Word: wolfed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. Markus Wolf, 83, suave spymaster known as the "man without a face" for his ability to elude photographers during most of his 34-year reign over the 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...
...central front in the Cold War, traumatized by Naziism and defeat, with plenty of families and loyalties divided between East and West, Germany was a target-rich environment for espionage. Wolf's foreign intelligence section of the Stasi (he claimed not to be involved in its pervasive organs of domestic repression, though critics doubted this) ran as many as 4,000 agents at a time. They penetrated the top ranks of business, government, parliament, the military and the intelligence services in West Germany and beyond. Wolf developed a particularly effective line in "Romeo" spies, handsome men who would befriend lonely...
...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...
...East Germany disintegrated, Wolf called for reforms, but finally sought asylum in the Soviet Union. He claimed to have turned down a CIA offer for a lifetime of ease in the U.S. if he would spill his secrets. He later returned to Germany and was sentenced to six years in prison for treason, but the conviction was overturned on the grounds that East Germany had been a sovereign state for which he had been entitled to spy. He was later convicted on kidnapping-related charges, but received a suspended sentence. That left him free to reinvent himself, which...