Information AboutMarkus Wolf |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MARKUS WOLF | |
| 1923 births | |
| wolf, markus | |
| 2006 deaths | |
| people from baden-württemberg | |
| east german spies | |
| cold war spies | |
| german jews | |
| spymasters | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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Markus Johannes Wolf (born January 19 , 1923 , in Hechingen , Hohenzollernsche Lande (now Baden-Württemberg , Germany ) is a former head of HVA (Main Administration Reconnaissance), the former East German foreign Intelligence division of the Ministry For State Security . He is the son of the writer and physician Friedrich Wolf and brother of film director Konrad Wolf . His father was a member of the Communist Party Of Germany , and after Adolf Hitler gained power, they emigrated via Switzerland to Moscow because of their Jewish ancestry. During his exile, he first went to the German Karl Liebknecht Schule and later to a Russian school. Afterwards, he entered the Moscow Institute of Airplane Engineering, which was evacuated to Alma Ata after Germany's attack on the Soviet Union . There he was told to join the Comintern , where he among others was prepared for undercover work behind enemy lines. After the end of the war, he was sent to Berlin with the group around 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 main Nazi leaders. In 1953 , at the age of 30, he was among the founding members of the foreign intelligence service within the ministry of state security or Stasi . As intelligence chief, Wolf achieved great success in penetrating the government, political and business circles of West Germany with spies. The most influential case was that of Günter Guillaume that led to the fall of chancellor Willy Brandt . For most of his career, he was known as the man without a face for his ability to avoid photographers. He retired in 1986 in order to continue the work of his late brother Konrad in writing the story of them growing up in Moscow in the 1930s . The book ''Troika'' came out on the same day in East and West Germany. For the people in the East he was a symbol of the ongoing changes, because he supported the Glasnost and Perestroika policies of Mikhail Gorbachev . His successor in the HVA was Werner Grossmann . In 1997 he was convicted of unlawful detention, coercion, and bodily harm, and was given a suspended sentence of two years imprisonment. TRIVIA John Le Carré 's spymaster Karla who appears in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy , The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People is believed to be modelled on Wolf. REFERENCES
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