Suspended Sentence Ends Trial of E. German Spy Chief

DUESSELDORF, Germany — A lengthy attempt to prosecute Markus Wolf, the legendary “man without a face” who ran East Germany’s spy agency for more than 30 years, ended with a whimper Tuesday as a state high court gave him a two-year suspended sentence on relatively minor charges and let him leave the courthouse a free man.

The trial, Wolf’s second since German reunification in October 1990, was by all accounts this country’s last chance to hold the once-elusive spymaster responsible for the devastating successes of his agency. At the height of his career, Wolf ran a network of about 4,000 well-placed agents outside East Germany--one of the largest and most effective spying operations in the former East Bloc.

The court found Wolf guilty of kidnapping, coercion and causing bodily injury--all committed in the 1950s and ‘60s--and ordered him to pay about $30,000 to an orphanage in Munich and to cover court costs estimated at about $120,000.

Prosecutors had called for a 3 1/2-year prison term.

“This sentence is the failure the federal prosecutors deserve,” scoffed Wolf’s lawyer, Johann Schwenn.

It could have been much worse for Wolf, 74, an archenemy of the West known only as “Mischa” during the Cold War and rumored to be the inspiration for the wily Karla in John le Carre’s spy novels. Wolf’s original 1992 indictment charged him with espionage, bribery and treason and cited dozens of dazzling “crimes,” including the planting of a mole directly in the offices of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. That intelligence coup led to the downfall of Brandt’s government in 1974.

Had Wolf been convicted on the original treason charge, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.

Instead, he eluded most of the charges against him as it became clear that, however brazen his exploits, and however morally repugnant the regime he served, little of his work constituted criminal activity under German law.

Wolf was convicted of treason in 1993, at the end of his first trial, and sentenced to six years in prison. But that conviction, harshly viewed by legal scholars here, was overturned two years later, when the Constitutional Court ruled that people who were citizens of the former East Germany cannot be charged with treason for spying against what was then a foreign state, West Germany.

“They just grabbed a handful of charges from a dusty drawer,” complained Patricia Fuhl, a Wolf sympathizer who had driven halfway across Germany to be present when Tuesday’s verdict was read. “They want to criminalize this man, just to demonstrate how bad it was in East Germany, to make the West look better.”

Wolf argued that while some of his intelligence-gathering methods may have been unpleasant, they were no different from those practiced by spy agency heads all over the world.

“I cannot really accept this sentence,” he said Tuesday. “If it were valid, then each and every member of a secret service, in the East or the West, could be convicted. This is a political judgment.”

In her two-hour decision, Presiding Judge Ina Obst-Oellers anticipated Wolf’s argument and tried to preempt it.

“He is not being tried as a symbol of [East German] injustice,” she said. “This trial concerns individual criminal acts, for which he has to take responsibility.”