MARKUS WOLF was modern history’s most brilliant spymaster, and, because his working life was devoted to the cause of communist oppression, also its most dangerous.

For 34 years he led the East German secret intelligence service, the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or main directorate of intelligence), a KGB clone that ran thousands of agents in the West (and some in Africa and Asia) and exploited similar numbers of reliable “sources” — individuals, but not agents, some knowingly communist contacts, others unaware of the real identity of the men and women to whom they slipped information, views and documents. They in turn were supported by countless sympathisers whom Lenin had termed “useful idiots”, of whom more than a few were based in British universities, political parties, trade unions and CND.

Thanks to this vast spying network, Wolf was usually better informed about policies and personalities in Western Europe and Nato than many Western leaders and generals.

Markus “Mischa” Wolf was born in 1923. His character had been cast by his experience of the Nazis (who drove his Jewish communist father and his family from their native Hechingen, in southwest Germany in 1933) and honed by Stalin and the Soviet Communists (who offered him refuge and then, in 1939, citizenship).

Wolf, by then a fluent Russian-speaker, soon became a convert to Stalinism. Not even the awful purges shook the faith he was never to lose. If anything, seeing terror in action apparently reinforced it, becoming his blueprint for sustaining communism in Germany once the Nazis had been destroyed. Unremarkably, the Soviet Union came to trust him as one of their own, ensuring he would prosper.

It was in Stalin’s Moscow that Wolf discovered what real power was, and how it might be used. After East Germany’s collapse, Wolf liked to portray himself in the West as just another intelligence chief. Relativising himself then became his life’s work, a project that had some success. Introduced to a meeting at the Reform Club in London in July last year as a “great European”, even Wolf looked somewhat startled. Others saw him much more plausibly as a fanatic and a brute.

Exuding bohemian charm (he even wrote a cook book on the “secrets of the Russian cuisine”), and proclaiming a sudden (if wholly unconvincing) rediscovery of his “Jewishness” after 1990, he tried to rehabilitate himself and to conceal his part in 40 years of the torture and imprisonment of thousands of East Germans.

In fact, the East German secret service was totally different from any Western agency, dedicated as it always was to the murderous traditions of Dzerzhinsky and Beria, and, in part, of the Gestapo. This was seen not just by its use of terror but also by the political power the secret police exercised alongside the party leadership. What distinguished the former from the latter was simply that the former were known about, while the latter were usually invisible.

As a refugee in the Soviet Union, Wolf was trained in intelligence work at a Comintern academy (where he met the first of his three wives, Emmi). When, in 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern, Wolf was told to find work as a radio journalist in Moscow. Here he met Walter Ulbricht, later East Germany’s first ruler, in the Hotel Lux where planning was already under way to convert the Germans to communists, using the power of the Red Army and secret police.

Wolf arrived in Berlin on May 27, 1945. In 1951, acting on Soviet “advice”, Ulbricht made him secret intelligence chief. Two years later his service was merged into the vast Stasi secret police empire, a consequence of the June 1953 uprising (thought to have been orchestrated by Western intelligence) which had rattled the party. “Domestic security” and “secret foreign intelligence” were now two sides of the same plan, a “sword and shield” to protect the party and to perpetuate its hold on power.

Wolf had always regarded Western democracies as mortal enemies of communism. All of them were now his targets; none safe from his intrusive gaze. The vast majority of his successes in Washington, Brussels and London were uncovered only after communism collapsed in 1989 (though with the exception of the Nato spy “Topaz”, and “Tina” and “Ken” in America, none was ever prosecuted there). Others, no less chilling, were known about before, usually through errors the spies made (of which the 1985 Schulze spy case in the UK was an example); they were terrifying indications of how deeply the HVA had penetrated the defences of the West.

By 1980 both US and British counter-intelligence had begun to contain the KGB; the HVA, on the other hand, flourished practically undetected (and passed most of its intelligence to the KGB, in any case). Wolf’s officers were hard to spot: an East German enemy could look so like a West German friend. In that year Wolf was promoted to general and awarded the Golden Order of the Fatherland.

His chief war was against West Germany, and it was against this liberal and democratic regime that his agents wreaked most damage, often catastrophic. Its defences were incapable of protecting the State against the 30,000 agents infiltrated into West Germany over 40 years. They did not merely spy but sought actively to destabilise the State, helping neoNazis and giving cash, weapons and assassination training to West German terrorist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite repeated scares and murders, the federal republic did survive the Stasi onslaught but it was not left unscathed.