The manipulative use of information by secret services was a spread phenomenon during the Cold War. By the 1950’s the Soviet secret police had developed a department for this field of work: Service “A” of the First Chief Department of the KGB, in charge of “active measures”. During the following decades the KGB encouraged his “fraternal organs” to carry out similar operations. Nonetheless, up until today little is known about this aspect of Socialist intelligence work.

Did agents pass on their own spying activities to the children? Were agents supposed to have offspring for the purpose of intelligence work, to this way be supplied with well-trained intelligence sources? Can we identify factors with the children of agents suggesting that there were attempts to hire them? The here presented article pursues these questions by five steps and comes to the conclusion: children of agents who later became agents themselves are an exception. In most cases agent-parents did not want to expose their children to the thus connected risks. In case of those agents who passed on their spying activities to family members there were mostly certain factors working in favour of such behaviour.

The intelligence activities in the Nordic countries of Norway, Denmark and Sweden have for a number of years evaded the attention of scholars. The Nordic Area offers an interesting case since the countries, despite their relative small size, did play a role for the intelligence services of the socialist countries. The operative challenges for the foreign intelligence agencies of these ountries were immense; not only did they have to spend considerable resources building professional intelligence organizations at home, they also needed to acquire linguistic and cultural knowledge enabling them to establish networks in Scandinavia.

According to the depiction by Klaus Bästlein, before 1945 Stasi victim Walter Linse had been a follower of the NS regime and an anti-Semite who, in his function as a consultant of the IHK Chemnitz, considerably drove on the “Aryanisation” of the economy and in this context additionally bullied the expropriated Jewish business people. However, there is proof neither that Linse had anti-Semitic ideas nor that he treated victims of “Aryanisation” unfairly. He was no opponent of the regime nor even a resistance fighter, but he had a distanced attitude to the NS system.

In addition to repression and co-optation, authoritarian regimes use redistributive and legitimizing strategies in order to secure heir survival. In this article we conceptualize and discuss different opportunities of legitimation through policy-making that can be sed in autocracies. We exemplify this concept by outlining autocractic legitimation strategies in innovation policy. Legitimation through policy-making is a double-edged sword, as it includes both potentials and risks for legitimation.