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| Markus Wold |
Wolf, the son of writer and physician Friedrich Wolf and brother of film director Konrad Wolf, fled as child in 1933 from the Nazi's and exiled to Moscow. After the war, he was sent to Berlin as journalist for the radio station in the Soviet Zone of occupation. As journalist, he followed the Nuremberg Trials against the Nazi leaders. In 1953, he was one of the founding members of the foreign intelligence service, a department of the ministry of state security, also called Stasi. As head of the HVA, Wolf developed the most effective secret service of the Cold War.
After retiring in 1986, he wrote a book which was originally a film project of his late brother Konrad, about Konrad and two friends, growing up in Moscow in the 1930's. Konrad joined the Sovjet Army, one friend the German Luftwaffe, and the third one joined the US forces. Still, after the war, the three friends meet again and keep contact. The book, Die Troika, a statement for friendship which also exposed the failure of communism, was published in East and West Germany. For the people in the East, Wolf, who supported the Glasnost and Perestroika, became a symbol of the ongoing changes in a country that rejected the changes in Eastern Europe.
Although Wolf headed only the foreign intelligence, one of many departments of Erich Mielke's Stasi, he became targeted as Stasi spy chief by the media during the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, Wolf was charged and sentenced in the reunified Germany with espionage, bribery and treason, but that conviction was later overturned and he received a suspended sentence on lesser charges.
In the book The Man Without a Face you can read about the years in Moscow, the developement of the most successfull spy agency of the Cold War, and lots of inside information on famous spy cases.
In Die Trojka you get a taste of the life in the pre-war Sovjet Union, and how friends got separated by Stalins abuse of communism.
The last book I got to read was In eigenem Auftrag: Bekenntnisse und Einsichten, Wolf's diary of 1989-1990, describing in detail the political collapse of East Germany and how the GDR government of Erich Honnecker lead the country, the SED party and socialism into the abyss by rejecting any changes in policy.
More books on intelligence are found in my Book Reviews.
There's a good two-part documentary about HVA Chief Markus Wolf. It's in German, but you can enable CC Subtitles
with Settings > Subtitles > Auto-translate > English.
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