Britain won't give Germany Stasi piles.

• Position: GOVERNMENT RECORDS

Britain is refusing to return to Germany a collection of Stasi files that reveal the names of British spies who worked for the East German secret intelligence agency during the Cold War.

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The records are part of a collection of mysterious microfilm images, known as the Rosenholz (Rosewood) records, which contain 280,000 files, including basic information on employees of the foreign intelligence arm of the former GDR, according to The Guardian.

According to The Guardian, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) obtained the records shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. American agents analyzed the data and then passed relevant parts on to countries in which the Stasi were active. The CIA gave a group of files relating to Stasi activity in the United Kingdom to MI5 in the 1990s.

Now, Germany wants the files back so they can be made available, unredacted, to scholars and historians. If this happens, the names of British Stasi sympathizers and spies could be revealed for the first time, The Guardian said.

Today, Germany has only these sections of the Rosenholz disks pertaining to activity in former West Germany. The governments of...