Invisible Man

We live in the age of confession, of the memoir, of the “tell-all.” Even a figure like Markus Wolf, whose job was never to say a word, turns out not to be immune to the seductions of the genre. As “the greatest spymaster of our century,” or so his publisher would have us believe, Wolf might seem to be the last man willing to tell secrets. After all, he was for 34 years the chief of Department XX, the espionage unit of the East German secret police, the infamous Ministry of State Security, or Stasi.

Autobiography, as Freud well knew, is a notoriously suspect literary form. It is, he once observed, a fiction. Memoirs promise authenticity but deliver deception, often as much for the author as for the reader. They are inherently self-serving. What matters, of course, is what an author chooses to include and what to keep out. “Man Without a Face” is an exemplary model of selective memory at work.

The world knows Markus Wolf as the master spy in charge of some 4,000 spies in the West during the Cold War, from the early 1950s until the late 1980s. He was responsible for planting his operative, Gunter Guillaume, in the inner circle of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who resigned when the betrayal became public. Wolf trained his agents as “Romeos” who would position themselves as lovers and husbands of lonely government secretaries in Bonn. He controlled “Topaz,” alias Rainer Rupp, who worked for more than 25 years as a mole in NATO headquarters in Brussels until he was exposed in 1993.

What was less known is the fact that Wolf was one of four cabinet members under Erich Mielke who set the agenda and controlled the activities of the Stasi. Although the Stasi was not the most brutal organization in the world, it was the most Orwellian. Its reach was monstrous, its ambition boundless. Under Mielke’s direction, its 80,000 full-time members (with the help of about 200,000 unofficial informants) compiled 6 million files on Germans, one-third of whom lived in West Germany. The numbers speak for themselves. When you exclude children and retirees from the 17 million citizens of the so-called German Democratic Republic, you are left with about 8 million people, whom the Stasi considered potential security risks. Roughly every other adult in the GDR had an intelligence file, and in a few instances, these files comprised thousands of pages. (By comparison, the Gestapo had about 35,000 informants who kept track of nearly 80 million citizens. Unfortunately, this disparity is easily explained: The Nazis were far more popular than the Communists.)

For the Stasi, as for any intelligence organization, there was never enough information. More was always needed. Nor were there enough people to evaluate all the data that were gathered up at such great cost and ingenuity. Indeed, it is a fundamental irony of the Stasi that, the most powerful secret police agency in history was unable to predict the collapse of the state it served, much less prevent it. As an intelligence agency, it was ultimately a failure. Its legacy was to poison an entire society from within, to turn neighbors against neighbors, children against parents, brothers against brothers, husbands against wives.

But Markus Wolf would have you believe that he had nothing to do with any of this. On the contrary, he presents himself in “Man Without a Face” as the gallant knight of this evil organization. He apparently never got his hands dirty, and as for his former boss, Mielke, the most hated man in the GDR, he has nothing but disparaging words. Wolf would like us to believe that he is almost an aesthete, a comrade loyal to high ideals, that he betrayed his fealty to the true cross of socialism to no one, least of all to Mielke. Until the publication of this book, he seems to have kept to himself his true opinions of East Germany’s course. These opinions, one suspects, are of very recent vintage. Before the end of the Cold War, such views had to be secret--so secret that no one, not even Wolf himself, noticed them.

“Man Without a Face,” which has already appeared in 14 languages, reads like Wolf’s last will and testament. The depth of his written confession is, of course, limited by the fact that he was also preparing to be tried for treason in a district court in Dusseldorf. Never mind that the judgment against Wolf was eventually lifted. In a second trial, he was convicted of kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment and bodily injury, and in May, was given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to pay about $30,000 to a Munich orphanage and to cover court costs, estimated at about $120,000.

Nevertheless, Wolf’s decades-long loyalty to so criminal an organization is, in a way, both admirable and respectable. He is an intelligent man who tries to understand and explain his ideological blindness. He is, by turns, even appealing in his fitful efforts to be candid. I suspect that a good portion of that effort is to be attributed to his co-author, Anne McElvoy, and his American editors, Peter Osnos and Geoffrey Schandler. They must have posed all the unpleasant questions which he had so successfully evaded during his life. Now that he no longer has to bother about the loyalty of 4,000 agents but rather the opinion of a worldwide audience, he answers these questions unabashedly and with a sense of humor. His mission is no longer to subvert, only to spin. “Man Without a Face” is, consequently, filled with the entertaining anecdotes and revelations one might wish--against all expectation--from a master spy.

Born in 1923, Markus Wolf was the son of the German-Jewish author and Communist Friedrich Wolf, who 10 years later was forced to leave Germany because of Nazi persecution. Markus, his brother and their mother soon followed, moving first to Switzerland and then to France. When his father wrote a play about the treatment of Jews in Germany, the Nazis placed the names of every member of Wolf’s family on their list of wanted criminals. “If there is such a thing as a single event that forms a man’s politics,” Wolf writes, “for me this was it: to be listed as a criminal by one’s own country.”

The family eventually moved to Moscow, where Wolf was educated in the elite schools of the Communist youth and the Comintern, where he developed the sense of party loyalty that shaped so many Communists of his generation. “It was ingrained in my character that if the party asked something of us, we responded obediently. They said, ‘Jump,’ and we said, ‘How high?’ ”

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Unquestioning obedience runs like an unintended leitmotif throughout Wolf’s book. Indeed, there were a number of events in his life that might have shaken his world view and his feelings of Communist superiority, but they didn’t. In his youth, he witnessed the effects of Stalin’s purges; many friends and acquaintances from the inner circle of emigres disappeared overnight and never returned. His own father was arrested. Later, as a reporter in Berlin in 1946, he witnessed the mass arrests and deportations of Social Democrats. In 1953, as a chief spy, he watched Russian tanks crush the workers’ uprising of June 17. Later, he knew about Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes at the 20th Party Congress, and he certainly had access to the uncensored pictures and reports of the uprising and violent crackdown that followed in Hungary in 1956. Then there were the construction of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Prague and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland. Again and again, one would like to ask this marathon man of party loyalty: How many mass murders would it take to awaken your sense of doubt or disgust?

Wolf’s answer is simple: “People have asked me how it could be that I, a reasonably sophisticated young man from a cultured family, could block out of my mind so many of these uncomfortable events. I was curious enough to listen to these accounts, but the words skimmed past me, filtered by the ideological net in my mind. . . . We focused on ensuring that Nazism would never infect Germany again.”

“Uncomfortable events”? Doesn’t it occur to Wolf that unconditional obedience and amoral idealism were the same tools used by the Nazis, whose return he so resolutely wanted to prevent? In fact, the strident anti-fascism line adopted by the GDR became an excuse for the Stasi to employ fascist tactics, not the least of which included the creation of detention camps for dissidents. As sophisticated and cultured as Wolf claims he is, he did not recognize any of this.

With regard to the prisons, in which a number of citizens landed, thanks to him, he blandly writes: “I never saw the prisons in East Germany, but the situation there must have been particularly bad.” He was even taken aback by the fate of Werner Teske, a defector from his own ranks who was caught and shot in the back of the head in 1981 in a military jail: “While I knew Teske’s future was grim, I had no reason to believe that he would die.” He even admits that he noticed the decline of the GDR only when it was too late: “I was taken totally by surprise with the rapidity of the state’s decline.”

Wolf’s naivete is, insulting and strains credulity. He claims that “the use of force [to acquire information from East German citizens] was the exception rather than the rule.” Yet at his trial in Dusseldorf, Wolf admitted that in 1959, he tried to pressure a typesetter, Georg Angerer, into making a defamatory statement about Willy Brandt. Wolf was convinced that Brandt, who was mayor of Berlin at the time, had been a Gestapo agent. Angerer, however, refused to sign the libelous statements despite being tortured in jail for six months. Wolf conveniently avoids mentioning this particularly nasty incident.

Such excuses and omissions make his story suspect. Although he admits that his department, together with two other sections in the ministry, trained PLO fighters in Stasi camps, he denies working with terrorists like Carlos: “My service neither controlled nor even to the best of my knowledge met him.” He speaks similarly about Abu Nidal, and he acts surprised by the charge that East Berlin was used as a base to carry out a bomb attack on a West German disco in 1986. He and Mielke were helpless, he says. “Mielke never expected this to happen, but dealings with the terrorists simply swung out of his control.”

Is this ignorance, or is this a lie? I think Wolf, as did many world leaders in both the East and the West, saw only what fit into his world view. As soon as the work got dirty, he put on his ideological blinders. The ends justified the means, and today he is proud of his white shirt, not because it is actually white but because he’s trained his eyes not to notice the spots on it. Although he accepts his responsibility, he rejects the notion of guilt.

So what were the great deeds of this spymaster? He perfected the use of sex as a surveillance tool, ruining the lives of the people involved, and he toppled Willy Brandt. But wasn’t Brandt the man who came up with the policy of detente? Wasn’t Brandt the least confrontational chancellor the East had ever seen?

Although it is probably true that because of his espionage techniques, Wolf knew secrets in Brussels and Bonn better than the ministers responsible for them, the terrible irony is that, in the end, he and his 4,000 spies didn’t realize that the GDR was threatened from within, not from without. The state had long been ruined by the totalitarian and encrusted power structure which he had so blindly supported. Markus Wolf may want the world to believe that he served as the model for John le Carre’s spy in “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” If that were true, then it would be the highlight of his misbegotten and forlorn career.