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Title: Man Without A Face by Markus Wolf, Anne McElvoy, Marcus Wolf ISBN: 1891620126 Publisher: PublicAffairs Pub. Date: 01 July, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33
Rating: 3
Summary: Far From the Full Story
Comment: This book is basically the autobiography of Markus Wolf, who was the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service (their version of the KGB). The best parts of the book for me were the accounts of his organizations dealings with world wide terrorism and the trade craft his group used. The details of the Stasi and his work history seemed to me to be only presenting the most positive sides. He was the head of one of the nastiest groups out there during the cold war yet he tries to present the Stasi as closer to the CIA / FBI then the Nazi SS they were more like. I was also disappointed that there was really nothing all that new here. The book is well written and given this was his first book and there was a translation involved, I am sure the other writer did most of the heavy lifting. All in all this is not a bad book, but it is definitely not the definitive account of the Stasi.
Rating: 4
Summary: James Bond Bureaucrat
Comment: Markus Wolf has an amazing talent for telling stories, listing dates and names, while avoiding the more substantive issues of personal thoughts and feelings, motivations, and heart issues. He tells the stories of major events in his career as head of East German Intelligence, however he doesn't tell, on the whole, how these events made him feel, what the mood and tenor of discussions were as he and his colleagues planned drops/rescues/spy-baiting/blackmail, etc. Most of the information in the book is interesting, but not personal. It's a provocative read, and you won't be sorry you bought the book, but it just seems to lack that ineffable something that really makes the book a five-star read--a truly autobiographical perspective. It's a bit antiseptic. What you will read is a book that contains a perspective you will not read anywhere else. Wolf was shrewd and cunning and tireless and he writes what he knows. He did little first-hand field-work, but he did know how to manage an agency. If you want to see what administrating a Cold War spy agency was like from behind the curtain, then this is one of the few authentic books that will give you the perspective you desire. I would not want to be a NATO spy-master up against Wolf.
Rating: 5
Summary: Marcus Wolf, a mirror image of the Cold War
Comment: As any John le Carre fan knows, the master spy, code-named "Karla", who runs the East German Intelligence Service, is the nemesis of George Smiley's Circus. After all he turned the Circus' former head, Bill Hayward, into a mole and it is up to Smiley to pick up the pieces and continue the espionage duel and save the Free World.
Karla was modeled on Markus Wolf who was the former chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, part of the Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. Wolf was arguably the greatest spymaster of the 20th Century. Certainly, he made East Germany, which was a puppet of the Soviet Union, into an intelligence super-power on the level of Britain, France and West Germany, if not the United States, the Soviet Union or China.
Now Wolf has written his own memoirs. Naturally, like all such memoirs one has to read it with corrective lens and, where possible, cross-check from other sources but the book gives a fascinating insight into the heart of the Cold War from the other side.
There are several themes in Wolf's book that bear paying particular attention to. One is the hiring of ex- and not so ex-Nazis by the CIA and the West German Intelligence Service after World War II. This is well documented from other sources on the Western side. Operation Paperclip, The Belarus Project and the Klaus Barbie Affair have been exhaustively researched and material published over the last 20 years.
Another matter of vital concern is Wolf's insight into the infiltration of Western intelligence agencies. The Blount, Philby, Burgess and Maclean cases in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and the unmasking of Aldrich Ames and others in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s are the fruits of this infiltration. We now know that Wolf had completely penetrated West German intelligence and political agencies and his account of the Gunter Guillaume case (the aide to Willy Brandt, the former Mayor of West Berlin) is particularly revealing.
On a profounder and more philosophical level, Wolf's book deals with many of the political and moral issues of the 20th Century as explored by such writers as Andre Malraux and Albert Camus. Wolf, of course, is basically a bureaucrat and nowhere near as deep a thinker as these writers. He is an unrependent Communist and Marxist yet he touches the philosophical roots of political action. His story is at the heart of 20th Century politics from Hitler to Stalin to contemporary Consumer Capitalism and should be read by anyone interested in the history of the second half of the 20th Century.
Victor De Mattei
July 13, 1997
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Title: Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police by John O. Koehler ISBN: 0813337445 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: 2000 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945-1990, The by Mike Dennis, J.M. Dennis ISBN: 0582245621 Publisher: Longman Pub. Date: 13 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence by Abram N. Shulsky, Gary James Schmitt ISBN: 1574883453 Publisher: Brasseys, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas ISBN: 0312252846 Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback Pub. Date: 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency by James Bamford ISBN: 0140067485 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 1983 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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