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THE ILLUMINATI CONSPIRACY

held during the week after Christmas at the Eidelstedter Burgerhaus on Hamburg’s Elbgaustrasse. The events lasted for three days; press and visitors were welcome, provided they paid the entrance fee.

In 1985 one of the paying visitors was Karl Koch. Steffen remembers seeing him there and being introduced briefly. He is also certain that they met on one other occasion, at a hacker get-together at an exhibition in Munich. Koch was an unmistakable figure: tall, emaciated, invariably spaced out.

For the next three years their lives would criss-cross in a complex dance. If Koch had seen the pattern, he would have understood. It was the Illuminati, faceless, unknown, all-powerful, conspiring to take control of Steffen's life.

Koch’s purpose in visiting the 1985 Chaos congress was to seek out certain information on computer systems and networks. Despite his years of practice, he himself was an indifferent hacker. He had come to realize he was not a born computer wizard; he needed assistance. Also, he was coming under increasing pressure from Kahl to find and copy classified material from computers in the West. Worse, his money was running out just as his dependency on drugs was increasing: from the relatively harmless hashish favoured by many hackers, he had graduated to the more expensive LSD and cocaine.

At first the Soviets had seemed incredibly naïve. Koch was able to pass Kahl public domain software, programs he had simply downloaded for free from electronic bulletin boards. The KGB had accepted the software and Koch had received payment. It seemed all very simple. And he assumed he wasn’t doing anything illegal: public domain software, after all, is available to anyone who wants it.

But then the Soviets became more demanding. The KGB had produced lists of programs it wanted to obtain and sites it wanted cracked. The Soviets also wanted dial-ups, user IDs, passwords and instructions on how to gain system-operator privileges in computer systems. In short, the KGB wanted the know-how to become hackers.

The Soviet secret service’s list of sites included the Pentagon, NORAD, the research laboratories at Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos, Genrad in Dallas and Fermilab in Illinois, MIT, Union Carbide and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was a shopping

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