Bond - and a long way beyond

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East German secret police used radiation sprays to track dissidents behind the Berlin Wall.

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It sounds like a movie fantasy, but a detailled report has revealed how secret agents "with vibrating armpits" could track their human quarries by following a radioactive trail the target left behind.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, the German Democratic Republic's secret police - the Stasi - secretly dissidents were sprayed with radioactive substances.

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And if they couldn't get surreptitously get close enought to the target, they would spray their cars, documents or paper money.

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Then, with a Geiger counter strapped under their armpits (to conceal the tell-tale bleeping of the machine) they simply followed the radio active trail to keep in touch with their target without even keeping them in sight.

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The discovery was made by Klaus Becker, a leading radiation protection expert. "It is a remarkable story. It's the first well-documented case of such a thing," he told the Magazine New Scientist.

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Becker, who left East Germany in 1951, became head of radiation dosimetry at the J�lich Nuclear Research Establishment in West Germany.

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Large doses of X-rays are thought to be behind the deaths from cancer of a number of prominent dissidents. Sometimes doses were so high that having radio active money in your pocket would have an effect on a man's fertitility tantamount to castration.

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When the secret police uncovered where dissident groups met, they sprayed the floors, so that everyone attending a meeting could be tracked. And they designed an airgun that could fire radio-labelled silver wire into a car tyre from 25 metres away.