By launching his ‘Romeos' into the West, Wolf was adapting and strengthening the Soviet system of using ‘honeytraps': women of little virtue who were tasked with trapping western agents stationed in the USSR - a proven method in the world of espionage. They seduced, slept with and then photographed the agent, provided that any spouse did not arrive unexpectedly and threaten to provoke a scandal. This was what had happened to the French ambassador to Moscow, prompting scathing remarks from General de Gaulle.
What was the real role of these Romeos and Juliet, and in particular, a certain woman called Gabriele Gast?
Before coming to the story of Gabriele Gast, we should first mentioned Markus Wolf, the creator of what would be known as the Romeo system. Wolf, the great man of German intelligence, was the stuff of legend and for once, the term is not misused. He was born in the early 1920s, in Stuttgart, to a family of Jewish artists: his father was a playwright and one of his brothers was a filmmaker. Immediately after Hitler seized power and they became aware of the growing threat in Germany, the Wolfs decided to leave the country. As communists they naturally headed to the motherland of socialism, the USSR. There, the young Markus, now called Misha by his friends, attended the Comintern (Communist International), an international communist organisation that advocated a worldwide communist revolution. Markus then worked for a Soviet radio station that broadcasted in Germany. The young man, who was already very committed to the cause, was supported very early on by the ‘organs' as they were called at the time, meaning Soviet bureaucracy and its leaders. The proof of this is that in 1945, Wolf was among the first German communists who were allowed to enter Berlin after the Nazi surrender. His career then progressed very swiftly: he was a journalist, then a diplomat for the new GDR and worked for the Communist Party Central Committee.
In the early 1950s he was told he was to be one of the future leaders of the East German intelligence bureau. Upon leaving for Germany and despite what he may have said later, Wolf remained a Moscow man. The ties were unbreakable. What is more, the service he was to lead played an essential role in Soviet intelligence operations in Europe, perhaps even the most important. In spite of its subordination to the KGB, his department was in direct contact with the West: there was no easier way for an East German to go into West Germany and become a spy. In the early years of the GDR the borders between the two countries were still open and the eastern agencies consequently had an active policy of infiltrating West Germany's main administrations and even its political parties. Thousands of spies took up their positions in the West. Some were active, while others remained dormant for a long time, giving them the opportunity to set up an ideal situation for themselves. This spider's web was woven so densely that it was estimated that no information could remain secret for more than a few days in West Germany. Even today, there are men and women living in a unified Germany that have never been exposed.
When he was in his early thirties, Wolf became the head of the HVA,77 the GDR's intelligence agency, an organisation that reported directly to the Ministry of State Security. According to the activities imposed by the KGB on the intelligence agencies in communist countries, the HVA was entrusted with infiltrating and providing false information in West Germany and NATO. This was in contrast to the Stasi, which was solely responsible for domestic intelligence, despite also reporting to the Ministry of State Security, but was devoted more to spying on East German citizens. In spite of these distinctions, there were no doubt links between the two, regardless of Wolf's subsequent denials.
Wolf was a man of amazing qualities. A zealous communist and even a Stalinist, he was nothing like the other East German civil servants. He was cultured, very intelligent and throughout his long years as head of East German intelligence, always attached great importance to the human side of his business. Without going so far as to say he was a philanthropist, it is true that Wolf certainly paid a great deal of attention to the psychological aspects of being a spy. Oddly enough, he never hesitated to sacrifice someone in order to maintain contact with his agents, or to move them out of the GDR completely. This would be particularly true in the case of Gabriele Gast.
Wolf reigned as the head of the intelligence service for over thirty years, even though he enjoyed a very strained relationship with his minister in charge. He owed his longevity, in addition to his talent, to the strong ties he kept with Moscow and had rendered such service to the his Soviet KGB comrades that he had shown himself to be irreplaceable. He had also carefully built up his legend of being a man who lived in the shadows, so much so that Westerners did not see a picture of him until the end of the 1980s, at a time when he had already stepped down as the head of his department.
But how did Wolf manage to have such a successful career as a spy? In order to weave such a veritable cobweb in West Germany, he had to develop particularly effective methods of recruitment. Naturally, he used all the traditional methods used in the intelligence world, such as blackmail. It must not be forgotten that at the end of the war, the KGB had raided the Nazi Party's archives, and by blackmailing those who had Nazi secrets to hide, he was able
