Spartan Profiles: Kristie Macrackis
SPY TECHNOLOGY
Students at MSU’s Lyman Briggs School of Science have an interesting option. “The Technology of Bond, James Bond,” as the seminar is titled, fills up every semester. It has intrigued local media. The Chronicle of Higher Education and the History Channel have done stories on the course’s creator, Kristie Macrakis, associate professor of the history of science and author of the upcoming Inside the Stasi’s Covert World of Technology.
Will students learn about exploding pens or Aston Martins with ejector seats? “Real espionage is not anything like the Bond movies,” says Macrakis. “The Ian Fleming novels are more realistic, but the movies are fanciful. I mean, Q always equips Bond with gadgets that turn out to be exactly what he needs to get out of trouble.” In real life, says Kristie, spies use more mundane things, like the Minox camera, often dubbed “the workhorse of the Cold War.”
A native of Boston, Kristie got interested in espionage while a graduate student at Harvard, where her dissertation research on science in Nazi Germany took her to East and West Berlin. “You can’t live in Berlin and not meet spies,” she says, noting that among others she met Adolf-Henning Frucht, a famous spy who worked for the CIA and was caught by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, and imprisoned 10 years. “He was a real character,” she recalls.
In 1990, when she returned to Berlin after the wall fell, she realized how central science and technology—and espionage—were to socialist ideology. “I was hooked,” she says. “I devoured every single book on the topic.”
Kristie says the East Germans were really good at the recruitment and handling of spies, using mainly ideology to recruit spies. U.S. intelligence tends to rely on money for recruitment and technology for information gathering. She believes we could use more of human intelligence—James Bond without the gadgets. “That,” she notes, “will be the subject of my next book.”