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confessed to espionage, the only offence covered by the amnesty. Paradoxically, confessing to any lesser offence could have resulted in a severer penalty.

Both were interrogated regularly and at length by the authorities. By early 1989 the Germans felt that they had enough evidence to support a case against the other members of the Soviet hacker gang. On 2 March 1989 eighteen people were interrogated and eight arrested. The latter included Hess, Pengo and Koch, as well as Dirk Brescinsky and Peter Kahl. The others were local hackers caught up in the wide-ranging investigation. All the hackers were released after a few days; Kahl and Brescinsky were dispatched to a high security prison in Karlsruhe.

Just two months after his arrest Karl Koch would be found dead, his burned body lying in a wood on the outskirts of Hannover.

In January 1990 Marcus Hess, Dirk Brescinsky and Peter Kahl stood trial in Celle, in northern Germany. Clifford Stoll and Pengo were witnesses for the prosecution. The problem facing the court was establishing proof that anything of value had been sold to the KGB. That was compounded by the fact that the German police had neglected to apply for a judge's consent for the wire-tapping of Hess. None of the material they had recorded 'just in case' could be admitted in court.

Without concrete proof that espionage on any significant scale had actually occurred, the sentences were light. Hess received twenty months plus a fine of DM10,000, Brescinsky fourteen months and DM5,000 and Kahl two years and DM3,000. All the jail sentences were suspended and substituted by probation.

Steffen Wernery is now thirty, an intense, outspoken man. He is calm about the man whose activities caused him to spend sixty-six days in a French prison. His ire is reserved for the French authorities, who he says have 'no regard for people's rights'. His time in jail, he says, cost him DM100,000 in lost income and legal fees – roughly what the Soviet hacker gang earned in total from the KGB. But he doesn't blame Koch, he says. And he doesn't believe he committed suicide either:

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