Wolf, the systematic spymaster who never came in from the cold

THE timing was ironic on many fronts. He died in his sleep, 17 years to the day after the Berlin Wall came down.

He died in a week when Irish poster sites were dominated by photographs of the new actor to take on the role of a spy named Bond, James Bond.

His death forced writer John le Carré, to deny, yet again, that he had based a key character in his Cold War espionage novels — Karla, the spymaster — on him.

He was a handsome idealist who sent men to their deaths without a qualm, a Jew who rationalised that the anti-Semitism of Stalin’s USSR was immeasurably less than the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany, a lover of Hemingway’s works forced by the system he supported to read them in secret, a brilliant handsome man with consummate self-confidence and no personal vanity whatsoever.

For more than 20 years, he was known to the CIA and other Western counter-espionage outfits as “the man without a face,” because, while they had an acute appreciation of his shadowy influence and power, they never managed to acquire a photograph of him.

Marcus Wolf was communism’s greatest spymaster. His death, much more than the demise of more public figures, marks the end of an era and the passing of an archetype.

Born in a small, largely Catholic village in rural Germany, Wolf was heavily influenced by his father, a doctor whose study of alternative medicines put him way ahead of his time and made him unpopular with his medical peers.

The father, so sexually and productively promiscuous that his son came to regard frequent introductions to new half-sisters and brothers as a normal part of family life, became a communist and wrote a play which infuriated the pre-war Nazi regime, ensuring the Wolf family name went on the list of enemies of the state. They were stripped of citizenship and forced to flee Germany with the assistance of international communism. An uncle was sent to a concentration camp and died there. All of which meant that, by the time he reached his teens, Marcus Wolfe was himself a passionate communist.

Talent-spotted early in his adopted homeland of eastern Germany, he was developed and quickly promoted as his espionage genius emerged. It was a genius rooted in observation of human beings, sensitivity to the acute needs of the emotionally unfulfilled and pure horse-sense appreciation that you don’t have to go to the top in order to find out what’s going on at the top in any political system. Instead of seeking to seduce leaders, managers or key men, Wolf instructed his agents to romance lonely secretaries who had access to their boss’s files, a policy which rarely failed to deliver the goods.

Nor were the bosses whose underlings he singled out necessarily from the political arena. Industrial espionage was vital to the Eastern bloc.

“Computer research was particularly valuable to East Germany, which boasted the top microelectronics company. Robotron,” he observed in his autobiography. “But our research lagged far behind America’s and Japan’s. The only way Robotron could even hope to keep pace was by acquiring Western knowledge and software forbidden to us under the embargo.

“Closely modelled on IBM, Robotron became so heavily dependent on surreptitiously acquiring IBM’s technological advances that it was, in effect, a sort of illegal subsidiary of that company.”

Although the spymaster was clear on the pivotal importance of computer technology to economic development, and adept in the use of clever gadgetry for espionage purposes, he nonetheless had an impregnable conviction that, no matter how advanced the technology available to state or industrial spies, the human factor is key to ultimate success.

“While it is true that in the age of satellites and computer hackers, technological intelligence, which does not come cheap, has to be used, human agents cannot be completely replaced,” he wrote in recent years.

“Technology can only establish the situation of the moment; secret plans, options, and other considerations will remain concealed even from the most sophisticated satellite.”

Under Wolf’s 30-year leadership, the GDR’s Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, built up an infrastructure in the East involving more than 4,000 spies which permeated every aspect of life, brought down Chancellor Willy Brandt, and created a pervasive culture of mistrust and terror.

All of that was destined for complete collapse in the aftermath of Gorbachev’s failed Glasnost, as was Wolf’s life-long anonymity. He was tried for treason, his conviction overturned on the basis that his work had been done in the service of a sovereign state.

In a shamed retirement, clandestine approaches were made to Wolf by the CIA: we’ll get you out of reunified Germany and pay you a lot of dosh to give up the names of former double agents in the West. Thanks, but no thanks was the response. Wolf preferred to stand up for what he still believed in.

“When we were young,” he explained, “it often seemed that the strength of our faith would be enough to transform the world. We failed not because we were too socialist in belief, but because we were not socialist enough in practice. Stalin’s crimes were not the logical outcome of communist theory, but a violation of communism.”

Partly because he needed the money to survive, partly because he wanted to explain how goodwill toward humanity had led him to head the most repressive organisation of its kind, he published an account of his life. Critically well received, it was nonetheless dismissed as an exercise in self-justification.

That dismissal was part of a syndrome which might be called Reactive Righteousness.

When a previously powerful system (such, for example, as the Catholic Church in Ireland) disintegrates and has its misdeeds floridly and repeatedly exposed in media, almost everybody climbs onto the safe moral high ground of extreme condemnation and refusal to hear, understand or gain from any insight offered by present or past adherents of the system. Marcus Wolf, feeling himself to be a victim of this reactive righteousness, called it “Victor’s Deafness.”

He had a point. Black-and-white certitudes mandated by current consensus are just as dangerous as black-and-white certitudes mandated by religious or state dogma. Post-communism, Wolf was still worth listening to.

“There are many of us who cannot accept the idea of being part of a society where the rich are getting richer by the hour while the poor continue to get poorer,” he wrote before his death.

“I am very uneasy at the prospect of a society and civilisation based solely on money. Money can be as powerful as any governmental system but often its effects are less visible without being less brutal. In the Eastern Block, the abuse of power began by manipulating ideals; in capitalist countries, the idea of personal freedom often merely serves as a disguise for business interests. Perhaps this is why, even in the nations that ‘won’ the Cold War, so many citizens are unhappy and cynical about the role of political systems in solving problems.”