Thursday, November 09, 2006

Spies

For many reasons--mainly ignorance--we blog a lot more here about fictitious spy masters than the real thing. Here's an exception: An actual, genuine, seriously bad-ass spymaster has died. Here's some good stuff from the Times:

Markus Wolf, the ''man without a face'' who outwitted the West as communist East Germany's long-serving spymaster, died Thursday. He was 83…. He planted some 4,000 agents in the West -- most famously, placing Guenter Guillaume as a top aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. The agent's unmasking forced Brandt to resign in 1974. Wolf, who said he spurned a CIA offer of a safe new life in California after the Cold War, managed to steal NATO secrets for the Soviet bloc that could have been decisive if war had broken out in Europe.

Because of his elusiveness, his rivals nicknamed him ''the man without a face.''…

Western agencies didn't know what the East German spy chief looked like until 1978, when he was photographed during a visit to Sweden. An East German defector, Werner Stiller, then identified Wolf to West German counterintelligence as the man in the picture.

Some also believe Wolf was the model for John Le Carre's wily communist spymaster ''Karla'' in his espionage novels.

The Stasi -- which at home enlisted spouses and lovers to spy on their partners -- sent seductive ''Romeo'' agents to the West to steal secrets from lonely government secretaries. Wolf said in his memoirs that ''if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.''...

In May 1990, with German reunification approaching, Wolf said two men appeared at his dacha near Berlin with an offer from then-CIA director William Webster to work for the U.S. spy agency. One of the two was Gardner Hathaway, who had just retired as assistant CIA director for counterintelligence, Wolf said. They offered a ''seven-figure sum,'' a new identity and a house in California. Wolf said he turned down the offer because he would never have betrayed his ex-agents -- even though it would have put him out of the reach of German prosecutors, who were seeking him for espionage, treason and bribery....


He was a serious bastard. However, as Robert Farley of LGM notes, "credit where due. Farewell, master spy."

Posted by jwb at 1:37 PM   

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