Spymaster: The Real-Life Karla, His Moles, and the East German Secret Police

In this penetrating look at the life and character of Markus Wolf, the most successful Communist spymaster of the Cold war, the author raises an intriguing question: Did this ruthless and charming man have to pay any price, morally or physically, for forty years as head of the East German Stasi's feared foreign intelligence network?The answer is, not really. As Wolf looks back on his life from his luxury high-rise apartment in East Berlin, he denies any direct responsibility for the human wreckage caused by his service and is unrepentant about his beliefs. In 1995 a high German court seemed to vindicate him, repealing a prison sentence for treason on the grounds that he was only doing his job for the now-vanished East German state.This first biography of Markus Wolf allows readers to judge for themselves, Leslie Colitt, a veteran Financial Times reporter, shows why Wolf was the perfect model for John Le Carre's superspy Karla. He details Wolf's dazzling exploits, such as his recruitment of mole Gunter Guillaume, the ex-Nazi whose penetration of Chancellor Willy Brandt's inner circle caused such a scandal that it toppled Brandt's government.The author portrays Wolf as a charming chameleon, father figure, and ladies' man. His agents were fanatically loyal to him, and Wolf often slipped into other countries to wine and dine them personally. But if necessary, he ruthlessly betrayed them, as well as Western spies and targets, to get the secrets his government demanded.Markus was a teenager when the Nazis rose to power and his family fled Germany for the Soviet Union. There Wolf received his first lessons in clandestine activity from the Comintern. At the end of World War II, he returned to the ruins of Berlin, where he hoped to be part of a new Socialist utopia. Recruited by the Soviet-backed secret police, he quickly moved up the ladder until he had become the most powerful arbiter of secrets in all of Germany.This biography is the first reckoning of Markus Wolf, as well as an absorbing account of the cold war's most chillingly effective spy machine.