Career
He was employed by the Stasi to make contacts among West German lawyers, which would gradually make him a broker for the spy swaps and prisoner exchanges which would make him famous in East Germany. His first swap negotiation was the trading of Francis Gary Powers and Frederic Pryor for Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher (Rudolf Abel). He also negotiated the exchange of Günter Guillaume in 1981, for captured Western agents. Overall, Vogel brokered the exchange of more than 150 spies and the exchange of Anatoly Shcharansky for Karl Koecher and his wife in 1986. He helped to broker the transfer of more than 34,000 East German political prisoners and 215,000 ordinary citizens to the West, beginning in 1964.
Read more about this topic: Wolfgang Vogel
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
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“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)