waited a couple of months, but in October the first contact meeting took place, and in April 1981 arrangements were concluded. This version of events was confirmed five years later when Felgner found herself arrested and protested, "After all, I offered my services to the Stasi on my own initiative". Looking back many years later she was vague on most of the details, but she did remember "5593392", the telephone number she was to use to report information to her Stasi handlers. She remembered their names: Pohl and Bethke. And she remembered her own IM cover name: "Schmidt". The files are more forthcoming. She established contact with influential men using what the Stasi jargon described as "specifically womanly methods" (mit "frauenspezifischen Methoden"). A co-worker from those times later recalled: "In the international hotels like the "Metropol" and the "Palace" in Berlin, or during the Leipzig Trade Fair, we picked out men from the west and went to bed with them. And it sometimes got pretty wild at Uta's house in Berlin-Kaulsdorf. That way we got to lead interesting lives and were able to escape the every day". In October 1981 Uta Felgner married for the fourth time. The files record that she was outraged when she discovered that her new husband was also on the Stasi payroll. His role involved infiltrating smuggling operations under a false identity. After she was arrested in 1986 she complained that her husband had "used her to make contacts during so-called holiday trips". Quizzed on this statement decades later she explained that after she was arrested she had been placed under such pressure - even being placed in a cell with two child murderers - that she had signed whatever statements had been presented to her in the Stasi jail. Escape attempt and aftermath Life again changed abruptly in 1986, shortly after her 35th birthday. Recently divorced for the fourth time, Felgner was introduced to the inside of a Stasi jail as an inmate of the Hohenschönhausen detention and interrogation centre. She had disappointed and let down her Stasi backers after developing a powerful urge to move across to West Germany. The files disclose that she applied to transfer and work as a "double agent". The Stasi reply was a categorical "no". Aside from any other considerations, it is reasonable to suppose that the Stasi, aware of Günther Asbeck's defection to the west, would have