Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo.
Posted on 11/12/2006 9:45:00 AM PST by lizol
Markus Wolf, known as Cold War spymaster, dies at age 83
By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times
Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo.
WARSAW, Poland — Markus Wolf, the spymaster who epitomized Cold War espionage as head of the brutal and inventive East German foreign-intelligence service, died Thursday at his Berlin home. He was 83. The cause of death was not announced.
Suave and elusive, Mr. Wolf was such an enigma that Western intelligence agencies didn't know exactly what he looked like during tense decades when a divided Germany was a haven for agents and double agents in a war for information between Moscow and Washington, D.C. He was known as the "Man Without a Face," which later became the title for his autobiography.
He oversaw 4,000 spies, many of whom infiltrated West Germany's police and military and corporations such as Siemens and IBM.
One of his biggest intelligence coups was planting Gunter Guillaume as an aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Guillaume was found out, forcing Brandt to resign in 1974. Mr. Wolf also ran "Romeo" agents, who seduced government secretaries for files and documents.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Notice the admiration for this bastard in the tone of the author.
Long faces at the Seattle Times.
What makes him a bastard? He was a master in the second oldest profession on the planet.
Yes, he was a master in the service of evil. And the commies are saddened at his passing.
See post #7. That poster nails it.
How do you feel about Nazi spies?
Commies should rot in Hell.
I wasn't making any judgment on his politics. Just his profession. From what I've read, spies have a lot of respect for eachother.
He sort of looks like one of my all time favorite actors in that pic - - Max Van Sydow.
Markus Wolf had a good relationship with Vladimir Putin.
But its OK to admire general Rommel? was he not serving The Satan himself?
No! Can't be! (sarcasm)
Good old Markus. He was an advisor to the DHS on security matters along with another KGB general.
Rommel was an honorable soldier who fought for Germany, in uniform, in two World Wars [won the Pour le Merite in WW1].
If you want someone in Germany to compare Wolf to, try Walter Schellenberg, or his master, Reinhardt Heydrich.
Admiration for Rommel is like admiring any dead historical military strategist. One is removed from the idealogy of the uniform and merely examines tactics and execution.
One does not find such seperation in the Cold War, where the enemy engaged in a war on a different playing field entirely, one not of our own making nor one we wish to emulate.
I like to think of this guy as the mastermind of a Orwelian society so vast, that the foundations of his headquarters was sacked uncovering the network of spying and ratting out one's neighbors to such a degree that the whole East German society was one large penal colony.
And that's only what we now know. If that's not in the service of evil, I don't know what is.
Ah, his decades of life covered interesting times, scenarios straight out of a James Bond novel.
We will be living with the results of this fellow's life work for decades to come. To a very great degree the antiwar movements were dependent for formation and guidance on puppet masters such as this one. To a very great degree the current leftwing bent of the media, both domestic and international, reflects their attitudes, parrots their catchphrases, and follows their carefully crafted scripting. There are college students wearing berets who think their ideologies original. They aren't. The sources were, however, so carefully hidden that they still function to poison the bloodstream of intellectual life to this day.
It's actually a pretty nasty legacy. I'm sure, however, that it was left in the name of "higher truths." What a pity he wasn't a farmer.
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