Man Without a Face by Markus Wolf

Author:Markus Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

By the mid-sixties, it had become clear to me that East Germany was lagging behind in the wider race for technological innovation. Millions were being pumped into research and development in West Germany, whereas our leadership, barring occasional outbursts of enthusiasm for some random project that had caught its fancy, starved scientists and engineers of resources and diverted spare cash instead to trying to satisfy consumer demand and thus prevent popular unrest.

It was after a conversation with frustrated scientist acquaintances that a way out of this misery suddenly dawned on me. If our agents were in a position to penetrate the political elite in Bonn and NATO headquarters in Europe, then why could they not gain access to industrial secrets? Although my main abilities and interests lay in political intelligence, I became increasingly obsessed by the potential of SWT. My family joked that it was late compensation for my unfulfilled boyhood dream of studying aeronautical engineering in Moscow; I still kept up my subscriptions to all the aviation magazines I could get my hands on, from the East or West.

But I could see that in chemical engineering, micromechanics, mechanical engineering, and optics, we had brilliant scientists who, because of the Western embargo on exporting technology to the Eastern bloc and the limited travel opportunities allowed them by East Germany, were busily engaged in the high-tech equivalent of reinventing the wheel. A little unofficial access to state-of-the-art Western research could go a long way, I reasoned, and besides, the leadership’s appreciation of the intelligence services would rise if we could help them balance industry’s books.

We would of course need far more specialists than we had. I discussed the idea with some of my senior officers and we agreed that the starting point would be a recruiting drive among science students. One of the first recruits was Werner Stiller.

An able physics student at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, Stiller was approached by one of our local talent spotters. When the local authorities were sure that he was a reliable prospect, he was sent to us in East Berlin, where he signed the document pledging himself “conscientiously and with all my strength” to the service of the German Democratic Republic through the Ministry of State Security. In an echo of the Communist adventure novels of his youth, he chose the cover name Stahlmann—“man of steel”—the same name assumed by my old boss. No sooner had he signed up than he and his two controlling officers downed a cognac.

Stiller was a handsome, thickset young man with a steady, intelligent gaze. He was too small a fish for me to have encountered personally, although he later liked to boast that he had met me. By his character, I would place him in the category of calculating, robust men rather than the fiercely ideological types we also had. Stiller was sent to Subsection I of the department, whose official purpose was to keep up with West German atomic research and monitor the deployment of all new weapons systems there.

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