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ONE OF THE WORST BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ
- By PAUL on 08-02-20
By: Gerald Posner, and others
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Do Not Disturb
- The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
- By: Michela Wrong
- Narrated by: Michela Wrong
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister.
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What is true and what isn't?
- By Buretto on 11-30-21
By: Michela Wrong
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The Man Without a Face
- The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
- By: Masha Gessen
- Narrated by: Masha Gessen
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to its own people and to the world.
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A Preview of Authoritarianism in the USA
- By Jimmy O on 06-08-19
By: Masha Gessen
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Executive Actions
- By: Gary Grossman
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 20 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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An assassin takes aim at a Presidential candidate during a primary stump speech. The instant he pulls the trigger, the outcome of the election is irrevocably changed. But Democrat Teddy Lodge, an upcoming media sweetheart, isn't killed. His wife is. As a result, Lodge emerges as the man to beat and the greatest threat to the incumbent President, Morgan Taylor.
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My highest possible recommendation for this novel!
- By Wayne on 08-12-16
By: Gary Grossman
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The Moscow Rules
- The Secret CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold War
- By: Jonna Mendez, Antonio J. J. Mendez
- Narrated by: Wilson Bethel
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Antonio Mendez and his future wife, Jonna, were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War. Soviets kept files on all foreigners, studied their patterns, tapped their phones, and even planted listening devices within the US embassy. In short, intelligence work was effectively impossible. The Soviet threat loomed larger than ever. The Moscow Rules tells the story of the intelligence breakthroughs that turned the odds in America's favor.
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Interesting, clean, pro-CIA history
- By Alexander M Leasenby on 02-27-20
By: Jonna Mendez, and others
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A Very Expensive Poison
- The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin's War with the West
- By: Luke Harding
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On November 1, 2006, journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died twenty-two days later. The cause of death? Polonium—a rare, lethal, and highly radioactive substance. Here Luke Harding unspools a real-life political assassination story—complete with KGB, CIA, MI6, and Russian mobsters.
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Cover-To-Cover, This'll Have You Mindblown!
- By Gillian on 02-03-17
By: Luke Harding
What listeners say about The Grey Men
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Justin McWilliams
- 12-14-22
awesome read, recommend to anyone and everyone
I enjoy books that really dive deep into our history, and expose the frauds of natural human behavior: to control the population by any means necessary, whether it be misinformation or a combination of things that will be "free" to the public. it's all smoke and mirrors for the politicians to get what they want, and what they all want is power. you can start out in politics with the right ideas but if you don't play dirty, you won't get far. once you've been playing dirty for long enough you become what you hated. bravo to the creation of this book, and the time sacrificed to fill in many blanks and educate people who don't know about the Stasi. well done
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- Patrick R.
- 01-10-22
An MfS-Stasi Practical Guide on How to Destroy a Soul
A great tome on the Mfs-Stasi. It is appalling how very little justice there has been for the victims of the Stasi and the even worse crime of historical apologists efforting to revise DDR History with Ostalgie. Better to get hurt by the truth than be comforted by the lie.
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- Al Berg
- 05-01-22
A story which needs to be told, but…
Overall an excellent book telling a story which many people will find new. However, the repeated linkage of todays left (at least outside of Germany) to a desire to rebuild communist police states seems a bit dramatic/inaccurate. In spite of this, a worthwhile listen and a lesson to help us avoid repeating horrific episodes in history.
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- Katy
- 07-09-22
Very Enlightening
Some other reviewers complained that the author allowed his political opinions into the story. But the way it struck me was that the story affected his understanding of European politics. I like good historical stories but this one delivered valuable insights into our current world system. Excellent.
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1 person found this helpful