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PARIS - Meeting Markus Wolf was like having mercury tipped into the palm of your hand. Like that strange liquid metal, he was beautiful and compelling but destined always to elude your grasp and you knew that too much contact with him could be toxic.
I began living in West Berlin in 1986 as the correspondent for the Observer and, at that time, Wolf was a legend.
As head of the elite foreign intelligence division of the Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi - the East German secret police - he had riddled West Germany with spies.
Bribery and seduction were his spies' stock in trade and they were so effective that Wolf regularly procured the weekly intelligence digest of West German espionage before the Chancellor in Bonn got to read it himself.
Wolf placed a spy, Guenter Guillaume, in the office of Chancellor Willy Brandt and even recruited the head of West German counter-intelligence, Hans-Joachim Tiedge, as a double agent. In West Berlin, the MI6 and CIA spooks hated him for his prowess, even as they secretly admired him.
But part of Wolf's mystique was that no one knew what he looked like. Indeed, he was dubbed "The Man Without a Face", because only one image, a blurred photo taken years before in Sweden, was in the public domain. On returning to the Western sector of Berlin after any big foreign ministry function in the east, one was always asked: "Did you see Wolf?" The answer was always, "I don't know!"
Meeting Wolf after the fall of the Berlin Wall strangely added to the legend. Very often, to meet a famous person in real life is to be disappointed. They seem smaller than you imagined, or uglier, or less important.
By then, Wolf had turned 70 and had suffered the shock of being denied asylum by his erstwhile allies in the Soviet Union. The German Democratic Republic, the state he had spent 34 years defending, had been absorbed without a murmur by West Germany, and he ran the risk of imprisonment. A footnote of history, a magician whose box of tricks had been exposed to the public gaze, the ex-spymaster should have been shrunken and diminished: a candidate for disappointment on a major scale.
Yet the man I met in the coffee bar of East Berlin's Palast Hotel seemed to have glided effortlessly into the new Westernised world. Exuding self-confidence, proud of his excellent English (but making it known he preferred to speak Russian), he delighted in the new culture of self-promotion, of book tours, TV chat shows and lunch with a foreign journalist.
George Smiley may have been hunched and brooding, but Wolf was very tall, strikingly good looking and gentlemanly, bearing out his tabloid nickname of "the Paul Newman of spying" and his reputation as a lover of women. He wore clothes of good quality, far better than East Germans could acquire.
His most effective weapon was his charm. Wolf was a warm personality, who told good (but never off-colour) anecdotes, adored chatting about literature and had a remarkable ability to listen.
He had the skills of a top-class actor, shaping conversation and stroking the ego of his interlocutor.
He laughed when I said he was supposed to be the inspiration for the character of Karla in John Le Carre's Smiley novels, and added that he would like to meet the author.
Far from having a grand apartment with dark wood and high ceilings, as one might have expected, he had a simple flat in a modern block in the rebuilt Nikolai Viertel of East Berlin. Once, as I dropped him back outside the building, I noticed that his name was on the doorbell in the street.
But then, from time to time, you would see a flash of the knife under the cloak. The same seductive charm that he turned on foreign journalists and his three wives was also the means by which he created a staff of loyal followers - and the same tactic that would be brought ruthlessly to bear on lonely government secretaries or weak-willed officials in Bonn.
Rarely, and only very obliquely, Wolf indicated that he was the guardian of many secrets; the kind of information, one imagined, that could destroy prime ministers and presidents.
The obvious hope was that this would protect him from victors' justice. But was this weapon for real, or was it for show?
Either way, Wolf never had to dish any dirt. In 1993, he was sentenced to six years in prison for high treason, but the ruling was quashed by Germany's top court. In later years, he became a top-selling author, releasing his memoirs, predictably called The Man Without A Face, as well as a book of recipes and anecdotes called Secrets of the Russian Kitchen.
For all his self-reinvention as a media figure, he never reneged on his defence of the Soviet Union. He stood by his commitment to communism, contending that it could be reformed. He defended his agents and the deeds they had done, in essence undermining democracy and destroying lives. It was yet another paradox for a man who seemed to have spent his life in a double game.
MARKUS "MISCHA" WOLF
* His career: East German foreign intelligence chief. Inspired the creation of the inscrutable communist spymaster "Karla" in John le Carre's Cold War novels. Forced the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt to resign in 1974 after an East German agent secured a job in the Chancellor's office. Headed about 4000 East German Stasi secret agents across the globe. For decades nicknamed "the man without a face" because Western intelligence could not even procure a photograph of him.
* His life: Born to a Jewish doctor's family in Germany. Emigrated to the former Soviet Union after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. Moved to what was to become East Germany in 1945. In May 1997 was found guilty of treason and kidnapping and given a two-year suspended sentence.
- INDEPENDENT
