HOWZAT

Wolf said that his first "Romeo", an engineering student codenamed Felix, started work in 1952 and operated under the cover of a travelling shampoo salesman.

He struck up a friendship at a Bonn bus stop with a secretary in the office of Konrad Adenauer, then the West German Chancellor. The relationship lasted for several years until East Berlin was tipped off that West German authorities were running a security check on the agent and hastily withdrew him.

Wolf, who later detailed a string of such sagas in his 1997 book Memoirs of a Spymaster, later appeared to back off his boast.

"It was wrong," he told reporters as he promoted the book. "Nobody has the right to spoil an innocent person’s life."

Wolf also voiced regret about his role in bringing down Brandt, the initiator of the so-called Ostpolitik of engagement with the Eastern bloc, describing it as "equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal".

Oleg Gordievsky, a former Soviet spy, told Times Online that Wolf had been one of the great spymasters.

Mr Gordievsky, a KGB defector who lives in Britain, said that he worked in the department that dealt with East German intelligence and had followed Wolf's movements during the latter half of his career.

Wolf spoke Russian like a native and was well-liked by the Kremlin - a factor that led to him to fall out with Honecker, who was suspicious of Russia's moves towards what he viewed as a more Westernisted style of government.

"He was a great spymaster and organiser. As an organiser, particularly he was a great one, much better and more successful than the Russians. Although he would have been envious of the way the British agents spirited me out of Moscow in 1985," Mr Gordievsky said.

But he added: "Because he behaved like a gentleman at lesiure people forget that he represented a utilitarian and evil system. The British spy George Blake was toasted in Berlin and Moscow but he gave away a lot of British and American agents who were shot under Wolf's supervision.

"People seem to have forgotten his bloodiness. He was in it up to his knees."

Mr Gordievsky did not meet Wolf in person until the 90s when both men attended an intelligence conference in Gemany.

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