Colitt, Leslie. Spy Master: The Real-Life Karla, His Moles, and the East German
Secret Police, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
The dust-jacket bills this book as
"the definitive story of Markus Wolf." Whether such a slim volume
can actually be the definitive story of a man like Wolf remains to be seen.
In the meantime Colitt, formerly Berlin correspondent of the respected London
broadsheet Financial Times has written an interesting contribution
to the Wolf story. He spent twenty-five years in Berlin and was the only
Western correspondent to report on the first Leipzig demonstration that
was the beginning of the end for the Honecker regime.
The book has three threads. The first
and dominant one is the life and career of Markus Wolf and the rise and
fall of the Stasi. The two subsidiary threads cover Colitt's own experiences
of the Stasi, as a Western journalist he was closely surveilled when he
visited East Germany, and the career of a Stasi informer whose path repeatedly
crossed Colitt's during twenty-five years in Berlin.
Born in Hechingen in south-western
Germany in 1923, Wolf came by his commitment to left-wing ideologies the
honest way: through his parents. His father was a deeply committed radical
leftist. As a doctor the father often treated the poor and indigent for
free as a matter of principle. The family were assimilated Jews who fled
to the Soviet Union as the threat to Jews increased in Hitler's Germany.
Wolf received much of his education, including a grounding in intelligence
or "konspiratsya," in a Stalinist Soviet Union and this served
to harden his commitment to communism. This commitment survived World War
II and even the most lunatic periods of Stalin's reign. The Wolfs became
Soviet citizens but Markus and his first wife surrendered their citizenships
when he became an East German diplomat.
Moscow sent Wolf to Berlin within weeks of the German surrender. His first task was as a pro-Soviet columnist for Radio Berlin. After a brief stint as a diplomat, he was picked to develop East German foreign intelligence capabilities. He was to fill the post as director of the Main Intelligence Directorate (Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung or HVA) with extraordinary competence until the collapse of East Germany.
The geopolitical oddity that was the
post-war division of Germany greatly simplified the job of the HVA. It was
very easy for East Germans to mingle with West Germans for recruiting. Great
play was made of the psychological damage that the division of Germany had
caused. In addition to being able to recruit agents by playing on this weakness,
it also stimulated a number of West German intelligence officers to become
walk-in agents for the East.
Colitt catalogs a number of cases,
starting with the dispatched agent Gunther Guillaume in 1956, Colitt's acquaintance
Armin, and working through to the walk-ins Hansjoachim Tiedge and Klaus
Kuron in the 1980s. There is also an interesting description of the use
of Romeo agents. This is a reverse honey-trap in which attractive and personable
men were used to recruit single, and often lonely, women, especially secretaries
in the West German intelligence agencies.
Coupled with the blanket counterintelligence effort
mounted in East Germany by Erich Mielke, the HVA was able to work with confidence
in a very secure environment. Colitt uses his own experiences in East Germany,
including excerpts from his extensive Stasi file, to outline some of these
counterintelligence practices. He also manages to point out that the system
must have been close to drowning in the sea of paperwork it generated. The
final HVA operation to be described is the KoKo or Commercial Coordination
operations used to obtain Western capital and technology for East German
industry.
The HVA record was not unblemished,
Wolf had to survive a number of penetrations and defections. His immense
personal charm and political savvy allowed him to escape anything more than
a mild rebuke on several occasions.
With the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe, Wolf lost power and influence and became vulnerable to prosecution
for masterminding actions against West Germany and its allies. His prosecution
could have been politically explosive, but West German judges ruled that
he could not be prosecuted for something that was legal in East Germany
when he ordered it.
Wolf is a man of great personal charm
and sexual magnetism and one has the impression that Colitt fell for the
charm when he interviewed him for the book. The book has a perceptible pro-Wolf
slant. This manifests itself early with a fairly atrocious description of
the origins of the Gehlen Organization that may have been the standard East
German version. Colitt would have done well to consult Mary Ellen Reese's
General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection. The lack of a bibliography
and of evidence for Colitt having checked his facts against other sources
are worrisome. There is a careless mistake where he says that a bombing
in West Berlin in late 1983 was of a French Consulate. It was in fact the
French Cultural Center and although he claims that Carlos was responsible,
he doesn't mention that the Armenian group ASALA was the only one that claimed
responsibility. His arguments against the prosecution of former HVA officers
are rather shallow and he ignores the possible counter arguments to his
own position.
The biography of Wolf is interesting
and well done, and the description of a number of operations and cases,
including a number about which very little has been heard in the US, is
informative. There is also comparatively little about the Stasi itself,
only a few references to specific sections and occasionally some mention
of the political infighting between Wolf and his superior (Erich Mielke).
Those looking for a comprehensive description
of the Stasi may want to look at Werner Stiller's Beyond the Wall
or wait for the translation of a number of excellent German books on the
Stasi. In addition, the intertwining of the three strands does not always
run smoothly and as a result some sections are amorphous. Despite the dust-jacket
claims, this book is probably not the last word on Wolf, but one has to
wonder if there ever will be a last word on him.
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