Competition can be cutthroat among real estate agents, many of whom tally their sales totals the way a cleanup hitter counts home runs.
The secret police, the Stasi, employed 100,000 agents, many of them ordinary citizens, to spy upon a mind-boggling one-third of the East German population.
She also noted that it relieved a burden from agents, many of whom had been referring contractors and other services on their own for years.
Later, most of the contingent returned to the United States, leaving only 20 agents, many of them deeply disgruntled, cooling their heels at another Aden hotel.
The site says it has identified 4,300 informers and 400 undercover agents, many of them from documents obtained from court files available on the Internet.
In the next month, Mr. Arlacchi hopes to send about 70 drug control agents, many of them Afghan-born agronomists, into the countryside to survey crops.
But just to remove the materials and catalog them took dozens of special agents, many of them outfitted with thousands of dollars worth of protective equipment.
The case has reignited perennial questions about a nationwide network of pension investment brokers, or placement agents — many of them from the world of political operatives.
