James W. Hall

James W. Hall (* approx. 1959) is a former US Army Sergeant who sold military secrets to the GDR and the Soviet Union in the 1980s .

Hall graduated from Sharon Springs , New York State High School in 1975 and joined the U.S. Army in September 1976. From 1982 to 1985 he worked in the central station Teufelsberg of the telecommunications electronic reconnaissance of the USA against the GDR in West Berlin .

From the end of 1982 Hall (code name Paul ) handed over top secret documents to the GDR spy Hüseyin Yıldırım for a fee . Later he had direct contact with Soviet agents. From 1985 to 1987 Hall was stationed at an office near Frankfurt, where intercepted messages were evaluated. There he also passed on secret documents. In May 1987 he returned to the USA for further training.

Hall was betrayed for money by a defector from the GDR secret service and arrested in the USA on December 20, 1988. Hall allegedly received a total of USD 300,000 for 30 to 60 deliveries from the secret services of the GDR and USSR over six years . He was sentenced on July 20, 1989 to 40 years imprisonment and a $ 50,000 fine. In September 2011 he was released from Fort Leavenworth Military Prison .

Almost all of it for the Stasi copied NSA -Proceedings (a total of 13,088 pages) were on 24 July 1992 on the orders of the Interior Ministry of the Stasi documentation authorities returned to the US government - without the consent of the Parliamentary Control Panel as the Stasi documentation law in the event of such a release without replacement. These files included the National SIGINT Requirements List (NSRL), a 4,000-page list of the NSA's espionage targets. This NSA order list comprised around 30,000 individual items. Of these, 50 pages were "orders" related to France and 35 pages to Germany. This version of the NSRL was later compared with the list of selectors requested by the NSA committee of inquiry .

literature

• Kristie Macrakis : The Stasi Secrets. Munich: Herbig, 2009, ISBN 978-3-7766-2592-9 .
• Friedrich W. Schlomann: The moles. Universitasverlag, Tübingen 1993, ISBN 3-800-41285-3

Web links

• Stephen Engelberg: US soldier crippled spy post set up in Berlin. In: New York Times, May 7, 1989

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Karin Assmann: Disappeared ex-spy James Hall. Hunt for the "Stasi Superstar" . In: Spiegel Online. Retrieved January 20, 2014.
2. ^ Georg Mascolo: Destruction of traces in office in Der Spiegel , 30/1999
3. ↑ Detlef Borchers: NSA spying: The GDR knew about it early on . Heise Online News. May 16, 2014. Retrieved May 27, 2015.
4. ↑ Detlef Borchers: Surveillance after Snowden: Stasi and NSA not in one pot . Heise Online News. May 27, 2015. Retrieved May 27, 2015.