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145 pounds. Slowly, he put on weight and spent every moment of his free time working out in hopes that he could pass the physical requirements needed to get out from behind his desk.
    He was rewarded in his fourth year by a transfer to operations and began taking part in the systematic kidnappings of Westerners who traveled to East Germany. Abel would help identify targets and sometimes even lure them into traps. His baby face and slight stature meant he could pass for a young teenage boy. Homosexual businessmen who traveled to the east were easy targets for blackmail. Abel would loiter on the appropriate corner, or park, or bar and wait for a man to come along and make a lewd request. He’d give the proper hand signal and the other members would swoop in, throw the man into the back of a van, then dump him in an interrogation room. The man would then be told he could choose between jail and public humiliation, or he could buy his freedom. Abel recalled, all these years later, that all of them but one chose to buy their freedom. That stubborn son of a bitch was eventually taken to an extremely harsh location where after a month of beatings he was strangled to death by a very sadistic and homophobic Stasi officer.
    Each kidnapping would usually yield several thousand marks. The Stasi had contacts in almost all of the western banks and they would do their homework before they named the price of freedom. His ultimate catch was a West German noble who brought in $500,000. The man was in their custody for less than twenty-four hours. Abel estimated that his unit alone had brought in over five million dollars in a two-and-a-half-year period.
    After that he was promoted to counterintelligence, which gave him reason to travel to West Germany more frequently. He was just getting involved in some serious spycraft when everything fell apart. He’d been warning his superiors for months that the signs were there, but they were too busy shuttling back and forth to Moscow kissing the asses of their KGB bosses. The last thing they wanted to do was tell the autocrats at the KGB that they were losing control of the Soviet Union’s westernmost European satellite. Such news was likely to get them marched out back and shot in the head.
    Abel had studied the economics of East versus West. He knew the numbers manufactured by the governments in East Germany and Russia to be false. As a general rule, he divided them in half in order to recalibrate for exaggeration and deception. The West, however, was a different matter. The evil capitalists had these things called corporations, and these corporations had a fiduciary responsibility to be honest with their shareholders. An amazing amount of data was public information. Every time Abel ran the numbers he came away with the same conclusion. They were getting their asses handed to them by the West, and they were about to collapse under the weight of their lies and economic inefficiencies. The empirical economic signs were right there for anyone who opened their eyes. The data on its own should have been enough, but Abel saw something else that was equally alarming.
    The communist dictators stayed in power by using two tools. The first was intimidation. Through a network of secret police, phone taps, and informants the populace lived under constant fear that if they said anything critical of the government they would be snatched from their beds in the middle of the night and disappear forever. The other tool was not physical in the painful sense, but rather mind-numbing. It was the state-controlled media. The dull thrum of propaganda that George Orwell himself had predicted so eerily in his monumental novel 1984 was churned out day after day on state-run TV and radio and in the newspapers. Abel saw the rise of the information technology age for what it was and knew the German Democratic Republic was about to lose its monopoly on the news and thus on people’s thoughts. A full year before the wall came