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:
“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)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)