Berlin
One of Germany’s top media executives has been implicated as a former Stasi spy. Bernd Runge, a vice president of publishing giant Condé Nast, was named Germany’s Media Man of 2003. But according to newly declassified files, he became an informer for the East German secret police, the Stasi, while studying in Moscow in 1981, and was paid to report on friends and associates until the fall of the Berlin Wall. One subject was his own sister, who left East Germany and married a West German in 1989. Runge has refused to comment, but Condé Nast boss Jonathan Newhouse has expressed “complete confidence” in him.
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