Markus Wolf: Markus Wolf would probably have had mixed feelings about the coverage of his death in the German press yesterday.
The long-serving head of East Germany's external espionage service loved publicity and would have been flattered by the acres of coverage debating the secret of his greatest success: infiltrating western intelligence - in particular Nato and the Bonn government - with a frugal yet potent mix of sex and socialism.
Yet Wolf would have been disappointed, if not surprised, by the focus on the inherent contradiction of his life and career.
Markus Wolf was born in 1923 in southern German town of Hechingen to parents who were members of the Communist Party and loyal Stalinists.
Wolf's father, a Jewish doctor and playwright, fled Germany before Hitler seized power and waited for his family in France.
Stripped of their German citizenship, Wolf's mother smuggled Markus and his brother, Konrad, later a prominent East German film director, over the border to Switzerland and on to France in 1934. There the Wolfs accepted an offer of asylum from the Soviet Union and moved to Moscow.
Wolf was educated alongside other German exile children at the Karl Liebknecht school and then received further education and intelligence training at the Comintern academy until it was closed down by Stalin in 1943. Even at a young age, he was aware of the Stalinist purges at play behind the scenes. "Fathers of friends disappeared, first in the German and then in the Russian schools we attended. Teachers became fewer," he said in a 1997 interview. "This double life was always there." Wolf's double life began - after a brief career as a wartime radio announcer - on a flight to Berlin in 1945 as part of the Walter Ulbricht group.
After a brief return to Moscow, serving in the embassy of Ulbricht's newly established German Democratic Republic (GDR), Wolf returned to Berlin in August 1951 to become one of eight founding members of the GDR's intelligence service. For the next 34 years, he headed the main directorate of intelligence (HVA) inside the Ministry for State Security or Stasi, which he would later maintain was entirely removed from the notorious excesses of the Stasi's domestic operations.
Wolf writes in his memoirs that intelligence services were peacemakers, stabilising the Cold War "by giving statesmen some security that they would not be surprised by the other side".
Wolf's own charm on the opposite sex appeared to become official policy of his "Romeo" agents who worked their way into the hearts - and soon the top secret filing cabinets - of spinster secretaries of top western officials.
His greatest espionage achievement was planting long-term sleepers such as Günter Guillaume, activated only after achieving the highest possible rank, in Guillaume's case, adviser to chancellor Willy Brandt, father of "Ostpolitik" and the Cold War thaw with the eastern bloc.
Guillaume's exposure in 1974 prompted Brandt's resignation and put the spotlight on Wolf, a disaster in the espionage business.
But beyond the high-profile spy cases, the HVA funnelled cash and weapons to left- and right-wing extremist groups and kidnapped defectors and other targets in West Berlin and elsewhere, delivering them into the hands of torturers and executioners in Stasi prisons.
The contradictions in Wolf's life became increasingly evident in the years after 1989 when he conceded mistakes but never blame in a series of autobiographical books as well as court appearances which, despite convictions, failed to put him behind bars.
For Germans, the overriding contradiction of Markus Wolf's life is how a refugee from a dictatorship and a life-long believer in the socialist cause could accept, even prop up, the perversion of socialism purveyed by his party bosses.
Wolf was reportedly flattered by the rumour he was the model for Karla, the communist spymaster in the novels of John Le Carré. However, the author vigorously repeatedly rejected that claim, as he did requests to appear in public discussions alongside Wolf.
"I think that Markus Wolf and his kind knew better than anyone, because of the way they were placed, what a foul little regime they were serving," said Le Carré in an interview. "I think they are thoroughly guilty men and they should slink away in disgrace."
Markus Wolf: born January 19th, 1923; died November 9th, 2006