E. German Spy Chief in Dock Again

BERLIN —  Markus Wolf, the former East German spymaster, faced a second trial Tuesday, this time to answer charges in a case that is probably the German state’s last good chance to prosecute a prominent member of the defunct Communist regime’s leadership.

Virtually all other ranking, former East German officials have died, grown too sick to stand trial or been made by circumstances to seem too washed-up or irrelevant to be satisfying targets for blame for the wrongs of the East German state.

Only Wolf remains as a serious, visible and unrepentant representative of East German socialism. The onetime head of the East Bloc’s most successful intelligence agency appears on talk shows, has published a chatty cookbook and will see his English-language memoirs published by Random House in the spring.

Now he is being tried for kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment and bodily injury. He appeared in court Tuesday in Duesseldorf, pleading innocent and mocking the prosecution for failing to come up with a better case against him.

“The attorney general and those representing him here have already been bad winners of the Cold War,” Wolf told the court. “Now they show themselves to be bad losers.”

The saga of Germany’s efforts to jail Wolf shows the extreme difficulty--if not impossibility--of using the legal system to sort out blame and punishment for the wrongs of East German communism.

After the regime collapsed in 1990, Wolf was tried for treason, convicted and in 1993 sentenced to six years in prison. But in 1995, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that no former East German official could be convicted of treason against West Germany--it was impossible for an East German citizen to betray the West German state.

Wolf’s sentence was vacated and he was sent home. But many Germans were dissatisfied with this result, as some of the lower-ranking West Germans whom Wolf had used as moles were still jailed. They had been exposed as spies after the collapse of East Germany and put on trial. But unlike Wolf, they were not protected by a Constitutional Court ruling. Some continue to serve sentences of up to 12 years.

To rectify this apparent injustice, the prosecution has redoubled its efforts to convict Wolf. This time, prosecutors hope to prove lesser charges that Wolf’s intelligence-gathering methods constituted criminal acts: kidnapping people in the process of recruiting them, imprisoning one man in hopes of extracting information and, in one case, having an East German deserter seriously beaten.

Wolf denies that he ordered the kidnappings or the beating. And he says that, in any case, the crimes he is accused of are routine activities for any foreign-intelligence service.

“If this trial were really about the individual items in the indictment, then nearly every employee of any intelligence service, in the East or the West, could sit here with me in the defendant’s dock,” he told the court Tuesday.

The prosecution has listed three specific instances in which Wolf is said to have broken the law.

The first occurred in 1955, when a 26-year-old translator for the U.S. military mission in West Berlin was taken unwillingly to East Berlin by a man who had come to her for English lessons. He turned out to be a recruiter whose bosses spent a whole night trying to talk the woman into spying on the U.S. military. When she refused, she was sent back to West Berlin on the subway, shaken but unharmed.

Wolf told the court that he couldn’t remember the incident and argued that, even if it happened, it didn’t constitute kidnapping. He added that West German spies, in the 1950s, carried out many kidnappings of East Germans, some with “horrible consequences.” He offered to “deliver an unlimited number of examples” to the court.

The second incident took place when an East German intelligence officer tried to desert to West Germany with his lover in 1962 and sought help from what turned out to be undercover East German agents. They abducted the deserters, beat the man unconscious and returned the pair to East Germany, where they served long jail terms. Wolf said he knew about the incident but had not ordered the action.

The third incident, in 1959, concerned Wolf’s arrest order for Georg Angerer, an East German who had known Willy Brandt, the late German chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Norway in the late 1930s. When the Nazis invaded Norway, Angerer went to work as a low-level Gestapo agent. Wolf had him imprisoned in hopes he could be pressured into revealing some discreditable Nazi connection in Brandt’s past. But after months, it became clear that Angerer couldn’t think of a single such link, and he was released. The prosecution asserts that Angerer was “physically broken” when freed; Wolf denied this, saying Angerer lived to age 84.