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Tự thuật của Trùm Gián Điệp Vĩ Đại Nhất của Chủ Nghĩa CS: Markus Wolf 

Wunderkind in Winter

MAN WITHOUT A FACE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COMMUNISM'S GREATEST SPYMASTER.

By Markus Wolf, with Anne McElvoy. Times Books. $25.00

 For something like thirty-four years, the author of this memoir served as chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, one of the most feared and forceful institutions in the infrastructure of postwar European communism. Herr Markus Wolf began his career as a Stalinist wunderkind; he was a youth of twenty-eight when first elevated to his tremendous position. The year was 1952; the Eastern European purges had crested; and Wolf's appointment, plainly Soviet-inspired, was designed to tighten Stalin's grip. But young Markus had been born to power. His father, Friedrich Wolf, was a German playwright and propagandist dear to the nomenklatura, and Markus was raised in the Moscow of the Terror, a coddled child, Russophile, bilingual, and groomed for the kind of authority that was handed to him in Germany after the war. There he survived decade upon decade as one of communism's most enduring grandees.

For most of that time, Wolf did his work in covert omnipotence, mythologized but unseen. With the collapse of the lie that was his life, however, he has unwillingly emerged into visibility, and now plays a new role in a new Europe. Since he was once the keeper of secrets, he is viewed as a man with history's answers. This has turned him into a kind of celebrity of cynicism. He regularly appears on the tonier European talk shows, where with lordly contempt he delivers the last word on the nations and people he once did so much to ruin. The old spy has become a star.

It is perhaps a paradox that this secretive bureaucrat should be so obviously endowed with star quality. But star quality it is. Both in his person and his prose, the most lustrous feature of the man's style is pride-always a useful trait in an apologist. His now-familiar face is lined with the weary arrogance of one who has spent a lifetime being the brightest, most forceful, and (until 1989) usually most powerful person in any given room. He is a man of evident and insolent intelligence, transparently arrogant, cultivated, and calculating. He is radiant with an immunity to shame and a cool disdain for the petty provincialism of mere truth. Curiously, a lifetime of deception helps make him believed. Above all, Wolf generates awe; he looks positively sated with self-confidence, which has not, it seems, been shaken even a little by the universal discredit that now covers his lifework and the dismal castle of criminality and lies within which he once secretly ruled.

For rule he did, and now that he rules no more, Wolf's chosen mission is to defend and rationalize communism-his communism-against its discredit. The task is of course impossible, but Wolf clambers around the impossible with such suppleness that it looks easy. Double talk helps. That, and an essentially mendacious tone. If the smooth stuff here is to be believed, tins lifelong enemy of democracy--sworn, serious, and murderously effective--has always been a matchless friend of liberalism, a crusader for good government, Stalinist-style. Wolf avoids predictable pitfalls; he understands the futility of mere denial, mere loyalty to the old lies. He easily-too easily-admits all kind of evils and errors. Indeed, almost every senior figure in the history of the GDR is seen as a knave or fool. Pig-headed brutes, the pack of them, all except for-well, guess.

 Wolf's prose is readable; he has interesting and probably even truthful things to say on subjects ranging from the Otto John case to the motives of gigolos, from the construction of the Wall to the mind of his hero and patron in police statesmanship, Yuri Andropov. That liberal. Yet, claiming to tell all, Wolf has surprisingly little to say that is new about the Cold War, or even communism. Despite the grand tone, this is little more than a pack of smooth evasions and contradictions, anecdotally dressed up. Wolf sounds like he is telling us truths. He is avoiding them. Rather than fill a page with these evasions, let me focus on one above all: criminality.

Criminality has of course been a highly publicized issue in Wolf's post-Wall saga, and he writes at length about his successful defense against the German government's prosecution of him for some of what it contends are his many crimes. Though the Germans have managed to convict Egon Krenz and some fifty-five other GDR officials for various offenses, Wolf has successfully maintained that he cannot be tried by one government for actions he performed, legitimately, as a citizen of another government, even if that government no longer exists. I cannot comment on the legal merits of this defense, except to note that it sidesteps the intellectually crucial issue of the criminality of the regime, and the cause, Wolf served.

Victor's justice, Wolf sniffs. Perhaps. Yet things are about to change. Our entire discussion of communism is about to enter a new phase-a new historiography, a new history-which is unlikely to deal gently with arguments such as Wolf's apologia. This coming wave may well transform our entire discussion of revolution and radicalism over the next few years. It will be international, though its prime energy now is coming from France. Consider the late Francois Furet's overwhelming Le Passe d'une Illusion; consider too the massive, relentless, irresistible indictment entitled Le Livre Noir du Communisme, recently produced by a circle of scholars around the historian Stephane Courtois. These two works, both astonishing best-sellers, are having an impact in post-communist Europe not unlike the impact The Gulag Archipelago had on the age of dissidence. But Furet and Courtois are Westerners; they have dashed aside the old double standard that let anti-anti-communists feign sympathy for Russian or Eastern European dissidents while assailing any Westerner, worst of all any American, who dared say similar things. This new history is a new post-communist assessment of communism's social bankruptcy, its crushing force for impoverishment, its totalitarian bond to fascism, its long history of murder and terror. It opens a new phase in the Western critique of totalitarianism. And it reduces the old-style double-talk of a Markus Wolf to babble.

By his own account, Wolf and his agency helped Stalinize Eastern Europe, suppress the Hungarian Revolution, defend and maintain the Berlin Wall, and subvert democratic politics across Europe, Africa, and Latin America while penetrating with agents of espionage every liberal democratic state in the West. His agency organized political murders, and brought the cruelties of black propaganda to new levels of sadistic effectiveness, including sexual sadism. Wolf was for years unfailingly helpful to his hero Andropov in his campaign to disgrace and discredit every dissident from Solzhenitzin to Wolf Biermann to Natan Scharansky. Much in the Soviet-sponsored "wars of national-liberation"-remember?-and the wreckage they left strewn across what used to be called the Third World was inspired, guided, and often outright directed by the East Germans. So was support and guidance for much in post-1968 international terror, ranging from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group, to such free-lance celebrities of murder as "Carlos the Jackal." (Such a tiresome fellow, Wolf sighs.) Then there was nuclear espionage, and the Stalinizing of the Cuban revolution. Wolf's agency played a key, if ancillary, role in the Orwellian domestic spying through which the GDR transformed the role of citizen into that of informer and made espionage the totalitarian principle governing every human exchange: all love, all loyalty, all rivalry, all hope, all fear-a nation based in mass mutual betrayal.

All this, Wolf assures us, sophisticates like ourselves should brush aside. Some of these demarches were mistakes; but what government doesn't make mistakes? As for the others, it is essential to Wolf's defense that they served the legitimate aspirations of a legitimate state. Were some illegal? Come, come. Every secret service sponsors illegality. You think the CIA and British intelligence are Sunday schools?

Note how important secret services are to this defense. Reduced to its crude essence, it holds that since every secret service sponsors illegality, any state with a secret service stands outside judgments of legitimacy or criminality. If everyone does it, everyone is the same. It is a curious revival of the old doctrine of "equivalence"-that favorite nostrum of post-1968 radicals, the blunt instrument once used to batter down the liberal critique of totalitarianism. The United States and the USSR, so equivalence proclaimed, are equally bad; twin powers, indistinguishable in evil. "The Soviet Union," one heard, "is almost as bad as the United States." Nonsense? Wolf's book is a smooth new version. It is reminiscent of when Carlos the Jackal, paunchy and middle-aged, stood in a Parisian courtroom being tried for three of many French murders attributed to him, and hectored his judges as "Stalinist." There is "equivalence" at its most pure. For Wolf, twin secret services mean twin legitimacy and twin illegitimacy. In a world where nobody is right, let nobody dare judge Markus Wolf.

Such is the logic that the new history, with its new perspective on state criminality, will demolish. Not that the perspective is unfamiliar. The Nazis long since made a vision of the criminal state a haunted commonplace. But should the communist states be seen in that light? Clearly, neither the law nor secret services make criminal states. Tyranny makes criminal states. Crimes against humanity make them. Courtois's scholars estimate Marxism-Leninism's murdered victims, worldwide, at something around one hundred million. If this number is even close to correct, where does talk of justice even begin? That is one, two ... many Markus Wolfs. A dark new discussion is taking shape. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

STEPHEN KOCH

Partisan Review Fall 1998