Word: germanics
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...foreign-intelligence division of the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police; in Berlin. Rumored to be the model for John le Carré's shadowy Karla (a suggestion the author has denied), Wolf placed his 4,000 spies in such enemy territory as NATO headquarters, cannily converted West German agents to his team, and famously touted the "Romeo method"--the wooing of lonely government secretaries to gain access to confidential files. Among his best-known feats: placing an operative in the inner circle of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who retired in 1974 after the aide's allegiance was revealed...
...Known as "The Man Without A Face" - for many years, Western spy agencies did not even have a photo of him - Wolf was the son of a German Jewish doctor and playwright, a Communist who had to flee Hitler and ended up in Moscow. He attended elite party schools in the Soviet Union, was trained for undercover work, returned to Germany as a journalist covering the Nuremburg trials and joined the East Germany spy service at its inception. In 1952, because his pungent Stalinism convinced Russian leaders of his loyalty, he became its chief - and brilliant...
...line in "Romeo" spies, handsome men who would befriend lonely secretaries working for senior officials and spymasters. Immensely patient, he would carefully help direct his plants to jobs where they could be increasingly valuable. One "Romeo" spy worked her way, after a long career, into the office of the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Wolf mused in retirement that "if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying...
...Wolf also turned many Western German spies into double agents. One, code-named "Topaz," worked for more than two decades in NATO's headquarters. Wolf personally ran the highest-ranking woman in the West German intelligence service, the deputy head of its Soviet bloc division, whose reports were so good they regularly reached the desks of the head of the KGB in Moscow. Even the head of West German counterintelligence defected to Wolf. "As even my bitter foes would acknowledge," he wrote in his interesting but fundamentally unrevealing 1997 memoir The Man Without A Face, his spy agency "was probably...
...Wolf's most famous victory was Gunter Guillaume, a long-time East German agent who feigned escape from the East to the West in 1956, became a successful businessman and politician in Frankfurt, and rose to become a trusted aide of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, in charge of Brandt's schedule and relations with his own party. Brandt was trying to calm the Cold War and reconcile the two Germanys through his "Ostpolitik," which Guillaume's reports confirmed as a genuine shift in policy. To keep Brandt from losing a no-confidence motion, Wolf paid 50,000 marks...