The Man in the Red Mask
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing THE MAN IN THE RED MASK By Roger Draper One of the many benefits of Communism's downfall has been the willingness of its former leaders to write much franker and more...
...When Guillaume was arrested in 1974, his boss, who had granted East Germany the diplomatic recognition it had long craved, was replaced by the much less accommodating Helmut Schmidt...
...Our role in bringing down Brandt was equivalent to kicking a football into our own goal," Wolf concedes...
...For one thing, the apparent successes achieved by many of his spies did not really promote the political interests of East Germany...
...At the end of the Cold War, a number of Wolf's subordinates "turned traitor," as he sees it, and exposed moles in West Germany, who were then convicted of treason...
...authorities in Berlin, and a Gestapo man...
...under the stagnant leadership of the ailing Erich Honecker I could see no realistic possibility of change from within...
...In the late 1980s, the HVA was "in the enviable position of knowing that not a single CIA agent had worked in East Germany without having been tamed into a double agent or working with us from the start...
...Wolf does admit that he was responsible "for perfecting the use of sex in spying...
...discrete branches of the Ministry of State Security spied on the population of East Germany and directed counterintelligence efforts against enemy security operations on its territory...
...Our special German school was closed...
...We children noticed that adults never spoke of people who 'disappeared' infrontof their families, and we automatically began to respect this bizarre courtesy ourselves...
...In the early days, the Soviets gave the ministry training and equipment, but its distinguishing features were homegrown...
...Many of the "moles" (that is, traitors) the HVA recruited in West Germany "were not Communists but worked with us because they wanted to overcome the [country's] division...
...The East German Ministry of State Security absorbed Wolf's agency in 1953...
...He simply insists that he was personally involved solely in foreign intelligence...
...Some Right-wingers helped the HVA because they hated America more than they hated Communism...
...More likely than not, it would also appear a few days later in the newspapers...
...Man Without a Face (Times Books, 367 pp., $25.00) by Markus Wolf, the penultimate head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service, ranks high among such works...
...They and the other offspring of Moscow's German refugee community "were subliminally aware that we were not party to the whole truth about our [Soviet] surroundings...
...I was not engaged in this, others were...
...They did their work, I did mine," as he puts it...
...Wolf's treatment hardly seems to justify his hysterical cry, in a letter to a prosecutor, that "There are to be victors and vanquished, retaliations without mercy...
...Many of our teachers disappeared during the purges of 1936-38...
...Male "Romeos," or gigolo-agents, joined the millions who fled westward before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961...
...In addition, the regime used cloak-and-dagger work as an alternative to change: Instead of tolerating the degree of openness required to build a modern economy, for instance, it tried to create a computer industry by stealing secrets from IBM, itself a dinosaur at the time...
...The United States and the USSR were so different that few people in either nation would spy for the enemy, and when caught they were executed or given life sentences...
...Wolf claims to have become something of a dissident after he resigned from office in '86, "feeling trapped by the ossified bureaucratic structures around me...
...On their arrival, they went on to seduce spinsters serving as secretaries to powerful politicians, businessmen and officials, using their paramours as sources...
...Writers & Writing THE MAN IN THE RED MASK By Roger Draper One of the many benefits of Communism's downfall has been the willingness of its former leaders to write much franker and more interesting memoirs than they would have done otherwise...
...According to the New York Times, upon receiving a two-year suspended sentence in late May, Wolf condemned the judgment as "a violation of the law and the Constitution," although in reality, kidnapping is illegal everywhere...
...As for the support those branches gave to international terrorism, he confesses to being "aware of many ties East Germany maintained with organizations [and individuals] deemed in the West to be terrorist," including the German Red Army Faction, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatists, Carlos the Jackal, and Abu Nidal...
...In this case—as in all those Wolf cites— he merely discovered that the private intentions of Western governments were similar to their public ones...
...Wolf himself was convicted on that charge in 1993 for his stewardship of the HVA, but the verdict was overturned two years later on the not unreasonable ground that East Germany had been a different state...
...What's more, Communist spies, betrayed by their short hair and conventional behavior, found it impossible to pose convincingly as hippies...
...Wolf denies any direct involvement in these astonishing abuses, but he definitely exploited the other defining characteristic of espionage in the two Germâmes: The extent to which men and women on either side of the border were willing to commit treason...
...Günter Guillaume, for example, was an HVA operative placed as an aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt...
...How, one wonders, would the Communists have behaved if they had won the Cold War...
...His current (third) wife once spent four months in a Communist prison for trying to leave East Germany...
...Markus' father, Friedrich Wolf, evolved from an observant Jew into a nudist, a pacifist, a health nut, and finally an acolyte of Stalin...
...The opportunity to unite two of the world's oldest professions was created by Hitler's war, which thinned out a generation of young men in both parts of Germany...
...In any case...
...If Wolf is telling the truth, however, these efforts were not very rewarding...
...First there was the scale of its internal security operation: At the regime's end it had more than 100,000 informers and perhaps 80,000 full-time employees...
...No other country in the world has ever felt such a need to investigate itself...
...Known since 1956 as the Main Intelligence Directorate (or HVA, its German initials), it was led by Wolf from 1952 to 1986...
...A Marxist aristocrat loyal not only to his German comrades but also to the Soviet Union—Russian patronage "was an essential element in my career"—Wolf was drafted in 1951 into the East German foreign intelligence service, whose main target was of course West Germany...
...Very occasionally, the [East German] intelligence officers in Washington would pass on some fortuitously overheard remark by Presidents Reagan or Bush, a juicy piece of senatorial gossip, or the insights of a top industrialist...
...The HVA, Wolf writes, was the "Soviet bloc's best intelligence service"—an empty boast that reveals the folly of attaching great importance to information merely because it is secret...
...In Man Without a Face, Wolf says nothing about his separate conviction for abducting a defector from the Ministry of State Security, a translator employed by U.S...
...We knew this because Edward Lee Howard [an American turncoat] had worked on the East German desk...
...The HVA had a mere 5,000...
...Still, he "was excluded from important operational details" and never planned a terrorist act or dealt directly with those who committed them...
...A physician and a successful playwright, as well as the author of a best-selling book (Nature as Healer and Helper), Friedrich shamelessly cheated on his Christian wife Else, to whom he wrote in a poem, "And if I hated too much/And loved too wild, too free/Forgive me for being human/Sainthood was not forme...
...After the Wall went up, this became harder to do: The number of refugees fell, making them a good deal easier for Allied counterintelligence to screen...
...The author maintains that the real importance of international espionage was to keep each side informed about the other's real intentions...
...So it might be argued that the United States, at least, had to conduct secret intelligence operations there...
...After studying to be an aeronautical engineer, Wolf served in World War II with the Red Army and then became a journalist for Communist publications in his occupied homeland...
...In 1933 the Wolfs fled to the USSR, where Markus and his brother Konrad grew up speaking Russian and holding Soviet citizenship...
...Naturally, it is hard for the officials of a democratic state to keep its policies secret, but East Germany was far less open...
...Foreign intelligence, Wolf's domain, was a "more defensible sphere of activity," he argues, because its aims and methods were similar everywhere...
...and believed the policies of the Western Allies were only reinforcing it...
...By contrast, both the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic could appeal to German national sentiments—a confusion that made treason much easier to commit and much less sternly punished, particularly in the West...
...Wolf eventually tried the Romeo strategy in the United States, but it didn't work here: "By the 1980s American women were too emancipated to be easily wooed into marriage...
...Though as an apologia for "actually existing socialism" it is tepid and unconvincing, it is a fascinating autobiography of a man whose appearance was a mystery to his Western rivals until the late 1970s...
...The East Germans wanted to have eyes and ears in Brandt's office, Wolf says, because "he was one of the leading anti-Communists of the Cold War," and when he decided to open up relations "we had every reason to want to be absolutely sure that he really meant to be our partner and was no longer our enemy...
...When the state collapsed in 1989, he took part in a rally to demand democratic reform, but he is still, for some reason, a Marxist...
...Wolf does not specifically argue that officers of state—Pol Pot, for instance—should have absolute immunity for their official acts...
...Neither was it for Markus, the elder of his two sons, born in 1923 in a country town in southwestern Germany...
...This heritage of betrayal is still a bleeding wound...
...Yet the preservation of East Germany's secrets did not save the regime, and we American taxpayers are left to wonder if they were really worth the money we spent in our vain attempt to uncover them...
Vol. 80 • August 1997 • No. 13
