Markus Wolf, with Anne McElvoy: Man Without a Face. The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster. NY: Random House/Times Books, 1997. 367 pp. ill.
Man Without a Face is one of the best books I have read this year. I enjoyed it so much, I wish it had been longer. Most of this review will consist of selected passages with brief comments, so that readers may judge for themselves. At the end I will address what I regard as the book’s shortcomings.
Since Wolf’s own family had escaped from Nazi Germany only to land in the USSR during the height of Stalin’s terror, why wasn’t he disgusted by the purges? “We German Communists had perhaps the most complete blind spot of all the foreigners in Moscow about Stalin’s crimes, since we had been rescued from death or imprisonment in Germany by the Soviet Union. Any other doubts about what was going on were overshadowed by events under Hitler’s brutal regime, and I was incapable of seeing our socialist system as a tyranny. For me and my generation of Communists, it had been a liberating force. There was perhaps a rough streak in its methods, but we always felt that it was essentially a force for good and it would have been futile to try convincing me otherwise.” (pg. 37)
Though aware of reports of “the rape and pillage that had accompanied the Red Army’s march to Berlin,” this was something he and his friends were unable to discuss freely. (pg. 39) He repressed all doubts for ideological reasons. Self-censorship became a habit that lasted for years. He admits that he “overlooked, minimized, or rationalized” Communist transgressions throughout most of his career. (pg. 40)
Besides, Wolf and his circle could always point to the unspeakable horrors of the Nazis to justify or explain away the lesser horrors of their own. In this context, it is worth noting that he attended the Nuremberg trials as a reporter, though he does not say much about what he learned there. He does admit that in September 1945: “We were very slow… to see that the unique dimension of the slaughter of the Jews was at the heart of National Socialism.” (pg. 41)
“We never came to terms with the scale of the lies perpetrated in the Soviet Union of the twenties and the thirties; consequently we could not recognize the lies, half truths and vendettas that accompanied our attempt to secure the Soviet Union’s strategic gains in Eastern Europe.” (pg. 57f.) Note that in that sentence, he uses the word “lies” twice. But on the very next page he qualifies that, saying: “I still refuse to accept the judgmental stance of those who say our system was built only on the Lie, but I have to admit that it was, in great part, built on excuses.” (pg. 58) I believe this provides a key insight into his mentality. Later, he accepts “responsibility” for abuses, but not guilt. “This is a moral distinction that I hope readers will accept in the interest of coming to terms with the excesses of the time.” (pg. 251)
How did he manage to be so successful at recruiting West Germans to work for the Stasi? “Westerners liked being courted by an espionage service, and the more lavish the welcome, the greater the chance they would feel flattered and respond positively. If one of my agents in West Germany had maneuvered himself close to a political, diplomatic, or business figure in Bonn and invited him for a drink or a meal, he wanted a restaurant with class – not too flashy or fashionable but the sort of good, solid place that suggests sound money and refined taste. The wine would have to be serious, too. Any well-placed Westerner thinking about offering secrets to us had to feel that he was dealing with a reliable, well-funded enterprise. I would never have dreamed of doing things on a shoestring like some of my Soviet counterparts, whose meanness with money was legendary and whose manners often revealed their limited horizons.” (pg. 118f)
Kim Philby, too, commented on the boorish behavior of Soviet agents – in fact, during his years in Moscow, the seminars he gave them on conspiratorial technique included lessons on proper manners.
Money, of course, played a role in this hidden world as well. “The calculus was cold and simple: We traded people for goods, which we could then use ourselves or resell for hard currency. Between 1964 and 1990 the GDR released over 33,000 political prisoners and over 215,000 citizens to reunify families, and received payments from the West of more than 3.4 billion deutschmarks.” (pg. 120) I recall at the time the financial incentives were downplayed by both sides, while the humanitarian aspects were highlighted.
A chapter that has naturally attracted a lot of attention is the one on Romeos, the agents who infiltrated their targets by befriending lonely secretaries in Bonn. Little is said, alas, about their training. And what we do learn is disappointing, “Contrary to the wilder rumors, they were not schooled in the ars amatoria back in East Berlin. Some were better than others at this sort of thing. They were sharp operators who realized that a lot can be done with sex.” (pg. 135) And again: “The Romeos I have described in this chapter were not experienced Don Juans, much less Adonises. They were ordinary men who might pass by on the street without attracting a second look.” (pg. 149)
But it was possible to win cooperation using neither money nor sex. “The wiser Soviet recruiters realized that in fishing for potential moles in the West, they had to bear in mind that other factors [besides money] are always at work. One of these is what I liked to call the erotic appeal of the East. By this I do not mean the prostitutes and pornographic videos occasionally supplied to help visitors pass their time, but the prickling excitement they seemed to feel at being received and feted on the other side of the Iron Curtain.” (pg. 206) Exactly – the Stasi were experts at coupling the erotic and the exotic.
In part, this book is a cautionary tale. It warns against overreliance on espionage as a guarantee of eventual victory in any prolonged conflict. The West’s moral advantage, he acknowledges, far outweighed the East’s superiority when it came to espionage technique. Occupying the high ground in the ethical battle proved decisive. “No amount of expertise on our part in planning, diplomacy, or the darker arts of espionage could have prevented that,” i.e., the eventual outcome of the Cold War. (pg. 122)
When it comes to the matter of maintaining one’s mental equilibrium in this world of mirrors, he offers this advice: “In order to reach the goals that have been set for him, an agent above all must preserve under the skin into which he has slipped the convictions that led him to the job in the first place.” (pg. 168) Unfortunately he does not give any practical recommendations on how to do this – how to keep one’s convictions when the means seem so blatantly to contradict the ends. The difficulty of doing so is what leads to cynicism among many agents and former agents, from John le Carré to John Hadden (Conversations With a Masked Man). Here Timothy Garton Ash’s advice is worth remembering: “… not only do the ends have to be good, the means must also be proportional to those ends. There is no simple rule about what justifies what. Each case is different, in each there is an invisible line.” (The File, pg. 235f)
Wolf says that the idea of spreading fake propaganda in the West was encouraged by Soviet sponsors, who “would have been happy to see us actually promoting neo-Nazi rallies for the sake of embarrassing West Germany.” (pg. 239) It is unlikely that this strategy has gone away and been forgotten with the end of the USSR; such passages could well cast an interesting light on the rise of the so-called alt-right in the most recent elections.
If people generally have “a fatal desire to tell the truth” even when it hurts them, this is especially true of Americans. As he observes, “America is a confessional society,” which makes it difficult, for example, for agents there to conceal their undercover activity from their spouses. (pp. 278, 292)
Many Yanks are by nature gregarious, and this was something the Stasi was able to take advantage of. “Unlike the English and French, who tended to keep to themselves during their postings, the Americans were usually happy to make friends and had fewer reservations about following up an invitation from a relative stranger for a drink, a meal, and a chat about life as an American in Europe. We also found that the Americans had a more pronounced inclination to make a quick dollar in unconventional ways. The Soviets, far more experienced than we, maintained that material interest, as they put it, was very often the reason Americans agreed to help a foreign power, even if they had plenty of money to start with. We noticed that when American officers tried to tempt East Germans into cooperating with the CIA, one of their first steps was to offer large sums of money, whereas in our recruiting we continued to play on ideology or, sometimes, motives of revenge. Only when that failed, or if it was clear from the start that the would-be recruit was out of money, did we offer it.” (pg. 293)
When he addressed the throng on Alexanderplatz, November 4, 1989, he indulged in the fantasy of an independent East German state that would be viable without walls. “I still believed that the GDR could be – at least for a substantial period of time – preserved separately from the West with a government incorporating socialist beliefs but permitting far greater freedom of speech, assembly, and property. I tried to persuade the half million at the rally and the millions more watching on television not to resort to violence, but as I spoke, protesting the atmosphere of incrimination that made every member of the state security organizations scapegoats of the policies of the former leadership, I was dimly aware that parts of the crowd were hissing me. They were in no mood to be lectured on reasonable behavior by a former general of the Ministry of State Security.”
In the crunch, it always comes down to a binary choice. Either/or. Graham Greene had shown in The Quiet American that it was a deadly American illusion to believe that there could be some third way; when Wolf addressed the crowd on Alex, he apparently had forgotten this lesson. He rarely let sentiment cloud his thinking to such an extent. How did the man who had the wisdom to step down from his post four years before the end of the GDR, an development which no one at the time foresaw, fail to anticipate that any advice he could give on the future form of government would be greeted with skepticism?
His analysis of the ills of Western society is also worth pondering. “In the Eastern bloc, the abuse of power began by manipulating ideas; in capitalist countries, the idea of personal freedom often merely serves as a disguise for business interests. Perhaps this is why, even in the nations that ‘won’ the Cold War, so many citizens are unhappy and cynical about the role of political systems in solving problems.” (pg. 348)
The only serious difficulties I have come at the end, where one finds passages that are the least satisfactory in the book. After confessing to many bad things he did, Wolf finds it galling to be accused of other things he did not in fact do. He acts a little aggrieved that he was, in his view, unjustly tarred by association with Erich Mielke, the overall Stasi boss, insisting that he worked in a completely, totally different part of the organization – the good Stasi, as it were. It’s telling that while he finds kind words for his CIA counterpart Gus Hathaway, he has none for his own superior. Always at pains to differentiate himself from Mielke and his bad Stasi, he declares he had nothing to do with internal surveillance or any of his colleague’s other unsavory practices. When he wraps things up in the final pages, he has not a word to spare on Mielke’s fate; his former boss was sentenced to six years for a murder he had committed many decades earlier and ended up serving more than four – does Wolf regard that as undeserved too?
Wolf sounds genuinely hurt that his friends in Moscow did little to help him when the GDR collapsed. Apparently he listened to enough toasts swearing eternal solidarity that he began to believe them. One would have thought his long professional experience would have taught him to be more cynical and not expect much assistance when the crunch came. At times, he seems to feel that the worst thing that happened was being let down by people he thought were his friends.
He also seems disappointed, even surprised to discover that his fellow Stasi agents, who betrayed secrets before the Wall came down, began to betray each other afterwards. Did he really expect spies to stand up and do the right thing if it meant risking their own necks? To be significantly better than the mass of their fellow countrymen? His whole career was built on getting people to violate their solemn oaths of secrecy – and now he’s dismayed when it happens to him? It’s almost touching to hear him complain that “the honor I had believed to be invulnerable in my service had not stood the test of different times.” (pg. 338)
As John le Carré said in 2019: “If you’re putting together a secret service you’re looking for people who can charm, who can persuade, and who are not burdened with too much moral sense. People are naturally larcenous and sufficiently hypocritical to appear virtuous and loyal, so actually you are looking for people who are almost by definition capable of betraying you.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/11/john-le-carre-truth-was-what-you-got-away-with
Wolf laments developments that have “made victims of us all,” as he wrote to one of his spies, then imprisoned in West Germany. (pg. 334) After some three hundred pages spent chronicling his successes in this murky world, it never occurs to him that it might be unseemly for him to play the innocent, that this is a role for which he might be miscast. He genuinely seems to think there should have been no tribunals organized by the victors at the end of the Cold War – as though his side would have been magnanimous and forgiving, had the tables been turned. “There are to be victors and vanquished,” he complained to the Federal Prosecutor in the Karlsruhe courtroom. Did he seriously expect otherwise? He backed a losing horse but still seemed to expect a medal because he rode it so professionally. It would better behoove him to take his lumps, even if he privately feels his punishment is unjust. Lay out the facts and let readers come to that conclusion on their own, if they are so inclined. “You choose your side once and for all – of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.” (Graham Greene: The Confidential Agent)
In sum, there is a lot of wisdom here, if not necessarily truth. Markus Wolf ultimately proved to be the GDR’s rough counterpart to Albert Speer – an articulate, urbane, well-mannered man who put his considerable talents to work for a state that in many respects did not deserve such devotion.
Some bibliographical matters: The German title of Man Without a Face is Spionagechef im geheimen Krieg (literally: “Espionage Chief in Secret War”). Strangely enough, the German edition is not in fact the original; the book was first published in English, and the German version which came out somewhat later does not contain all the material in the English. For example, Chapter 13 “Terrorism and the GDR” is omitted in the German edition. It is however erroneous to claim, as Regine Igel does, that the German version is a translation of the English. (See Telepolis, 17 Februar 2010, “Offene Worte von Markus Wolf…”) As the title page quite clearly says, the book was written by Markus Wolf “with Anne McElvoy,” a columnist for The Guardian who also translated another work by Wolf, Memoirs of a Spymaster: The Man Who Waged a Secret War Against the West (1998). According to an early report on Man Without a Face, “German publishers have refused to buy the book, citing what one called their ‘political and moral responsibility’ not to contribute to his rehabilitation.” (Stephen Kinzer: “Ex-East German Spymaster Finds Polishing His Image is Hard,” NY Times December 8, 1995) They later changed their minds and brought out the German edition. Could financial considerations have perhaps outweighed qualms about moral responsibility?
The memoirs of two other Stasi generals, Josef Schwarz (Bis zum bitteren Ende, 1994) and Werner Großmann (Bonn im Blick. Die DDR-Aufklärung aus der Sicht ihres letzten Chefs, 2001), also are full of complaints about having been betrayed by Gorbachev and their Soviet friends. Where Wolf, as already noted, takes pains to separate his department from the rest of the Ministry for State Security, as though it existed as some kind of separate entity with its own norms, Großmann freely admits that the various branches worked hand in glove.
Man Without a Face is well edited and translated, so there are only a few errors worth noting. Losecaat van Nouhuys appears twice in the – unusually thorough – index, first with the given name Hans, then Heinz, though clearly there is only one individual involved; Brecht’s play Die Maßnahme is usually rendered in English as The Measures Taken, plural, not The Measure Taken (pg. 233); Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was head of the Free Democrats, not the “Center Party” (pg. 248); “Verzeiht, Dass Ich ein Mensch in” is a less than completely accurate rendering of the title of Friedrich Wolf’s poem “Verzeiht, dass ich ein Mensch bin” (pg. 322); the best translation of Rechtsstaat is probably not a “just state” but something like a “state under the rule of law,” though I concede that this translation would spoil the contrast Wolf wants to make with an “unjust state” (Unrechtsstaat) – the word play here is untranslatable. (pg. 340)
Of related interest elsewhere at this site: Stefan Heym’s Collin, which features a character based on Erich Mielke; another, called “Bergmann,” is based on Markus Wolf himself, described as follows: “You can easily visualize him as a top manager in a big corporation – well-groomed, astute, matter of fact, and with a sixth sense for what goes on in other people’s minds…” (The name “Bergmann” may suggest that he is a climber.) Also see the review of Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy, in which Wolf’s successor Werner Großmann makes an appearance.
© Hamilton Beck
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