Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This is an entertaining, enlightening, and lively written book. Wolf's Teutonic humor makes it a joy to read. I unreservedly recommend it.

(I had written a more comprehensive review, but my browser failed, so I've summarized why I enjoyed the book above)

As any John le Carre fan knows, the master spy, code-named "Karla", who runs the East German Intelligence Service, is the nemesis of George Smiley's Circus. After all he turned the Circus' former head, Bill Hayward, into a mole and it is up to Smiley to pick up the pieces and continue the espionage duel and save the Free World. Karla was modeled on Markus Wolf who was the former chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, part of the Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. Wolf was arguably the greatest spymaster of the 20th Century. Certainly, he made East Germany, which was a puppet of the Soviet Union, into an intelligence super-power on the level of Britain, France and West Germany, if not the United States, the Soviet Union or China. Now Wolf has written his own memoirs. Naturally, like all such memoirs one has to read it with corrective lens and, where possible, cross-check from other sources but the book gives a fascinating insight into the heart of the Cold War from the other side. There are several themes in Wolf's book that bear paying particular attention to. One is the hiring of ex- and not so ex-Nazis by the CIA and the West German Intelligence Service after World War II. This is well documented from other sources on the Western side. Operation Paperclip, The Belarus Project and the Klaus Barbie Affair have been exhaustively researched and material published over the last 20 years. Another matter of vital concern is Wolf's insight into the infiltration of Western intelligence agencies. The Blount, Philby, Burgess and Maclean cases in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and the unmasking of Aldrich Ames and others in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s are the fruits of this infiltration. We now know that Wolf had completely penetrated West German intelligence and political agencies and his account of the Gunter Guillaume case (the aide to Willy Brandt, the former Mayor of West Berlin) is particularly revealing. On a profounder and more philosophical level, Wolf's book deals with many of the political and moral issues of the 20th Century as explored by such writers as Andre Malraux and Albert Camus. Wolf, of course, is basically a bureaucrat and nowhere near as deep a thinker as these writers. He is an unrependent Communist and Marxist yet he touches the philosophical roots of political action. His story is at the heart of 20th Century politics from Hitler to Stalin to contemporary Consumer Capitalism and should be read by anyone interested in the history of the second half of the 20th Century. Victor De Mattei July 13, 1997

This book is basically the autobiography of Markus Wolf, who was the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service (their version of the KGB). The best parts of the book for me were the accounts of his organizations dealings with world wide terrorism and the trade craft his group used. The details of the Stasi and his work history seemed to me to be only presenting the most positive sides. He was the head of one of the nastiest groups out there during the cold war yet he tries to present the Stasi as closer to the CIA / FBI then the Nazi SS they were more like. I was also disappointed that there was really nothing all that new here. The book is well written and given this was his first book and there was a translation involved, I am sure the other writer did most of the heavy lifting. All in all this is not a bad book, but it is definitely not the definitive account of the Stasi.

Mr. Wolf wrote a good book. He didn't apologize for his past, while providing detailing information (the most interesting thing, IMHO) about the "mood" of the times. Wolf was - in several ways - a man between two intelligence era, ss his opinion about security and computer shows: he claims having had no security leakage while handling agent files "by hand". But when information technology comes ...

This is a dramatic forseeing of what intelligence and information gathering would become in the very next future: a technology-controlled activity, able to collect a huge quantity of information, without anybody out there able to understand it.

Conclusion: as all the book of this genre, information cannot be taken as "holy spell", nevertheless the reading is really a good experience.

Mr. Wolf, whatever your view of, and whichever side you are on in the 'great game', has provided an interesting insight into how he created an apparatus that provided quite a bit of fun and games for everyone to figure out. His version of events are quite sanitized, which is to be expected. He is an advocate of the system he grew up under and prospered from, so his personal viewpoints have to viewed in that light. However, what is of interest to current practioners of the arts is that he was very successful with recruiting efforts in target environments, and avoided detection by cognizant entities for quite a period of time. As some come to relearn old lessons, his observations will be deemed valuable in the course of events. Worth the read.....Hopefully, Mr. Wolf, you'll publish more in the days ahead.

As a long-time fan of John LeCarré's espionage novels, I was interested in reading Markus Wolf's autobiography. Wolf was rumored to have been the figure that LeCarré based his character, "Karla" -- the chief of the KGB Foreign Directorate -- on in his earlier novels. LeCarré has denied this, but the similarities are striking.

What you won't find in this book is an extended discussion of espionage "tradecraft" or gripping stories about spying operations. What you will find may be a bit more disturbing. Wolf was (he died in 2006)) an unreconstructed Communist, as other reviewers have noted. He remained a true believer in Marxism, even after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and his subsequent trial. What I found most troubling was the last section of the book, his Epilogue. In it, and as a Communist, he looks at capitalism and expresses clear disapproval of any society based solely on money and the accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the many. Predictable, you might say. And, he opines that money can have as powerful and as insidious an effect on a society as any form of government. And, that the notion of personal freedom in the West is sometimes used simply as a tool to facilitate business interests. Coming on the heels of Enron, WorldCom and Halliburton, these statements simply can't be dismissed out of hand. One of the chief benefits of democracy is the ability to criticize the government, and, to my mind, there is more than a bit of truth to what he says.

In the main, the book is quite candid and, as I said, more than a little disturbing. Definitely worth reading.

Nothing's more interesting or terrifying than the real thing. Personally, I couldn't put down the memoirs of Markus Wolf, the decidedly unrepentant East German spy chief. Not a nice fellow, but very good at his craft. Chilling.