Cold War espionage added $4.6 billion to East Germany’s economy

No matter what side you were on, espionage was a cornerstone of Cold War political life. But it was also big business. Espionage was so integral to East Germany that on the eve of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, spying on the West was juicing the nation’s economy by nearly 7.5 percent. In the manufacturing sector, industrial espionage boosted value by over 22 percent in 1988 alone—roughly $4.6 billion in 2020 prices.These and other insights are analyzed in a recent study overseen b