Wolf Markus - Man Without A Face: the Autobiography Of Communisms Greatest Spymaster

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Table of Contents

For Andrea

Without a maximum of knowledge, you are unable
To put spies successfully in place.
Without humanity and justice you are unable
To send scouts ahead.
Without sure instincts and a penetrating mind you are unable
To judge the authenticity of a report.
Sensitivity! Sensitivity!

Sun-tzu, Chinese general, fourth century B.C.
The Art of War

Introduction

For thirty-four years I served as chief of the foreign intelligence service of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. As even my bitter foes would acknowledge, it was probably the most efficient and effective such service on the European continent. We gathered many of the strategic and technical secrets of the mighty armies arrayed against us and passed them via Soviet intelligence to the command centers of the Warsaw Pact in Moscow. It was widely believed that I knew more about the secrets of the Federal Republic of Germany than the chancellor in Bonn himself. Indeed, we placed agents in the private office of two chancellors, among the thousand or so we had infiltrated into all sectors of West German political life, business, and other areas of society. Many of these agents were West Germans who served us purely out of conviction.

I saw my personal and professional life as one long arc that began with what was a grand goal by any objective standard. We East German Socialists tried to create a new kind of society that would never repeat the German crimes of the past. Most of all, we were determined that war should never again originate on German soil.

Our sins and our mistakes were those of every other intelligence agency. If we had shortcomings, and we certainly did, they were those of too much professionalism untempered by the raw edge of ordinary life. Like most Germans, we were disciplined to a fault. Our methods worked so well that we unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen, Willy Brandt. The integration of the foreign intelligence service into the Ministry of State Security meant that the service and I were charged with responsibility for both internal repression in the German Democratic Republic and cooperation with international terrorists.

It is not easy to tell the story of this intelligence war from what was our side of the vanished Iron Curtain so that it will be understood by those who have spent their lives on the other. In recounting my story of a unique battle in the Cold War, I seek no pardon as a representative of the losers. Our side fought against the revival of fascism. We fought for a combination of socialism and freedom, a noble objective that failed utterly but which I still believe is possible. I hold to my beliefs, although they have been tempered now by time and experience. But I am no defector, and this memoir is not a confessional bid for redemption.

From the time I took over East German foreign intelligence in the 1950s until my photograph was surreptitiously snapped in 1979 and identified by a defector, the West had no idea what I looked like. They called me the man without a face, a nickname that almost makes our espionage activities and the intelligence war between the East and West sound romantic. It was not. People suffered. Life was hard. Often no quarter was asked or given in the war between the two ideologies that dominated the second half of our century and paradoxically gave Europe its longest era of peace since the fall of the Roman Empire. Crimes were committed by both sides in the global struggle. Like most people in this world, I feel remorse.

In this memoir I have attempted to recount from my side the facts in full as I know them. Readers, reviewers, and historical specialists may examine them, credit them, and challenge them. But I reject the accusations of some of my countrymen that I have no right to recount and examine in detail the successes and failures of my career. In Germany there has been an attempt, through the courts and elsewhere, at a settling of accounts to ensure that only one version of history prevails. I seek neither moral justification nor forgiveness, but after a great struggle it is time for both sides to take stock.

Any history worthy of the name cannot be written only by the winners.

Foreword

By Craig R. Whitney

When a country is its own worst enemy, having the worlds best foreign spy service cant help, as the leaders of East Germany discovered when that Communist country collapsed like a house of cards in 1989.

The irony does not escape Markus Wolf, the man who built the East German espionage agency and led it for thirty-four remarkably successful years. East Germany needed spies, its insecure Communist leaders thought in the early days of the Cold War, because West German economic superiority, coupled with NATO military might, threatened to overwhelm it. But despite 4,000 espionage agents and 109,000 secret police informers in the huge State Security Service, which had one informant for every 150 East German citizens, the Communists did not recognize until too late that it was their own internal flaws, the fatal fault lines of any system built on repression and coercion, that would bring them down.

For personal reasons, Wolf retired at his own request in 1986 and moved to a sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Spree River in the center of what used to be East Berlin. It was a choice location in the Communist scheme of things, in a neighborhood restored by the regime to recall the atmosphere of prewar Berlin; cobbled pedestrian streets and craftsmens shops tucked into buildings whose bright pastel colors were meant to evoke an eighteenth-century past. After the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, tabloid newspapers called Wolfs apartment a luxury penthouse, typical of what the masters of the State Security Servicethe dreaded Stasi, as Germans called itallowed themselves but denied all ordinary East Germans. The descriptions were always overdrawn.

There are ninety-nine steps to the sixth floor and the building has no elevator. Even in his mid-seventies, Wolf is still fit enough to negotiate the stairs. In the dingy entryway, someone has scrawled Stasi pig on Wolfs aluminum mailbox, an act that would have meant immediate imprisonment in the Communist days. A few blocks away his son from a previous marriage now earns pocket money in a pizzeria under the railroad tracks of the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn station, the primary border crossing for visitors between east and west used during the Cold War days. Wolf is a man who has fallen a long way.

Unlike some of his Stasi colleagues, Wolf never saw the intelligence business as a way to enrich himself. Wolf is a compelling presence, well over six feet tall, trim and gray-haired with an interesting, elongated face, penetrating brown eyes, and the long-fingered, delicate hands of an intellectual. His German is elegant and expressive. He chats about Goethe and Brecht or Tolstoy and Mayakovski with equal ease, and he has a sense of humor. To while away the time during a brief forced exile (his second) to Moscow after German unification in 1990, he put together a book called Secrets of Russian Cooking (Geheimnisse der russischen Kche), a charming mix of recipes for beef Stroganoff, blini, and piroshki with cartoons and clever anecdotes from the spy business.

But seeing him today, one cant help but wonder what Wolf would have been as a West German: a general, perhaps, or foreign minister, or the head of some great German enterprise. He would have been successful, no doubt, prosperous and proud, perhaps with a few more pounds around his middle and a Mercedes in his driveway. But instead he lives in the petit bourgeois way of East Germanys Communist leadership, a collection of aging mediocrities to whom he feels loyalty but also intellectual superiority. In one of the harshest and most repressive political environments in Europe, he succeeded and survived by his wits, using his education and his charm to persuade Westerners to betray their own country for the Communist cause. Given how pitiful that cause was in East Germany, the real question is how so brilliant and intelligent a man could squander such great gifts on so wretched a system.

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