Markus Wolf - Biography, Cultural impact, Bibliography

German chief of secret police, born in Hechingen, SW Germany. He served as deputy minister and head of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung in the ministry for state security of the German Democratic Republic (1958–87). Following German reunification in 1990, he faced trial for his espionage activities during the Cold War, and in 1997 was given a two-year suspended prison sentence.

Markus Johannes "Mischa" Wolf (January 19, 1923 – November 9, 2006) was head of the General Reconnaissance Administration, the foreign intelligence division of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (MfS).

Biography

Born in Hechingen, Province of Hohenzollern (now Baden-Württemberg), Wolf was the son of the writer and physician Friedrich Wolf and brother of film director Konrad Wolf.

During his exile, he first attended the German Karl Liebknecht Schule and later a Russian school.

After the end of the war, he was sent to Berlin with the group around Walter Ulbricht to work as a journalist for a radio station in the Soviet Zone of occupation.

In 1953, at the age of 30, he was among the founding members of the foreign intelligence service within the ministry of state security. As intelligence chief, Wolf achieved great success in penetrating the government, political and business circles of West Germany with spies. 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.

He retired in 1986 in order to continue the work of his late brother Konrad in writing the story of their upbringing in Moscow in the 1930s.

Shortly before German reunification he fled the country, and sought political asylum in Russia and Austria. When denied, he returned to Germany where he was arrested by German police. Wolf claimed to have refused an offer from the Central Intelligence Agency to defect to the United States. This was later quashed by the Federal Criminal Court because Wolf was acting from the territory of the then-independent GDR.

Markus Wolf died in his sleep at his Berlin home on November 9, 2006.

Cultural impact

John le Carré's spymaster Karla who appears in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People was believed by some readers to be modeled on Wolf. However, the writer has repeatedly denied this, and did so once again when interviewed on the occasion of Wolf's death.

Bibliography

Wolf, Markus (with Anne McElvoy);