Man Without A Face

For decades, Markus Wolf was known to Western intelligence officers only as "the man without a face." Now the legendary spymaster has emerged from the shadows to reveal his remarkable life of secrets, lies, and betrayals as head of the world's most formidable and effective foreign service ever. Wolf was undoubtedly the greatest spymaster of our century. A shadowy Cold War legend who kept his own past locked up as tightly as the state secrets with which he was entrusted, Wolf finally broke his silence in 1997. Man Without a Face is the result. It details all of Wolf's major successes and failures and illuminates the reality of espionage operations as few nonfiction works before it. Wolf tells the real story of Gunter Guillaume, the East German spy who brought down Willy Brandt. He reveals the truth behind East Germany's involvment with terrorism. He takes us inside the bowels of the Stasi headquarters and inside the minds of Eastern Bloc leaders. With its high-speed chases, hidden cameras, phony brothels, secret codes, false identities, and triple agents, Man Without a Face reads like a classic spy thriller—except this time the action is real.

In this fascinating and revealing autobiography, Markus Wolf, East Germany's chief foreign intelligence officer and foremost spymaster of the Eastern Bloc, tells his own dramatic story, a true thriller and a stunning examination of loyalty, betrayal, and the long shadow of history. 16 pp. of photos. 352 pp. Print ads. 50,000 print.

"A great autobiography by one of the most intriguing Cold Warriors...[containing] extraordinary revelations about the inner world of espionage." —Miami Herald

Library Journal

East Germany had one of the most successful intelligence services of the Communist bloc, headed by the notorious Wolf, rumored to be the model for John le Carr's evil Karla. Wolf (b. 1923) was trained by the Comintern in the 1930s as a Soviet agent after fleeing Hitler, and from 1952 to 1987 he led the foreign intelligence arm of the East German secret police (Stasi). In this memoir, he recounts the sex-for-information spy game, turf battles and bureaucratic inertia, covert warfare, his Western opponents, family problems, his flight to the Soviet Union in 1989 after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and his return to Germany in 1991. Wolf is proud of his professional career and still believes in the Socialist ideal but says (rather self-servingly) that the methods were all wrong. While Leslie Colitt's Spymaster (LJ 11/15/95) offers an insightful portrait of Wolf, this insider's look at the East German espionage community (complete with organizational charts of the East German government and Communist Party and the Ministry of State Security) is also recommended for public and academic libraries.Daniel K. Blewett, Loyola Univ. Lib., Chicago

Markus Wolf was the head of East Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service. Born in rural Western Germany in 1923, Wolf fled from the Nazis to the Soviet Union. He came of age in Moscow in the 1940s and was picked out by the Party to be returned to the war-ravaged Germany for its political restructuring. Wolf quickly rose through the ranks of East Germany's foreign intelligence operations. He left the Stasi in 1986, three years before its collapse. He passed away in 2006.