THE story of Markus Wolf, East Germany's infamous spy chief, is given added piquancy by the view that he was the model for John Le Carre's fictional superspy, Karla. In this case, truth is much stranger than fiction. Here is an intelligent, charming, cultured man who had little difficulty putting his many talents at the disposal of the warped and mercifully short-lived political entity which was East Germany.
As East Germany failed, Markus Wolf's works prospered. He placed a spy in the West German Chancellor's office. The unmasking of Gunter Guillaume in 1974 drove Willy Brandt from office. Afterwards, Wolf admitted this might have been an own goal, as Brandt was a leading protagonist of reconciliation between the two Germanies.
When Martin Bangemann, now an EU commissioner, was West Germany's economics minister, Sonja, his "unusually capable secretary, very open, very friendly, very helpful", was busy photographing his documents with a miniature camera and sending the film across the border to Wolf. Bangemann liked and trusted her so much that she accompanied his family on holiday.
There are Le Carre-like touches of ambiguity about the debonair Wolf and the way in which he fitted in with the East German Stasi police apparatus. His father was a social revolutionary, a doctor and a playwright, who preached a creed of fresh air, vegetarianism and rustic nudity. Friedrich Wolf saw himself in the tradition of German Jewish nonconformism, like Heine and Marx. In reality, he was as gullible as Shaw, taken in - in both senses - by the Soviet Union to which he fled after Hitler took power. His children became Russian - and Markus was known as Mishka to family and close friends all his life.
An early spell as a journalist covering the Nuremberg war crimes trials exposed Markus Wolf to the reality of what Germany's leaders had done, and how they refused to accept responsibility for the deaths of nearly 40 million people. He was not alone in being suspicious that Nazism had not gone away, but was sleeping in the new West German state. A convinced communist, he saw salvation in Walter Ulbricht's new state, purged of its disgraceful past. It is easy to judge now, but many intellectuals and scientists then welcomed it. In fact, it was promulgating a new lie. All Germany's past misdeeds could be blamed on West Germany. East Germany was new, pure, unsullied and anti-fascist.
Wolf did the East German state some service and it rewarded him handsomely. He played brilliantly on the ambiguity which lay on both sides of the postwar border. Some West Germans spied for, him for money. Some did so because they felt it was their duty, and would take no rewards. For them, West Germany was not yet purged of its past. Former Nazis were emerging in leadership positions in business and administration.
And then there was sex. Where Britain's secret service bumbled along on a diet of booze and bugery. Wolf's BNV supplied its informants with heterosexual services. Poor Gabrielle Gast was 25 in 1968 when she met a really nice East German called Schmidt and fell for him. His real name was Schneider. They secretly got "engaged". She got a job with the BND, the West German intelligence agency, and on her lover's instruction set about photographing all the secret documents she could find. She then placed the film under the washbasin in a train which travelled across East Germany to Berlin. En route, Wolf's people picked it up.
Markus Wolf liked to meet his agents personally. Gabrielle Gast was one of many he charmed. He took risks to visit them, he wined them and dined them, often cooking special dishes for them. When Gast was exposed as an East German spy in 1990, she suffered hugely. Her spying had not been done for gain, but to please her lover who turned out to be false. And Markus Wolf whom she had counted on as a friend was false too. Many others were similarly betrayed.
After the Berlin Wall fell, Markus Wolf was sentenced to six years in prison for endangering West Germany's security. A federal court overturned this, on the grounds that those who spied from East Germany should not be prosecuted. It was a sensible decision. His was a life laid waste by the after-effects of two wars. Unlike others less fortunate, he lived it.
