for senior members of the country's ruling party living in the prestigious Waldsiedlung "secure housing zone", just outside Berlin. She got to know Asbeck better: he changed Felgner's life dramatically. Asbeck was a worldly man with a special proposal. "He needed a female partner to provide representation services and to entertain Asimex business associates and others to meals. She must always be available for him, whenever he needed her." Records indicate that Uta Felgner did not need to be asked twice: she became his mistress. Some years later, in 1981, Günther Asbeck turned up in the west. He provided the West German intelligence services with descriptions of around 100 top officials in East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party, its Ministry for State Security and its "front companies". His information included compromising details on these individuals which, he said, they had confided to his "business lady". Later, in a letter intercepted by the East German Ministry for State Security, it was found that Felgner herself had written that in the course of her work for Asbeck she had "gotten hold of [information on] the corruption of ministers, secretaries of state and senior officials". Felgner knew her knowledge had a value. Months before her backer, Asbeck, fled to the west she had confided information to the Ministry for State Security "in the hope of obtaining material advantages", in the bureaucratic language of the Stasi record. Asbeck himself was surely unaware of her approach to the Stasi. In a country where the waiting list for citizens applying to purchase a Trabant was reckoned in years, he was providing Felgner with the use of a luxury car and other accoutrements of a western life-style to which few others, outside the political establishment, could aspire. As the senior Stasi officer handling Felgner's case noted, "she said Asbeck would have dropped her immediately if he had been informed of her co-operation with the Ministry for State Security". Nearly thirty years later the journalists investigating her past asked Felgner about all this, but she "no longer had a precise recollection of her activities back then" ("... an die Anfangszeit ihrer Tätigkeit keine genaue Erinnerung mehr"). Stasi The files confirm that on 1 August 1980 Uta Felgner, apparently without any invitation or pressure to do so, volunteered to provide information to the Ministry for State Security. She offered information about western businessmen. The files show that the Stasi