And yet, like a uniformed King Cnut, ultimately his professionalism and skill was unable as part of the East German political and security leadership to hold back the tide of contradictions in a system that - ultimately - failed economically, politically and morally. How he addresses these twin tracks of professional pride and political failure make the autobiography I've just completed a fascinating read. That, following retirement, he became a Gorbachev follower and in 1989 ended up speaking - now as a writer - to one of the dissident protest forum's that sprang up in that year, is just one of many surprising facts in this book.
Man without a face provides a useful counterpoint to any conventional western understanding of the thrust and parry of Cold War espionage. Wolf comes across as immensely proud of what he achieved, the professional standards he introduced, the innovations his team developed - in particular, the use of Romeo agents to hook unsuspecting West German women into sharing intelligence - and the society which he was defending.
And yet, throughout the book, he expresses significant doubts: about the realities of the comradely relationship with the KGB, about the lives of agents sacrificed to achieve the bigger goal of defending the GDR, and the realities of defending the indefensible when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Stasi files, the reality of East German was exposed for all Germans to see. It is, in its way, a wonderfully expressive defence of the personal over the political.
