6 The Rise and Fall of a Socialist Future: Ambivalent Encounters Between Zanzibar and East Germany in the Cold War

Abstract

In many ways we were naïve about the effects of our intervention in Third World countries. Our intelligence-gathering skills, honed by the experience of the Second World War and the Cold War,were transferred through our well-trained liaison officers and specialists. Prompt-ed by their diligence, the security service in Zanzibar reached ridiculous dimensions. Relative to the size of the population, it was soon far bigger than our own, and it rapidly acquired a dynamic of its own over which we had no more influence.³ ⁶