Markus Wolf

Markus Wolf   (Spook)
Born	19 January 1923 Hechingen, Province of Hohenzollern, German Reich
Died	9 November 2006 (Age 83) Berlin, Germany
Alma mater	Moscow Aviation Institute
Parents	Friedrich Wolf
Interests	Cold War
Spook who ran foreign intelligence of the STASI for some 34 years  Spook  In office 1951 - 1986 Employer STASI

Markus Johannes Wolf (also known as Mischa) was head of the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung), the foreign intelligence division of East Germany's Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, abbr. MfS, commonly known as the Stasi). He was the Stasi's number two for 34 years, which spanned most of the Cold War. For most of his career Wolf was known as "the man without a face" due to his elusiveness. It was reported that Western agencies did not know what the East German spy chief looked like until 1978, when he was photographed by Säpo, Sweden's National Security Service, during a visit to Stockholm, Sweden. An East German defector, Werner Stiller, then identified Wolf to West German counter-intelligence as the man in the picture.

Background

His father was Jewish and a member of the Communist Party of Germany who after 1933 emigrated to Moscow with his son.

During his exile, Wolf first attended the German Karl Liebknecht School and later a Russian school. In 1936, at the age of 13, he obtained Soviet identity documents. He was a citizen of Germany, the Soviet Union (USSR) and, later, East Germany (GDR).

Career

The East German Head of Intelligence - East Germany Investigated", 2024

After the war he was sent to Berlin with the Ulbricht Group, led by Walter Ulbricht, to work as a journalist for a radio station in the Soviet Zone of occupation. He was among those journalists who observed the entire Nuremberg trials against the principal Nazi leaders. Between 1949 and 1951 Wolf worked at the East German embassy in the Soviet Union. That same year he joined the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

HVA and MfS (Stasi)

Full article: Stasi

In December 1952, at the age of 29, Wolf was among the founding members of the foreign intelligence service within the Ministry for State Security. As intelligence chief, he achieved great success in penetrating the government, political and business circles of West Germany with spies. He had around 4000 spies under his control, the most notable individual in this regard was Günter Guillaume, who was secretary to and close friend of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and whose exposure as an East German agent led to Brandt's resignation in 1974.

Support for "terrorism"

According to an article from the Washingtonpost, based on reports by an unnamed defector, Wolf until 1986 was responsible for Department III which allegedly supported "terrorism" in what the GDR considered the non-socialist economic area (Nicht-Sozialistische Wirtschaftsgebiet NSW), which were countries that were not a member of Comecon, especially in the Arab world and had all information about "terrorism" sent directly to him. "Terrorists" who received training from Stasi at training camps in the GDR were from countries which were supportive of the GDR including Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, South Yemen and Palestinians and all of whom stored very large caches of arms and explosives at their embassies in the GDR. Although the GDR provided direct support to these main countries, the Soviet Union's KGB required Wolf's Stasi to coordinate its efforts with the KGB and beginning in the 1970s they worked together as equals using data from all the Eastern European intelligence services stored at a center in Moscow to unify all the information about "international terrorism" from all GDR and USSR friendly security services. Wolf's Stasi trained the security brigade of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in counterintelligence and briefed PLO trainees about U.S. intelligence services and also protected "terrorists" from countries allied with the GDR from arrest through the Stasi's monitoring of western intelligence services. While the Red Army Faction (RAF) set off bombs in West Germany, Wolf's Stasi provided safe havens in GDR for the RAF. Wolf's Stasi provided direct training to intelligence services from Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, South Yemen and Ethiopia.

Although Wolf's Stasi supported the pro Soviet Union Najibullah from Afghanistan during his stay in the GDR, all Afghan mujahidin organizations in West Germany that operated in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union's War in Afghanistan were infiltrated and high ranking KGB officers contolled operations against mujaheddin centers in West Germany because the Soviet intellegence services, including the GRU and the KGB, allegedly considered operations in Afghanistan too sensitive to trust to Wolf's Stasi. Other related individuals, groups and events that Wolf's Stasi directly supported include Yasser Arafat, who headed the PLO, George Habash, who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Venezuelan Illich Ramirez Sanchez, whose code name was "Separat" but was known as "Carlos the Jackal" and often visited East Berlin and the GDR, the perpetrators of the April 1986 La Belle discothèque bombing in West Berlin, Abu Nidal and Abu Daoud, who organized the Munich massacre during September 1972 at the Munich Olympics.

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