Markus Wolf, 83, Elusive East German Spymaster

Markus Wolf, the “man without a face” who outwitted the West as Communist East Germany’s long-serving spymaster, died yesterday in Berlin. He was 83; no cause of death was announced.Wolf, who said he spurned a CIA offer for a safe new life in California after the Cold War, managed to steal NATO secrets for the Soviet bloc that could have been decisive if war had broken out in Europe.He planted some 4,000 agents in the West, most famously placing Guenter Guillaume as a top aide to a West German chancellor, Willy Brandt. The agent’s unmasking forced Brandt to resign in 1974.Born in Germany in 1923, Wolf and his father a Jewish Communist playwright, fled to the Soviet Union the following year. He studied aeronautical engineering in Moscow before being sent for political training at a Comintern, school. He worked at German People’s Radio in Moscow from 1943 to 1945, when he returned to Germany.After reporting from the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders, Wolf joined the new Communist state’s embryonic intelligence service in 1951, a division of Stasi, the secret state police.Western agencies didn’t know what the East German spy chief looked like until 1978, when he was photographed during a visit to Sweden.Wolf said in his memoirs that “if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.”The Stasi, which at home enlisted spouses to spy on their partners, sent seductive agents to the West to steal secrets from government secretaries.Wolf said his first “Romeo,” an engineering student code-named Felix, started work in 1952 and operated as a traveling shampoo salesman.He struck up a friendship at a Bonn bus stop with a secretary in West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s office; the relationship lasted for several years until the agent’s cover was blown.Wolf detailed a string of such sagas in his 1997 book “Memoirs of a Spymaster.” In the case of Brandt, Guenter Guillaume became the Chancellor’s chief procurer of women, Wolf claimed. Thanks to Guillaume, Moscow kept close tabs on a rift in NATO during the early 1970s.Wolf voiced regret about his role in bringing down Brandt, the initiator of “Ostpolitik,” or overtures to the Eastern bloc, describing it as “equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal.”Wolf emerged as a supporter of the Glasnost and Perestroika policies of Mikhail Gorbachev.In May 1990, with German reunification approaching, Wolf said he was offered a job working for the CIA, with perks including “a seven-figure sum,” a new identity and a house in California. Wolf said he turned down the offer out of loyalty to his ex-agents, even though it would have put him out of reach of German authoritiesLater in 1990, Wolf fled to Moscow. He eventually surrendered to German authorities and was convicted of treason, but his convictions were overturned on the basis that he had been acting on behalf of East Germany.

Markus Wolf, 83, Elusive East German Spymaster

Markus Wolf, 83, Elusive East German Spymaster

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