The Washington Post has described it as “one of the greatest coups of Cold War espionage” and among the “CIA's greatest triumphs,” yet the CIA still remains officially silent on how they managed to acquire the Stasi's foreign department (HV A) agent card files after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unlike the miles of files from the repressive, internal-security Stasi apparatus that were secured by the opposition movement, the foreign spy files were legally destroyed, with the sanction of the German government, in early 1990. Intelligence officers were especially loyal to their agents and felt morally obligated to protect the identity of their sources.

One of the most loyal patriots, a tall Saxon with a paunch whose appearance was reminiscent of George Smiley, was Major General Horst Vogel, deputy head of the HV A and longtime leader of the Sector for Science and Technology (SWT). After the fall of the Berlin Wall he described how his staff “destroyed everything” by shredding or fire and how he threw many of his files into a bonfire in his backyard and took the charcoaled paper to the dumpster himself. He even refused to endorse the story circulating in the late 1990s that they handed over the filmed agent card file to the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB): “One doesn't hand over files to strangers.”