Who Really Is Angela Merkel? A Counterintelligence Inquiry
Unraveling the mystery of «IM Erika» reveals hidden angles to recent German and European history
It’s difficult to conjure up a politician whose reputation has fallen so far and so fast as Angela Merkel’s. Since leaving office as Germany’s chancellor at the end of 2021, following a 16-year run in power, Merkel’s image has plummeted in an unprecedented manner. Europe’s most famous female politician, who turned 70 a few months ago, is witnessing the collapse of her once-hailed accomplishments.
It’s easy to forget just how big a celebrity “Angie” was just a few years ago, far beyond Germany. As the leader of not just Germany but in many ways the European Union too, de facto, given Berlin’s economic dominance over the EU, Merkel was a unique star among Western politicians. As Germany’s first female chancellor, Merkel was the most powerful woman in European politics.
Distaste for Donald Trump during his first term in the White House led some Americans to dub Merkel “the leader of the free world.” The case for such accolades, dubious at the time, looks ridiculous now. On every front, Merkel’s legacy appears increasingly negative. Her chancellorship as head of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (which she took over in 2000 as party leader) witnessed Germany’s painful decline. Merkel’s real legacy is her country’s economic waning, political turmoil, and strategic irrelevance.
Thanks to short-sighted pro-environmental policies under Merkel, Germany’s once vibrant industrial economy, the engine of Europe, is in seemingly irreversible decline. The “economic miracle” birthed by the CDU in the decades after the Second World War, when West Germany made itself Europe’s economic powerhouse, is falling apart. Merkel neglected Germany’s military too, while kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaving the Bundeswehr in a state of deep disrepair.
Perhaps Merkel’s worst debacle was her careless opening of Germany’s borders to millions of migrants, mainly from Asia and Africa, during the EU’s 2015 migration crisis. She boasted “We’ve got this” (Wir schaffen das) but, in truth, opening Germany’s borders to migrants, many of them Muslim, has gifted Germany a wave of crime and terrorism, while creating a underclass that’s stressing the country’s welfare state.
It's no surprise that German politics is being upended by the far-right Alternative for Germany, which appeared in 2013 as a populist protest against Merkel’s Eurozone monetary policies, yet since the migrant wave the AfD has embraced German patriotism in a fashion that’s been deemed verboten since 1945. The AfD’s rise in polling, despite rigorous efforts by the CDU to marginalize any threat on the populist Right, has shocked the Berlin establishment while unmasking Merkel’s accomplishments as increasingly threadbare.
Undeterred, Merkel released her memoir at the end of last year, pompously titled Freedom. Even friendly reviewers conceded that she appeared out of touch with current politics, plus unrepentant that she was always right. Merkel’s deep unpopularity was revealed by feedback on her autobiography, which skewed so negative that Amazon limited comments to verified purchasers. In neighboring Austria, former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz – whose own center-right party is under siege from the populist right, just as in Germany – bluntly explained that this was Merkel’s fault. “Without the migration policies since 2015, the AfD wouldn’t be anywhere near this strong,” Kurz stated, and it’s difficult to argue his point.
Matthew Karnitschnig, POLITICO’s chief European correspondent, has been a rare Merkel critic in the mainstream media. In her last days as chancellor, Karnitschnig castigated the “Merkel Myth” which portrayed her as far more competent at politics than she really was. A few months later, after Putin’s 2022 re-invasion of Ukraine, he denounced Putin’s “useful German idiots,” Merkel prominently among them, for their failed deterrence towards the Kremlin. In a follow-up interview, Karnitschnig pulled no punches, specifically citing Merkel’s “East German roots, as she was someone who thought, like a lot of German politicians, that she could understand the Russians, while others, such as us, couldn’t. That might be true to a certain degree, they do have more familiarity, but in this case it led her to make a fatal error.”
To sum up, the supposed “leader of the free world” in fact ran her wealthy country into the ground, crashing its economy, weakening its military, flooding it with Muslim migrants, creating social chaos, while proving uncomfortably eager to give the Kremlin whatever it wanted, plus making Germany dependent on Russian natural gas – all at great cost to Western unity, the EU, and NATO. It’s therefore time to ask what’s really going on with Angela Merkel.
This newsletter has previously offered unique deep-dives into the vexing bona fides of Donald Trump and Barack Obama, applying an experienced counterintelligence lens to those complex men, a service you can’t find anywhere else. It’s time to do the same to Angela Merkel. As Top Secret Umbra explained in its assessment of Obama:
Asking questions is the nature of counterintelligence work. Making hypotheses based on limited information constitutes the cornerstone of counterespionage. If you’re not judicious, you can wind up in the vaunted Wilderness of Mirrors alarmingly easily. “Just asking questions” here doesn’t mean social media sealioning, rather making informed inferences from intelligence fragments, looking for patterns. This is why counterintelligence must be left to professionals, while there are few things more toxic in a democracy than amateur counterintelligence weaponized for partisan purposes (see: Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy).
Who really is Angela Merkel?
The salient fact about her is that Merkel was born in Hamburg in 1954, moved to East Germany just weeks after her birth, and was approaching middle age when the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989 and the DDR collapsed. Merkel was never a dissident against the regime and its ruling Socialist Unity Party or SED. In fact, her father, Lutheran pastor Horst Kasner, unusually moved to East Germany with his family in 1954, when far more people were fleeing the DDR, with its poverty and repression, to West Germany. Known as “Red Kasner,” her father was sympathetic to the SED, though exactly how deep his ties ran to the ruling party remains opaque.
Angela Merkel had a normal upbringing in East Germany, including involvement with the Free German Youth or FDJ, the ruling party’s youth wing. Her relationship with the FDJ was expected of anyone seeking a career under Communism, and Merkel’s young life appears unexceptional for her time and place. She studied physics at Karl Marx University in Leipzig from 1973 to 1978, then pursued advanced studies in quantum chemistry, culminating in her doctorate in 1986. She was a scientist not an activist. However, Merkel entered politics quickly after the Berlin Wall’s fall in late 1989. She was elected to the Bundestag, the federal parliament, for the CDU in reunited Germany’s first elections, a year later, then was quickly appointed to the cabinet by then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Her rise in the CDU, with Kohl’s favor, came fast, and within a decade of her first parliamentary election, Merkel was the party’s leader. Just five years after that, she became chancellor.
Going back to 1990, when Germany reunited, there have been persistent whispers that Merkel was connected to the former regime’s secret police, what East Germany called the Ministry for State Security (MfS, Stasi for short), the DDR’s equivalent of the mighty KGB. This is hardly a silly or inappropriate suggestion, given how deeply the Stasi penetrated every aspect of East German society (here the 2006 award-winning film The Lives of Others is essential for the “feel” of life in the DDR). The Stasi were a highly efficient secret police force, combining cunning Russian methods with German rigor, yet they failed to save the party from collapse.
The Stasi kept tabs on society by recruiting large numbers of informants, called “unofficial collaborators” (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter or IM), in every sector of life. Family members and close colleagues weren’t off limits for recruitment, as stunned East Germans discovered after 1990 when Stasi files were partially opened and some discovered that those informing on them to the MfS were friends and lovers.
The circumstantial case for Merkel having enjoyed some sort of relationship with the Stasi that she wouldn’t have wanted known after 1989 is straightforward and easy to postulate. Her own father was pro-Communism and was involved with a party-endorsed church group that was under Stasi influence. That “Red Kasner” was permitted to travel to West Germany at a time when few DDR citizens were, counts as indication of Stasi approval. Similarly, a young Angela Merkel was allowed to travel to West Germany, a privilege that was denied “enemies of the people” or anyone deemed suspect by the MfS.
The story gets more interesting during the heady year following the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Angela Merkel entered politics. Political activism, pent up for decades, burst forth in the DDR at once. Within weeks of the wall’s fall, Merkel joined one of the small political groups trying to gain traction as the SED disappeared and democracy emerged. It was called Democratic Beginning or DA, and it was an outgrowth of church activism. Merkel’s attraction, given her father’s career, seemed normal, and in February 1990, DA leader Wolfgang Schnur appointed her the party’s press spokeswoman. However, the DA’s growth was soon stunted by the revelation that Schnur, a lawyer turned activist, had been a productive informant for the Stasi, which knew him as IM Torsten, going back to the 1960s. Schnur’s clandestine specialty was spying on religious groups, particularly the Lutheran church.
After that debacle, the damaged DA was rolled into the East German CDU in 1990. This is an important point. Under the DDR, the ruling SED exercised complete control over political life, but its “parliament” included several fake parties, called “block parties,” to provide the illusion of political pluralism. The East German CDU posed as an analog to West Germany’s CDU, but was in fact under regime control, with considerable Stasi influence.
After Schnur’s implosion with the revelation of his Stasi ties, the neophyte Merkel quickly accepted the patronage of Lothar de Maizière, member of a prominent family and the leader of the East German CDU. A respected figure, de Maizière headed East Germany for a few months in 1990 after the SED’s fall, in the run-up to national re-unification on Oct. 3 of that year. However, de Maizière’s cabinet post in Chancellor Kohl’s united government, a concession to German unity, collapsed a few weeks later when it was revealed from Stasi files that de Maizière, too, had informed for the MfS for decades as IM Czerny.
As circumstantial evidence, the fact that Angela Merkel grew up in a pro-Communist family in the DDR that enjoyed Stasi approval, while the two politicians who enabled her sudden rise in politics were both Stasi informants, presents a troubling portrait. Here, Merkel’s claim that the MfS approached her in 1978, during her student days, to serve as an informer, an offer which she says she declined, seems a tad too on the nose.
Such coincidences have combined with innuendo to create an online myth that Merkel in fact was IM Erika, a loyal and productive Stasi agent who spied on friends and colleagues. It was these MfS connections which enabled her sudden rise in German politics around 1990: hence the pivotal roles played by Stasi informers Schnur and de Maizière in burrowing IM Erika into the unsuspecting Kohl government, through the back door. This is a German version of the “Manchurian Candidate” concept which, if taken to its conclusion, explains why Merkel did so much damage to Germany and the West as chancellor.
This isn’t an absurd notion on its face. Certainly, any counterintelligence veteran acquainted with the Stasi and their modus operandi has questions about Merkel’s bona fides and true biography. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s evident that the fall of Communism and the rise of democracy in the former Soviet Bloc around 1990 was considerably less clear-cut than is commonly supposed. Across Eastern Europe, as the secret police detected the collapse of Communism before anyone else did, thanks to their informants swiss-cheesing society at all levels, the smart ones planned to survive. Here the 2019 Czech TV series Bez vědomí (branded in English as The Sleepers) offers intriguing insights regarding what really happened when Communism fell.
Still, none of this comes close to constituting evidence that Angela Merkel had a clandestine relationship with the East German secret police, one which she concealed in the decades after the DDR’s end. Is there any evidence?
Here we must turn to Hubertus Knabe, Germany’s top expert on the Stasi files and their meaning. A German historian whose family fled the DDR, Knabe’s life since 1990 has been devoted to exposing the crimes of the SED and the MfS, as he has done in several books. Having spent decades poring through them, his knowledge of Stasi files – grasping not just their arcane code-speak but what certain files do not reveal – is unsurpassed. Knabe is precisely the expert to provide a balanced, learned assessment of what Merkel’s relationship with the Stasi might have been. He did so in a 2019 deep-dive analysis into IM Erika mythology that remains the last word on this controversial topic, barring the unexpected discovery of waylaid MfS files that shed light on the Merkel case.
Knabe’s assessment is highly detailed but can be summarized. He dismisses Internet ramblings about Merkel’s alleged MfS career as nonsense, including obvious fabrications of photos and whatnot, while tracking down the origins of the specific IM Erika allegation. Curiously, Knabe can’t place the IM Erika claim before 2000, and it seems wholly fictional in origin. No Stasi files which survive mention any IM Erika that could be Merkel.
The problem, of course, is that the Stasi files are incomplete. The MfS destroyed certain files relating to high-value agents, “to protect sources,” as the regime collapsed. The Stasi file on IM Czerny, Merkel’s mentor de Maizière, counted among them. It’s gone. That said, based on what MfS files survive and can be accessed, Knabe comes to tentative conclusions.
First, there are Stasi files that mention Merkel, yet they are not available to the public. Per German law, this implies that Merkel wasn’t an informant, rather a Stasi target, perhaps only indirectly. Knabe also observes that, in addition to the Stasi files known to have been destroyed as the DDR collapsed, the MfS shredded 15,000 bags of secret files, most of which have never been reconstructed. Any Stasi file on Merkel could possibly be hiding there. Besides, the former chancellor herself hasn’t been forthcoming. Per Knabe:
[Merkel] was also allowed to travel to the Federal Republic [of Germany] twice. The MfS usually kept meticulous records of such events. The problem is that if you want to see these documents, Merkel has to agree to them, which she has refused to do on several occasions. Since there is no law that forces chancellors to disclose Stasi papers about them, the Merkel file remains a black box.
Knabe demolishes myriad myths about Merkel’s purported relationship with the Stasi, including fact-free allegations that she assisted the MfS with their surveillance of dissidents. Further, the fact that Merkel was surrounded by Stasi informants, particularly around 1990, in no way proves that she was one too. Knabe observes that Merkel’s multiple trips outside the DDR, including to West Germany, would have required Stasi approval – as a scientist, Merkel worked in a position deemed sensitive to the state – but there’s not much in the available MfS files about all that. Again, it’s difficult to assess what may be in Stasi files which haven’t been released to the public. He concludes that Merkel as a student was more active in the party’s FDJ youth wing than she later admitted, so much so that it was slowing down her studies, yet this relationship provides no clues about any possible Stasi connections. Knabe implies that Merkel has been economical with the truth regarding her support for the SED during her scientific career. However, since we can’t know what’s in Stasi files the public hasn’t seen, and perhaps were destroyed decades ago, this case must remain officially unresolved. Knabe sums up the case of IM Erika thus:
It is not yet possible to say whether such a [MfS] file exists on Angela Merkel. The Stasi Records Authority has not released any corresponding documents. This could be because the Stasi did not create a formal IM file, contrary to regulations. Or the file was destroyed or it only contains information about her and not from her. Since the Stasi Records Act does not allow even the highest state offices to force information about the file situation, it is up to Merkel alone to create transparency on this point.
To date, Merkel has not done so. This inevitably raises questions. But what if the IM Erika myth was a ruse anyway, a distraction from the real story? A few years ago, American Boomers with computers overnight grew obsessed with the lurid QAnon online fantasy, the bizarre notion that murderous pedophile rings had burrowed deep into our politics and our elites. Such sordid claims were laughable on their face, a hodgepodge of lies, half-truths, and fabrications – but the mysterious case of Jeffrey Epstein revealed that VIP pedophile rings in fact do exist. What if QAnon and similar online fantasies proliferate by design, to avert eyes away from unpleasant real stories?
What if Merkel’s secret life was never about the Stasi at all? Some senior German intelligence officials, including friends of mine, grew to possess grave doubts about Merkel during her chancellorship. During the 2015 migration crisis, Merkel’s office refused to accept intelligence assessments indicating that among the migrants were criminals and terrorists, constituting a threat to Germany. That wasn’t what the chancellor wanted to hear, thus solid intelligence was suppressed. Other German spies were troubled by Merkel’s persistent pattern of viewing Putin and his regime through unduly rosy lenses even when intelligence from German and NATO sources indicated that Moscow couldn’t be trusted to act in good faith. One senior German intelligence official became so alienated from Merkel that he dropped unsubtle hints to German journalists that the chancellor was compromised by Moscow.
Nobody took the bait. The notion was too “conspiratorial” and German journalists are even more risk-averse than ours regarding such inquiries. However, this notion is taken seriously in Western counterintelligence circles, particularly among graybeards who remember the KGB. In this version of events, the IM Erika myth is a distraction: an overstatement of events and possibly a complete falsehood, designed to deter investigation of Merkel’s real ties to Moscow.
We know that Merkel visited the USSR on multiple occasions, including a 1974 physics exchange to Moscow and Leningrad, in addition to a stint perfecting her Russian in Donetsk (in today’s Russian-occupied southeast Ukraine), plus shorter sojourns into the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She also enjoyed an extended research stay in Prague.
Although the KGB considered East Bloc spy services like the Stasi to be their junior partners, Soviet intelligence regularly recruited citizens of those countries to spy for them. The KGB during the later Cold War ran what it termed PROGRESS operations against Eastern Europe, mainly to assess dissent against Communism. Some of these agents were declared to partner services like the Stasi, but many were not. If Merkel was approached by the KGB to assess her willingness to collaborate with Moscow, the MfS might never have been informed.
Even if Merkel didn’t accept the KGB’s offer to collaborate, just as she claims she rejected the MfS pitch in 1978, the mere fact that there’s a secret file on her in Moscow lurking in a spy archive somewhere would give Germany’s chancellor something to fret about. Here the strained personal relationship between Merkel and Putin offers tantalizing hints. The Kremlin strongman delighted in making Merkel appear uncomfortable before the cameras. In an infamous 2007 incident in Russia, Putin brought his big Labrador Retriever to a meeting with the German chancellor, who is terrified of dogs. Merkel appeared visibly frightened and intimidated while Putin smirked. Years later, Putin claimed he didn’t mean to terrify the German leader, it was a misunderstanding.
But was it? Putin is a Chekist to his core, an expert in deception and manipulation. He served in East Germany from 1985 to 1990, working for the KGB. Watching the DDR collapse left an indelible impression on then-Major Putin. During his tour in Dresden, part of Putin’s job was liaison with the Stasi. Although it’s unlikely that Putin would have enjoyed direct knowledge of any KGB relationship with Merkel, it’s highly likely that he would have heard about it in later years, as Merkel rose to the top of German politics. Chekists, like spooks everywhere, like to share spy stories.
Here this discussion becomes purely speculative. However, it’s been the subject of numerous late-night talks among counterintelligence professionals in several countries over the last two decades, since Angela Merkel took power in Berlin, sending Germany down the road to decline and deterioration. A former KGB senior officer I’ve known for many years, a man who worked against the West for decades, suggested to me some years ago that his former service was the real mystery behind Merkel’s secret biography. Perhaps that’s true. Maybe some spy archive will reveal such unpleasant secrets one day. Until then, we can be certain only that the German media will avoid asking probing questions about Angela Merkel’s true biography.