Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster [Hardcover]

Markus Wolf with Anne McElvoy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 1997

n this fascinating and revealing autobiography, Markus Wolf, East Germany's chief foreign intelligence officer and foremost spymaster of the Eastern Bloc, tells his own dramatic story, a true thriller and a stunning examination of loyalty, betrayal, and the long shadow of history. of photos.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Imagine if Heinrich Himmler or Lavrenti Beria had written an autobiography! Well, a secret police chief of even greater prowess (and even greater secrecy) has done just that. For 34 years--through almost the whole of the Cold War--Markus Wolf was the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service. As such, he gathered and disseminated to his Soviet sponsors many of the deepest top secrets of the whole era. A good example of the mirrors-within-mirrors nature of Wolf's world is his description of his service's interactions with celebrated terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Wolf relates that whenever Carlos came to East Berlin, the spymaster's main concern was "getting him out of the country as soon as possible." But this proved difficult because well, Carlos was a terrorist not above turning on his hosts. Indeed, Wolf reveals that while Carlos was a guest of his government, he made threats against East Germany's Paris embassy and that the reaction was not to expel him, but to beef up embassy security. Similarly, Wolf tells how the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, which killed two U.S. soldiers and resulted in a U.S. reprisal air strike against Libya, involved East Germany's knowing admission through border control of Libyan diplomats with explosives in their luggage. Here, Wolf questions the notion that such terrorists were worth coddling for their usefulness in any all-out war against the West. You have to wonder if he also did so in his old job.

From Library Journal

East Germany had one of the most successful intelligence services of the Communist bloc, headed by the notorious Wolf, rumored to be the model for John le Carre's evil Karla. Wolf (b. 1923) was trained by the Comintern in the 1930s as a Soviet agent after fleeing Hitler, and from 1952 to 1987 he led the foreign intelligence arm of the East German secret police (Stasi). In this memoir, he recounts the sex-for-information spy game, turf battles and bureaucratic inertia, covert warfare, his Western opponents, family problems, his flight to the Soviet Union in 1989 after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and his return to Germany in 1991. Wolf is proud of his professional career and still believes in the Socialist ideal but says (rather self-servingly) that the methods were all wrong. While Leslie Colitt's Spymaster (LJ 11/15/95) offers an insightful portrait of Wolf, this insider's look at the East German espionage community (complete with organizational charts of the East German government and Communist Party and the Ministry of State Security) is also recommended for public and academic libraries.?Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 367 pages
• Publisher: Times Books; 1st edition (June 8, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812963946
• ISBN-13: 978-0812963946
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,109,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > History > Military > Intelligence & Espionage

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Master Of The Spy Game, January 10, 2005

By 

Beth Fox "Beth A. Fox" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Man Without A Face (Paperback)

It is difficult to review this book, because it requires one to separate the merit of the book itself -- which is great -- from the behavior of the regime which the author served -- which was atrocious. The author, "The Man Without A Face" (so called because no Western intelligence agency had his picture) ran the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the foreign intelligence section of the feared East German "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" or Stasi. The HVA was one of the most effective foreign intelligence services during the Cold War.

The book is a fascinating, insider's view of the HVA. The Stasi's main target was West Germany, and the frighteningly efficient HVA managed to place agents in many key positions in or near the seats of power of West Germany and NATO. We learn how the author used "Romeo" traps, taking advantage of the post-war gender imbalance in Germany to send male spies to woo lonely West German secretaries in key positions. It was extremely disconcerting for me, as an American, to learn that every single one of the CIA's agents who attempted to infiltrate East Germany was either an East German plant or a double agent.

Having said that, it is also important to say that Markus Wolf is and remains an unreconstructed Communist. He is the German version of a "red diaper baby"; his parents were Communists and his faith in communism was forged when his partially-Jewish family was given refuge by Stalin from the Nazi holocaust. He is a still true believer -- convinced that communism failed only because of the way it was implemented, not due to any flaws in the ideology itself. This view permeates the book.

Wolf also failed personally to speak up about the regime's behavior. There are far too many times we hear in the book that "that wasn't my department" -- the spying on East German citizens, the long sentences for those who attempted to escape. Indeed, Wolf tells us that he never visited an East German prison. He does own up, in part, to the GDR's support of terrorist groups, which led to calamities from which we are still reeling.

The book not only gives an inside view of how spying is done, but it raises a number of issues. For one thing, after two separate countries unify, what should be the status of individuals from one country who in the past spied on the other? The unified German government attempted to try Wolf for treason, but was stymied, as he only became a citizen of the "Federal Republic of Germany" after unification. Overall, a fascinating, well-written, worthwhile read -- but go elsewhere to find a description of the Stasi in its entirety or an unbiased view of East German policy.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Cold War Viewed from the Other Side, November 17, 2006

By 

Leonard J. Wilson (VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Man Without A Face (Paperback)

History is written by the winners, or so the old saying goes. So, I decided to start reading some histories written by the losers. The fact that Markus Wolf, head of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, was able to write his memoirs after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East Germany, and the entire Warsaw Pact is a modern phenomenon. Prior to the end of the Cold War, most losers were not in a position to write their memoirs or anything else. Wolf was tried for treason by the now united Federal Republic of Germany. The case was dismissed by the German Constitutional Court on the argument that as a citizen of East Germany, he could not have committed treason against West Germany. He is lucky that his trial was not conducted under the legal system of his former masters.

In brief summary, Markus Wolf was the half Jewish son of German Communist parents who fled to Moscow when the Nazis came to power. Markus grew up as a good Soviet citizen and Communist. He spent WWII writing and broadcasting Soviet propaganda aimed at the German army. After the war, he transferred his citizenship from the Soviet Union to the new German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and rapidly advanced to become director of the Foreign Intelligence Service in 1953, at least in part because he was both fluent in Russian and trusted by the Soviet hierarchy. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1986, three years before the Wall came down. The title of his memoir, Man Without A Face, is based on the fact that the US Intelligence Community did not have a photo or description of Wolf's appearance until well into the 1970s. This added to his legend as the other side's greatest spymaster of the Cold War.

Herr Wolf repeatedly emphasizes the point that he was responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence and had no responsibility for or knowledge of internal repression. That fell under a different directorate which reported to Wolf's immediate boss, Erik Mielke, Minister of State Security. As Director of Foreign Intelligence, Wolf was primarily responsible to his East German and Soviet masters for collecting intelligence on West Germany, and through it, on NATO and the US. He had numerous successes, the most spectacular of which was planting a mole in the office of Willy Brandt, the Chancellor of West Germany and author of the policy of Ostpolitik, the opening of West German contact with the East. The discovery of the mole, Gunter Guillaume, resulted in the fall of Brandt's government in 1974, a result which Wolf sincerely regretted, since it partially curtailed Ostpolitik.

Throughout the book, Wolf presents himself as a reasonable and humane intelligence professional. He repeatedly stresses that his service did not participate in internal repression, practice torture, support terrorism, and was generally on the side of the angels. I think he is probably sincere in these statements and will even accept that there is probably some truth in them. He was apparently quite disillusioned with the brutality of Stalin and the utter stagnation of the entire Soviet Block that followed Stalin. Nonetheless, East Germany did practice all the darker arts of Stalin, even if Herr Wolf was not directly involved. Wolf also repeatedly says that he is not trying to apologize for or justify his service to East Germany. I find this harder to accept. The author of an autobiography is seldom in a position of offer an unbiased portrait of his subject. He has still not accepted that an all-powerful state founded on any ideology, whether National Socialist or Communist, is in a position to repress any dissent by the most brutal means and will justify doing so based on the controlling party's ideology.

Despite the somewhat self-serving nature of this book, it provided a useful insight to what the other side was thinking and doing during 40 years of the Cold War. I'd recommend it to any serious student of Cold War history.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars James Bond Bureaucrat, March 5, 2000

By 

Ty W. McFarland (Twin Falls, ID) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Man Without A Face (Paperback)

Markus Wolf has an amazing talent for telling stories, listing dates and names, while avoiding the more substantive issues of personal thoughts and feelings, motivations, and heart issues. He tells the stories of major events in his career as head of East German Intelligence, however he doesn't tell, on the whole, how these events made him feel, what the mood and tenor of discussions were as he and his colleagues planned drops/rescues/spy-baiting/blackmail, etc. Most of the information in the book is interesting, but not personal. It's a provocative read, and you won't be sorry you bought the book, but it just seems to lack that ineffable something that really makes the book a five-star read--a truly autobiographical perspective. It's a bit antiseptic. What you will read is a book that contains a perspective you will not read anywhere else. Wolf was shrewd and cunning and tireless and he writes what he knows. He did little first-hand field-work, but he did know how to manage an agency. If you want to see what administrating a Cold War spy agency was like from behind the curtain, then this is one of the few authentic books that will give you the perspective you desire. I would not want to be a NATO spy-master up against Wolf.