WITH perhaps a Germanic lack of irony, Markus Wolf can write this of the spy George Blake:
"The peculiar sadness of Blake's fate is that he lost his homeland, not just once, when he fled England, but twice, when the Soviet Union collapsed and he was left to live out a withdrawn life in an adopted homeland that had abandoned his cause."
This from a man who has felt the ground repeatedly shifting beneath him and has had swiftly to move on; first as a child from 1930s Germany to the Soviet Union (his father was Jewish and a Communist), more recently from the German Democratic Republic, then from Moscow, finally and briefly from neutral Austria; who was betrayed by his beau ideal, Gorbachev, declining to rescue Wolf's agents cut adrift in the West; and who finally put up his hands and resignedly accepted the reality of the New World Order.
Not that Wolf has himself led a withdrawn life since the collapse. He has been hauled before the German courts on a charge of high treason, been sentenced to six years in prison, and then seen that verdict (rightly) overturned by the Constitutional Court - "Hitler's long shadow was one of the reasons I agreed to the idea of working for a secret service. This was not treason."
And he has been brought face to face with the myth that grew up around him in the West over his 34 years as head of the HVA, East Germany's foreign intelligence service: "legendary", "suave", "the spider at the centre of the web", "the model for le Carro's Karla", blab blah. These memoirs do much to fill in the true features of the Man Without A Face a process that began when he stood up with New Forum in the dying months of the GDR and courageously, if ultimately futilely, called for the reform of a system that he had long come to see as corrupt and self-defeating.
He quotes Brecht: "What baseness would you not commit/To stamp out baseness?", and speaks, in a happy phrase, of "the net of ideology in my mind". And he admits to the inner emigration of so many of his fellow- citizens ("I also had my niche and, paradoxical as it may sound, that niche was my service") and to the wilfully averted eye in the greater cause. The Party was the god-head, beside the paramountcy of which everything else, including humanity, took an inferior place.
Though almost entirely removed operationally from the repressive excesses of the internal security apparatus, the Stasi, Wolf's own service did unpleasant things that he regrets and others that he defends, and in that, of course, it was no different from other such agencies. Spying has always been a dirty game, and will continue to be so.
BUT, given that, there is no question that Wolf was, professionally, the best spymaster in the Warsaw Pact, and probably in a wider arena. And for connoisseurs of intelligence operations, there is much diverting material here about honey-traps and Romeo agents, espionage coups and disasters against the opposition (almost invariably West Germany, where he ran 4,000 spies).
One amusing, and illustrative, disclosure he makes is that he, chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate" of the German Democratic Republic, was not informed in advance of plans for the Berlin Wall, and awoke on the morning of August 13th, 1961, to hear on the radio that the workers' shock troops were already uncoiling the barbed wire and mortaring the breeze- blocks. This he ascribes to malice on the part of the head of the Stasi, the old Stalinist Erich Mielke, with whom he had a reciprocally spiky relationship.
But it is in its revelations of Wolf's moral relativism and his present- day agonising reappraisal of it that the meat of the book lies. He notes candidly: "Using the powerful instrument of the State Security Service against citizens holding different opinions, or those who sought to leave their own unloved country, was tantamount to trampling on the ideals of Communism's founders. Thus the chances of reform had been wasted, and our own responsibility and guilt by default remain a tormenting burden to this day."
If is striking how often the words "moral" and "morality" flow from his pen, and there is no doubt that this is an admirably, and for him painfully, honest account of an idealism disillusioned, yet still strongly held. The question that no one can answer is: is his socialist Utopianism still realisable, or does it contain - within itself the gene of its own destruction?