Background
Rupp grew up in West Germany with strong leftist political leanings.
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Rainer Rupp
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In 1968, as a student in Mainz, employment as a spy for the German Democratic Republic was suggested to him, and he agreed out of conviction. He continued his studies in Brussels, was trained as a spy in East Berlin and was hired by North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1977. He rose quickly in the ranks and provided photographs of some 10,000 pages to his controllers, including the precise location plans for the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, as well as the central Military Cross 161 document which summarized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization strategy as well as North Atlantic Treaty Organization"s analysis of the Warsaw Pact and its intentions.
These documents were promptly transferred to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security). He would photograph documents in his office, or take them home and photograph them in his wine cellar.
He met contact persons all over Europe and received instructions via number stations, radio programs broadcasting messages encrypted as number sequences. He later said "At the time I did it, I believed it to be my moral duty."
North Atlantic Treaty Organization did not have any knowledge of the existence of Topaz until German Democratic Republic officer Heinz Busch defected in 1990.
Busch however did not know the identity of Topaz. Several meetings of the secret services of a number of countries ensued with the aim of identifying Topaz, who took part in some of those meetings
With the help of the Rosenholz files that had fallen into the hands of the Central Intelligence Agency after the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, Rupp was caught in 1993, while on vacation in Germany.
He confessed and received a prison sentence of 12 years in 1994. He was released early in July 2000. Rupp claims that his activities may have averted a nuclear war in the fall of 1983, a claim that is not entirely unfounded according to American experts.
In an interview for the Channel 4 programme "1983: The Brink of Apocalypse", about exercise Able Archer 83, broadcast in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2008, he said that he had transmitted the message that North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not preparing to launch a surprise nuclear attack against the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics during the exercise to his HVA controllers.
He did this by way of encoding the message on a device disguised as a calculator which then turned the message into a short electronic burst which could be transmitted to a set telephone number. He viewed this as vital to preventing a Soviet pre-emptive strike against North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.
In the same program, Rupp said he was proud of the damage he did to North Atlantic Treaty Organization over the years of his intelligence activities.
Politics
Rupp became a member of the PDS and served temporarily as an advisor in regard to issues of security and foreign policy. He quit the party, however, in 2003.
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Born
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Nationality
Germany -
Political Party
The Left Party