Pizzas galore!

Wolf needed the secrets of the Bonn government, not just to be forewarned and so forearmed, but also to exploit and undermine West German policy in East Germany’s interests. Hits ranged from the acquisition of computer technology to “earning” hard cash by selling Stasi political prisoners to the West Germans (this produced almost DM4billion — about £1.3bn — itself used to buy further advantages, often in the form of votes in the Bundestag). Every federal chancellor was targeted in one way or another. Usually, their secretaries were won over by Wolf’s “Romeo” agents who traded East German passion for West German secrets, but electronic espionage was also employed: 100 lines in Kohl’s Chancery were tapped, monitored by 48 stations in East Berlin and Czechoslovakia, producing 19,000 pages of text. When Kohl was alerted to this in the late 1980s (apparently by MI6) he took to using public phone boxes near his office. But they, too, were wired by the HVA. Wolf’s spying successes were a catastrophe for West German Intelligence from which it has yet to recover.

Running spies, however, was Wolf’s forte. For 17 years he personally directed Gabrielle Gast, who had been recruited to communism as a student and was regarded as one of the most able officers in West German secret intelligence, the BND. She was a regular visitor to MI6 in London. When passing foreign-policy secrets to Wolf, she was codenamed “Gerald” but became “Gisela” when betraying the BND.

Klaus Kuron, the BND chief counter-intelligence officer in the 1980s, and Hansjoachim Tiedge, the West German security service’s counter-intelligence expert, were also Wolf’s agents, as were numerous other figures in public life and the universities, including at least one celebrated researcher on East Germany. Sixteen politicans were identifed this year when the CIA returned the Stasi archives to Berlin. A final list is expected in 2007.

Wolf’s most notorious operation was against Willy Brandt, leader of West Germany’s Social Democrats (the SPD) and the leading West German statesman of his day. As a “good German” (who had fought against Hitler) and a firm believer in détente with Russia, he was hugely popular with ordinary East Germans, but hard to attack openly and therefore a potential threat. East German leaders feared he would undermine them.

To spy on him Wolf first recruited a woman (“Lydia”) who appeared, conveniently, to be sleeping with both Brandt and his main opponent, Franz- Josef Strauss. When Brandt became Chancellor in 1969, one of Wolf’s officers, Günter Guillaume, became Brandt’s chief aide and confidant. Arguments about his loyalty were dismissed by politicians suspicious of their own intelligence agencies which they regarded as hostile to the SPD.

The HVA could now always know Brandt’s bottom line in any negotiation and pick up the odd Nato secret as well. Although it quickly discovered that Brandt genuinely accepted East German sovereignty, Guillaume also collected evidence of Brandt’s more intimate secrets so as to blackmail or destroy him should the need arise. Guillaume’s shock arrest (again, allegedly, thanks to MI6) was a huge setback for the communist spooks who were meant “to wash the bear without getting its fur wet” by staying hidden. Not only did this reveal the extent of HVA penetration in the West but it threatened to destroy détente (which, in the event, was unaffected) while also causing much unease among ordinary East Germans, ironically increasing their wish to be rid of communism.

In his spying, Wolf corrupted, without shame or mercy, the lives of many thousands of his victims — a category which must include many of his own agents as well as those on whom they spied. Wherever a weakness of any kind was discovered in anyone possessing secrets or having access to them, Wolf’s men would ruthlessly use it. As he himself said, no one touched by his secret service was ever to be forgotten by it, no debt incurred for which he would not one day exact repayment.

Wolf retired from the HVA in 1986, although in November 1989 he reappeared to beg the East Germans to retain communism (revealing for one instant his true political standing). Fleeing to Moscow once again, he decided to return to face trial, sure that the German courts would discharge him. They, showing a clear (some might say shameful) reluctance to accept the extent of his evil, did the next best thing. In 1993 he was given six years for treason and corruption but allowed to appeal and then, in 1997, after a retrial (centred on the view that the original charges were not contrary to East German law and therefore not crimes) he received two years’ probation for false imprisonment and sanctioning torture. He was delighted to have spent not a single night in jail.

Before 1989 Soviet-bloc leaders often used to say that Germans could make anything work, including communism. If this was true, it was also true that Wolf and the HVA had not been able to prevent its collapse. But communism did not fall because of Stasi intelligence service failures — they had, after all, kept it alive for 40 years — but because their Russian masters decided to turn out the lights. Wolf’s total subservience to the Soviet Union — his passport to power 40 years earlier — had now brought about the end of his own career and the death of Germany’s only communist state.

Markus Wolf, spymaster, was born on January 19, 1923. He died on November 9, 2006, aged 83.