GERMANY: Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster whose penetration of Willy Brandt's inner circle brought down the West German leader, has died in Berlin aged 83.
In a Cold War career spanning four decades, Wolf built up a network of 4,000 East German spies in the West that rivalled that of the KGB and took credit for "perfecting the use of sex in spying".
His greatest coup was planting the agent Günter Guillaume as an aide to chancellor Willy Brandt; Guillaume's exposure forced Brandt's resignation in 1974.
For decades Wolf was known as "the man without a face" because no recent photo of him existed in Western intelligence files, a notoriety that ended in 1979 when a surreptitious photo taken in Sweden was splashed on the cover of Der Spiegel magazine.
Wolf was born in southwestern Germany in 1923 and, a year after Hitler seized power in 1933, emigrated to the Soviet Union with his mother and Jewish doctor father, a member of the Communist Party.
There, "Mischa" Wolf learnt fluent Russian and studied engineering before returning to Berlin in 1945 in the entourage of future East German leader Walter Ulbricht. He reported on the Nuremberg trials and became a founding member of East German intelligence in 1953.
Wolf channelled his own appeal to the opposite sex into the so- called Romeo method, encouraging East German agents to be befriend lonely secretaries of high- ranking West German officials, often with impressive results.
"The link between espionage and romance is no invention of mine . . . but if I go down in espionage history it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying," he wrote in his memoir. "Contrary to the wilder rumours, they were not schooled in the ars amatoria back in East Berlin."
Wolf's support for the glasnost policy emerging from Moscow contributed to his retirement in 1987. In 1989 he was booed off stage at public demonstrations, ending his brief idea of running for president of a democratic East Germany.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall he refused a CIA approach to work for US intelligence under a new identity in California.
Months later, he fled from Berlin to Moscow and then unsuccessfully sought political asylum in Austria before surrendering to German authorities.
Several court cases ended in convictions but did little to put Wolf behind bars. He became a familiar face on the chat-show circuit, particularly after the publication of his 1997 memoir.
"I never knowingly betrayed my ideals," he wrote, but admits he spent life in East German intelligence supporting and "watching the abuse of power practised in the name of the socialist ideal in which I still believe".
He died at home in his sleep yesterday, the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.