HE WAS known as 'the man with no face', because even those who spent a lifetime tracking his movements were said to have no idea what he truly looked like. But they certainly knew his reputation.

Markus Wolf, who died on Thursday, was a legendary Communist spy chief who masterminded some of the most brilliant and diabolical feats of espionage for well over three decades.

As head of the foreign intelligence arm of the East German secret police - the Stasi - he cut one of the most sinister and shadowy figures of the Cold War, and was said to be running a network of some 4,000 spies.

Indeed, it is often incorrectly asserted that Wolf was the model for John le Carre's fiendish master spy, Karla. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that, as with so many in the secret world, the story of his life is as murky and complex as any spy novel.

Born in Germany in 1923, Wolf 's father was an eminent physician and writer who was not only an ardent Communist, but also had Jewish ancestry.

After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Wolf family emigrated to Moscow to escape persecution, and soon the young Markus was studying at an aeronautical college.

However, the Soviets had already identified the idealistic young exile as a potential agent and persuaded him to work for them in his former homeland.

Under the name 'Michael Storm', Wolf returned to Germany in 1945 at the end of the war, posing as a radio journalist in the Soviet zone of occupation.

Although the job was a cover, Wolf reported on the Nuremberg trials.

There, he set eyes on some of the most evil men of the last century and was astonished by how ordinary they appeared.

'Perhaps I was naeve,' he later wrote, 'but I had seen the photograph of all these Nazi leaders, in all their former pomp and glory. Then, in Nuremberg, I saw normal, simple people sitting in the dock.

They seemed like staff in a railway station or in a post office.' The trial left a huge impression on the 22-year-old. In his final report for the radio station, Wolf hoped for a 'time without war, aggression or crimes against humanity' - a wish all too ironic in the light of his later career in the dreaded Stasi.

In 1949, Wolf was appointed a member of the East German mission in Moscow, where he acted as the press and cultural attache. It was during this time that he was further groomed to become an intelligence officer.

He was clearly well-suited to the task, because by 1953, at the immensely young age of 30, he was appointed head of the innocuously titled 'German Reconnaissance Administration', which was nothing less than the East German equivalent of the CIA or MI6.

A department of the Stasi, the state apparatus that spied upon and brutally tortured its own people, the GRA quickly came under Wolf's leadership, and was shaped it into perhaps the most ruthless and impressive intelligence gathering organisation the world has ever seen.

Wolf was an idealist, and saw his spies as agents of world peace. 'I tried to instil a different motivation,' he said, 'to give them the security and conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful.' Nevertheless, like spy masters the world over, Wolf found that agents were more readily recruited when vast sums of money were flashed in front of them. He was also a pioneer of the classic method of the 'honeytrap' to lure well-placed foreigners into the Stasi's clutches.

What distinguished Wolf was that he was not averse to using 'Romeo' agents to woo women informers. The results of this policy were all too often tragic, as Wolf himself was to admit.

'There were cases of women whose love was abused, who for a certain time procured important documents or information, not knowing who for, or what service they worked for, and for a variety of reasons, were tried and jailed.' Typically, Wolf would not admit that sometimes the results were even more disastrous.

In the late 1950s, Leonore Heinz, the secretary to a West German foreign ministry official, was seduced by one of Wolf's agents, Heinz S'tterlin.

SO SUCCESSFUL was this honeytrap that the couple got married in 1960, and over the next few years Leonore unwittingly passed on secrets to the East via her spyhusband.

However, the couple were arrested in 1967, and when it was revealed to Leonore that S'tterlin had, in fact, married her on orders, she hanged herself in her cell.

Such an occurrence would have been of little consequence to Wolf, who worked closely with some of the world's most despicable terrorists.

He was involved with Carlos the Jackal, the PLO, ETA, the IRA, and even the Red Army Faction that murdered its way through West Germany.

The aim was to create panic and fear in the West - and to that end, the terrorists were thoroughly trained by Wolf 's men at clandestine camps in East Germany, where they were taught the skills of an assassin.

In one exercise, a live sheepdog was used as a dummy passenger in a Mercedes and was riddled with bullets before the car was blown up.

As well as abetting terrorists, Wolf's department became astonishingly adept at industrial espionage and thoroughly penetrated IBM.

In fact, as Wolf was to admit, the East German electronics firm, Robotron, was 'so heavily dependent on surreptitiously acquiring IBM's technological advances that it was an illegal subsidiary of that company'.

However, perhaps Wolf 's greatest success was the agent Günter Guillaume, who was sent to West Germany in 1956 with orders to inveigle himself into the political system.

Guillaume rose through the Social Democratic Party, and by the early 1970s he had become a close aide to the Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was seeking closer ties with the East.

It was an incredible coup the modern-day equivalent of one of Tony Blair's aides reporting to Al Qaeda - 13 although it was not to last.

In the spring of 1973, Guillaume fell under suspicion and was placed under surveillance.

He was arrested a year later and the ensuing scandal, coupled with revelations about the chancellor's penchant for prostitutes, forced Brandt to resign.

Some thought that Wolf had deliberately forced Brandt's downfall, as the Chancellor was becoming too popular spreading the message of democracy in the Communist East.

Wolf denied this, and admitted that the resignation was something of an own goal.

His organisation, he said, 'had unwittingly helped to destroy the career of the most farsighted of modern German statesmen'.

In 1986, Wolf finally resigned, stating that he wanted to become an author. However, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the former Stasi chief began to worry for his future security and he sought refuge in Russia. In October 1990 he pleaded to Gorbachev for sanctuary.

'We were your friends,' he wrote. 'We wear a lot of your decorations on our breasts. We were said to have made a great contribution to your security.

Now, in our hour of need, I assume that you will not deny us your help.'

GORBACHEV refused, and after reunification Wolf was arrested, convicted of treason and sentenced to six years in prison. This was overruled by the German Supreme Court, which judged that Wolf had not committed an act of treachery against the country he was living in at the time the old East Germany.

Nevertheless, he was convicted in 1997 for his involvement in the 1955 kidnapping of a woman who worked for the American mission in Berlin.

The woman had been subjected to severe psychological torture during her kidnapping, and Wolf was given a two-year suspended sentence.

For the rest of his life, Wolf appeared on countless television programmes plugging his books - one of them on his favourite hobby, cooking - and never appeared to show any regret for heading one of the most loathsome organisations of the 20th century.

In fact, he boasted that he had brought peace to the West. 'When it's recognised that this service contributed to securing and protecting peace in Europe for 45 years, then I can perhaps be proud.' But there was to be one last surprise.

What Wolf never realised, during his time at the Stasi, was that the CIA had been able to identify him as early as 1959, when - armed with a detailed description of Wolf's handsome features - an analyst had successfully picked him out from hundreds of photographs taken at the Nuremberg trials.

The 'man with no face' had been no such thing all along.

next >

< previous