East German spy is dead

last updated 8 January 2015

Berlin

The communist world's most famous and successful spymaster, Markus Wolf, has died at the age of 83. Known as "the man without a face" because Western agencies couldn't get a photo of him, Wolf was the longtime leader of East Germany's feared Stasi secret intelligence agency. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Wolf planted some 4,000 agents in the West, one of them a top aide to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Most of his spies were "Romeo agents," good-looking men who seduced secretaries in Western government offices and got them to turn over documents. "If I go down in espionage history," Wolf said in his memoir, "it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying." Fictional spy chief Karla, the villain in many John le Carré novels, is widely believed to be based on Wolf.