Markus Wolf - Spymaster
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Our culture has been fascinated by spies, both real and imagined, for as long as I remember. Even today the cultural phenomenon continues to spawn offshoots such as the popular music genre of “Spy Music.”
Yesterday, November 9 2006, Markus Wolf, an example of the real-deal, passed away in Berlin Germany.
Born in 1923, son of a father who was a member of Germany’s Communist Party and of Jewish descent, Wolf and his family were exiled to France in 1933 and moved to Russia the following year. He returned to Germany in 1943 with a group of journalists covering the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
After a short stint as a counselor at East Germany’s embassy, Wolf joined East Germany’s newly formed foreign intelligence service, Stasi, in 1951. He became its leader the following year, and stayed in the job until his retirement in 1986.
Known as the man without a face for his ability to avoid photographers, Markus Wolf achieved great success in inserting his spies in the governmental, political and business circles of West Germany. His placement of Günter Guillaume as a top aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt led to Brandt’s fall in 1974.
In his 1997 book “Memoirs of a Spymaster,” Wolf wrote that, “if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.” He used Romeo agents to steal secrets from government secretaries with lonesome love lives.
A supporter of the Glasnost and Perestroika policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Markus Wolf fled East Germany just before the reunification of Germany but soon returned when he was denied political asylum in both Russia and Austria. In 1993 he was convicted of treason and sentenced to six years imprisonment though his conviction was later repealed. In 1997 he was convicted of unlawful detention, coercion, and bodily harm, and was given a suspended sentence of two years imprisonment.
It is believed by many that John le Carré’s spymaster Karla, who appears in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People,” is modeled on Wolf.
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