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Markus Wolf, known as Cold War spymaster, dies at age 83 By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times Former East Germany spy chief Markus Wolf is seen in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in this 1995 photo. WARSAW, Poland — Markus Wolf, the spymaster who epitomized Cold War espionage as head of the brutal and inventive East German foreign-intelligence service, died Thursday at his Berlin home. He was 83. The cause of death was not announced. Suave and elusive, Mr. Wolf was such an enigma that Western intelligence agencies didn't know exactly what he looked like during tense decades when a...

Markus Wolf, the sinister East German spymaster who spun his web across Western Europe, has died peacefully in his sleep — taking with him some of the darkest secrets of the Cold War.A solitary red rose was deposited by a sympathiser yesterday on the doorstep of his Berlin apartment block. But few tears were being shed for the 83-year-old Stasi general who dispatched some 30,000 agents to seduce Nato secretaries, buy up politicians, vacuum up secrets and train terrorists. Normally voluble politicians contacted for comment yesterday refused to utter a word, as if Mr Wolf were a demonic presence. “Let...

Markus Wolf, the former head of communist East Germany's foreign intelligence service, has died at the age of 83, his family says. Wolf kept such a low profile that Western intelligence services did not have his picture. But as a key figure in the feared Stasi security ministry, he was a highly influential figure in the Cold War. He was interviewed by the BBC last year over his role as a journalist at the Nuremburg trials in 1945-6. He said witnessing the evidence of the Nazis' crimes "influenced my later life because anti-fascism became the raison d'etre of my life".

“There can be no peace without honestly and maturely confronting the past.” --Joachim Gauck[1] It’s the middle of May, and I’m having breakfast at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.[2]  I’m in Germany with other journalists on a visit sponsored by Atlantik-Brücke, a Berlin-based organization that promotes German-American friendship.   This morning I’m speaking with Dr. Helmut Holl, former state secretary for Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany.  Dr. Holl and I discuss the German Democratic (sic) Republic (sic) (GDR), which subjugated eastern Germany from 1949 to 1990 after National Socialist subjugation from 1933 to 1945.   A short walk from the Adlon is...

BERLIN - The official German archives released Wednesday a communist file that describes former West German leader Willy Brandt as an intelligence source, but experts said it was clear that Brandt was unaware he was being pumped for information. Brandt was one of 45 members of the West German Bundestag parliament in the 1969-1972 period who is named in a directory of East Germany's foreign espionage network. Historians say three Bonn parliamentarians were definitely communist spies at that time. Files on 16 persons were released. Most of the rest, like Brandt, who was chancellor 1969-1974 and died in 1992, were...

In most parts of Berlin today, one has to look hard to find the double strand of bricks embedded in sidewalks, >snip< the Berlin Wall was one of the most visible, despised, politically and ideologically charged boundaries on earth. It was also the quintessence of an unnatural border, one drawn not by nature, language, ethnicity or colonial hubris, but an artificial, man-made and deliberate cleaving of a culturally and linguistically homogenous society.  >snip<  very simply, no major world city had been cleaved in half so abruptly and violently. >snip< What happened in East Germany, many Germans are  realizing, was not...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

Earlier this year, Congress launched an investigation into the sale of cell phone records after the FBI and Chicago Police warned that Web-based firms could sell their officers' calling lists to criminals. Now some of the companies under investigation for fraud are telling Congress they have provided personal information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. On Monday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., blasted the FBI after learning that Advanced Research Inc. sent Congress a letter saying the firm did work for the bureau. Attorney General Lisa Madigan has sued Advanced Research for allegedly using fraud to obtain Illinois consumers'...

A great many people still do not understand why turning down the DP World deal was a bad step for the United States. The issue actually has several levels of significance, and most people never saw beyond one or two of them. I won’t go into a prolonged discussion about why DP World did not threaten National Security, or why the policies of the U.A.E. post-9/11 are so much more important than their pre-9/11 policies. For this article, I will simply present a real-world example of the limits of paranoid security concerns: The Stasi. East Germany was not a fun...

BERLIN -The former East German secret service considered Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, one of the most dangerous critics of communism and spied on him starting in 1974, a leading weekly reported Sunday.The Bild am Sonntag released excerpts of vast files showing that the secret police, or Stasi, closely watched Ratzinger for years, collecting biographical details, information from spies and expectations of his next moves.Ratzinger's friendship with Polish-born Pope John Paul II - who Poles today largely credit with giving them the courage to challenge communism -was viewed by the Stasi as particularly dangerous."Since the mid-70s, Ratzinger has...

Secret police spied on pope 02/10/2005 13:59 - (SA) Berlin - The East German secret police spied on the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI for 15 years, targeting him as one of the Vatican's fiercest opponents of communism, according to a report published on Sunday. From April 1974 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the feared Ministry for State Security kept close tabs on the then theology professor Joseph Ratzinger, according to documents from the so-called Stasi archives printed in the weekly Bild am Sonntag. "Ratzinger is seen at the Vatican as one of...

Germany's new Left party, which could play a crucial role in deciding the next chancellor, faced acute embarrassment yesterday amid claims that at least seven of its MPs had collaborated with the Stasi, the East German secret police. The head of Germany's state-held Stasi archive, Marianne Birthler, said she had documents to prove the MPs had worked as "inoffizielle mitarbeiter" (unofficial collaborators). The public had a right to know which MPs had collaborated, she said, adding: "It's a question of trust." The revelation came as the Left party held its first meeting as a parliamentary group after Sunday's inconclusive general...

TOP secret computer disks have revealed the huge extent to which East German Stasi spies were able to infiltrate the West during the Cold War.The Rosewood file reveals that universities, national sports and the civil service had many more East German spies on their payrolls than previously believed. Now the authorities are under pressure to out former spies who continued to work in their jobs after reunification. The file was acquired by CIA spies in the heady days after the Berlin Wall fell as the Stasi's paper shredders worked overtime to destroy 90% of the records detailing its activities over...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...

Pope John Paul II's 1981 attacker, Mehmet Ali Agca, has alleged that Vatican prelates helped him carry out the shooting in St. Peter's Square - a claim that was dismissed yesterday by Cardinal Roberto Tucci, a former organizer of papal trips. Agca has given conflicting reasons for the attack, and his motives remain unclear. "Without the help of priests and cardinals, I would have not been able to carry out that action," he was quoted as saying in an interview with the Italian daily La Repubblica. "The devil is within the Vatican." But in an apparent contradiction, he said that...

CIA to Release Additional Documents About Nazi War CriminalsBy Malia Rulon Associated Press Writer Published: Feb 6, 2005 WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA has agreed to release more information about Nazi war criminals it hired during the Cold War, ending a standoff between the intelligence agency and the group seeking the documents, Sen. Mike DeWine said Sunday. DeWine, R-Ohio, was lead Senator author of a 1998 law that required all U.S. government documents related to Nazi war crimes to be declassified, but the Central Intelligence Agency had resisted giving up details about the work performed by agents with Nazi ties....

For Bakhtiar Amin the chance yesterday to visit the former headquarters of East Germany's Stasi secret police had personal significance beyond his duties as human rights minister in Iraq's interim government. As he examined thousands of file cards in the archives of the ugly east Berlin ex-Stasi compound, he recalled a previous visit to Berlin, in 1980, when an assassination attempt against him and other Iraqi dissidents was foiled only at the last minute. Iraqi diplomats loyal to the former dictator Saddam Hussein, based in communist East Berlin, crossed into West Berlin carrying explosives, to blow up a conference involving...

GERMANS’ seemingly insatiable desire to relive the hardships of the communist era is about to find a new outlet in a "theme hotel" in the former female political prison of the old Stasi secret police.The themes on offer to the paying guests at Schloss Hoheneck are pretty much what the Stasi offered to its captives: deprivation, discomfort and "abysmal food". The towering fortress-style place of incarceration is not dissimilar to the infamous Colditz Castle, where prominent Allied POWs were incarcerated during the Second World War. For £66 a night Bernhard Freiberger is offering "dissident breaks". No "wellness" or hydro-therapy cures...

BERLIN – An ugly complex of buildings here that once housed the East German secret police is the stuff of dreams for two Iraqi exiles. The climate-controlled rooms, storing millions of pages of material gathered by Stasi spies - neatly categorized and ready for examination - are the kind of place Hassan Mneimneh and his colleague Kanan Makiya would like to see in Baghdad one day. "What you have here, we can only dream about," says Mr. Mneimneh, who with Mr. Makiya is trying to set up an archive documenting the Baathist regime that could be used to help bring...

<p>BERLIN -- German scientists said Monday they have developed a computer system to reconstruct millions of files on informants torn up by the East German secret police -- within years rather than centuries.</p> <p>After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Stasi security police tore up into jigsaw puzzle-size pieces documents on their huge network, which include meticulous observations on East Germans and foreigners deemed a threat to the state. About 15 people have been working at the Berlin archive for Stasi documents meticulously piecing together scraps by hand.</p>