TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.0 KB | 286 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 24

Tales of a Master Spy From the Other Side


The former chief of East German intelligence and the model for
John le Carre's Karla, MARKUS WOLF talks about espionage in
the bad old days of the cold war, why he returned from Moscow
to face possible imprisonment and what he likes best about his
favorite spy novelist

By DANIEL BENJAMIN and JAMES O. JACKSON/BERLIN and Markus Wolf


    Q. You worked for the East German foreign intelligence
agency for more than three decades. What were your U.S.
operations like?

    A. Our work concentrated mainly on U.S. targets in West
Germany and in West Berlin. It was only at a relatively late
stage that we began to establish contacts within the U.S. Our
initial efforts were to send in so-called sleepers, or
undercover agents. Unfortunately, the first one was uncovered,
and he revealed everything he knew. This was a major setback.
After the German Democratic Republic opened its embassies in
Washington and at the United Nations, we established contacts,
but most of the material we managed to obtain by these sources
was legal or semilegal. It was not top-secret information. If
you are wondering whether we had contacts on a very high level
-- no, there was no American Senator or higher official on our
payroll.


    Q. Were you really so unsuccessful?

    A. In the 1950s and 1960s we did have a very good source
in the American mission in West Berlin -- a German in the
political section. So I don't want to present a picture of us
being completely harmless. But except for this, I believe I do
not merit praise for our work in the U.S.


    Q. Are the rumors true that you recruited high-ranking
West Germans as your agents?

    A. Last year I was informed that a letter had been sent by
the last East German government to the West German side giving
a guarantee that in the last few years there was no agent
activity above the level of ministry director [the top
civil-service rank]. There have been questions about whether
a state secretary [the level just below Cabinet rank] was
involved. There wasn't.


    Q. Are any of the estimated 400 ex-agents who have not yet
been uncovered working now for the KGB or another spy service?

    A. Where that 400 figure comes from is a mystery to me.
But I can say that I did not pass on a single one to the KGB,
nor did my successor. The head of the intelligence service in
the Soviet Union would not want to continue any form of
contact. The risk would be too great. One cannot rule out,
however, that some adventurers might try to profit from their
knowledge.


    Q. Do you merit praise for work elsewhere?

    A. The most important reason for the successes of our
intelligence service was that I focused our activities on West
Germany and West Berlin. Once the G.D.R. began opening
embassies, we had more contacts in more countries, but I tried
to avoid too great a fragmentation of our activities.


    Q. Which intelligence service do you rate the most
successful?

    A. The U.S. services could draw upon knowledge they gained
in West Germany and West Berlin. At least in quantitative
terms, I could say that they were successful. As far as quality
is concerned, I don't know. We had considerable success against
the West German intelligence services, as the heads of those
services themselves have confirmed. I probably know less than
you about Mossad or the British intelligence services.


    Q. Just before unification between East and West Germany
last year, you took refuge in the Soviet Union. Why have you
returned to Germany, where you may be held accountable for your
actions as head of the East German foreign intelligence service?

    A. I am not very happy with the situation. But this is the
reality, and I have to live with it. I could have been given
asylum in the Soviet Union -- I have friends there -- but I
wanted to live in Germany. My parents, my brother and I left for
11 years during the Nazi era. I did not want to be an emigre for
a second time.


    Q. Your return was prompted by the failed Soviet coup in
August, was it not?

    A. My decision had nothing directly to do with the coup.


    Q. Did you feel you would be in danger if you remained in
Moscow?

    A. No I didn't. The situation was anarchic, and nobody
seemed to be in control. But I did not want to make myself a
burden for the Soviet Union, for Russia or for the people who
would turn out to be the leaders of this emerging country. I
considered myself a guest. I did not want to cause any trouble.


    Q. Doesn't it seem ironic to you that you are free on bail
because of the liberal laws of a country you tried to undermine?

    A. We will have to wait for the decision of the Federal
Constitutional Court to find out if I and the other members of
my service go free, and whether the court will impose severe
sentences upon the people who worked for us within West Germany.
Should this happen, it would be a heavy moral burden for me. I
believe that the way they are treated should reflect the end of
the cold war.


    Q. What do you mean by "moral burden"?

    A. I believe that many of our agents in the West were
there because of a conviction that what we were doing was right,
not because of money or blackmail. It would not be logical for
the heads of the service to go free while those who believed in
the Warsaw Pact and what we were doing went to prison. In the
past, when agents were arrested, we tried to arrange exchanges
for them, but suddenly this is no longer possible.


    Q. If the shoe were on the other foot and we were all now
living under East German law, what would have happened to West
German agents who had infiltrated your service?

    A. It is a paradox when the person who was head of the
subdivision under me for counterintelligence is standing trial
in Munich together with an agent who infiltrated the West German
federal intelligence service. It is the job of an intelligence
service to infiltrate the services of other countries. And if
a person succeeds in this, he should not be condemned under laws
in a new country for actions undertaken under laws that were
valid in his country. I cannot accept the idea of good and bad,
black and white, that East Germany was an illegal state and West
Germany was a constitutional one. It is hard for me to say what
would have happened if the situation had been reversed.
Important West German agents would not, I believe, have remained
in that kind of united Germany.


    Q. Did you aid Abu Nidal, Carlos, the Red Army Faction and
other international terrorists?

    A. Our agency and I myself had nothing to do with the Red
Army Faction. The P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat were recognized by
East Germany as representing a state, and there were agreements
on military and security training. We provided some of that
training, but at no time did our agency work on terrorist
activities. I cannot say anything definitive about the Ministry
of State Security as a whole, but I can say that every effort
was made to avoid terrorist activities being initiated from East
Germany. It has become known that Arab individuals did prepare
certain activities in East Germany that were then carried out
in West Berlin.


    Q. You are referring to the bombing of La Belle
discotheque in Berlin [in 1986, killing three people, including
two U.S. soldiers]?

    A. Yes, La Belle. This is one example. But I do not
believe that the Ministry of State Security or the foreign
intelligence agency was informed in advance about it. After the
bombing they were able to reconstruct what happened.


    Q. You come from a family of intellectuals. Did you and
your late brother Konrad [a leading East German filmmaker]
become so involved with the system that you became totally blind
to its faults?

    A. This is, for me, the central question, more important
than even the criminal prosecution that I may be facing. Nobody
who had a prominent position can be free of responsibility for
the wrongs that occurred and for the failure of the experiment
of socialism on German territory. My father, who died in 1953,
believed in this experiment. Some people have asked how someone
who had experienced the Moscow trials of the 1930s could remain
silent. I believe that one develops an ability to ignore, an
ability that my brother and I developed. We believed that in our
own areas of work -- my brother in the arts, I in the
intelligence service -- we could achieve something. We simply
ignored what was happening around us. In the years before my
brother's death [in 1982], I began to reflect more deeply. We
did not use the word Stalinism to describe it, but we did
believe that the socialist system had been deformed. We wanted
to introduce reforms similar to those of Gorbachev in the Soviet
Union -- glasnost and perestroika. It was at this time that my
opposition to the regime began.


    Q. In what way?

    A. With my first book, Troika, in which I tried to present
ideals of humanism or tolerance. I am working on another book
to try to examine what happened and why and also to examine our
responsibility. Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Yeltsin were
fortunate in that they had an opportunity to reflect on what had
happened and also to introduce reforms. We had no opportunity
to prove that we too could learn from the past. But we did in
fact want to move along a path toward democracy.


    Q. Do you still consider yourself a communist?

    A. Yes. When one is as old as I, one does not easily
change one's ideological hats. My father, who had a Jewish
bourgeois background, became a pacifist after his experience in
World War I. He soon saw that after the failure of the
revolution in Germany in 1918, society could only be changed if
a communist ideology were adopted. I believe that mankind's
striving for justice and freedom led to the creation of the
communist ideology. I reject what always has been a central
issue in communism: power, the struggle to obtain it and to keep
it. I believe that this is one of the main reasons for the
failure of the communist system.


    Q. What do you think when you look at a united Germany and
the demise of East Germany?

    A. I do not wish to turn back the clock, but I, like many
other people living in this part of united Germany, am not happy
about the way the unification took place. I do not believe that
the state and society in which I am now living have discovered
absolute truth. I do not believe that this society will be able
to solve the major problems facing mankind either in Germany or
elsewhere. Communism and socialism have been so compromised that
an alternative left-wing movement has been fragmented and
deprived of its inherent force. I do not expect to live to see
the emergence of a new alternative, but I do still believe one
will develop to correct the dark sides of this society.


    Q. Among readers of spy novels you may be better known as
Karla than as Markus Wolf. Have you read the novels of John le
Carre? Do you see yourself in his Karla character?

    A. At first I had read only The Spy Who Came In from the
Cold, but now I have read some others as well. I am not sure
that I am the model for Karla. Maybe I will have a chance to
put that question to Mr. Le Carre.


    Q. When do you expect to meet him?

    A. I am not sure. Some TV people are planning something.
I am not pushing for it, but it may happen. I have been reading
his books, and Tom Clancy's too. I'm trying to read Clancy in
English to improve my command of the language, and maybe we can
have a talk sometime.


    Q. What do you think of the Le Carre novels? Are they
realistic?

    A. Yes, especially his first book. The classic espionage
book for me is Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. That is the
best. I recently read Le Carre's The Russia House, and I have
some criticism. If we had done it together, I think it would
have been better.