An intriguing book. Rather too detailed (but don't give up -- it's full of good stuff). A good reference for managers on how to run a business by maintaining excellent rapport with one's employees (Marcus Woolf style) and an excellent example of professional ethics (again, Marcus Woolf style towards his moles). Some amazing ideas by the East German intelligence, e.g.Romeo agents, are described.

Having travelled to East Berlin during the 50's and 60's, I thought this book would be of some interest. I was not prepared to be as thoroughly enthralled by this account of the East German secret police and its deputy minister, Markus Wolf, as I was. It was an unexpected find! Colitt obviously knows his subject and has created a spellbinding historical account.

I was given this book as a gift and think the photographs in it are absolutely great! The text that accompanies all the photos is interesting, but I've noticed more than just a few spots in the book where the captions to the photos stops in mid-sentence. I still love the book and if those captions were complete; it would rate 5 stars.

This book was given to me as a Christmas gift this past year. As a writer of Spy Fiction ("The Malagasy Tortoise"), this book has given me a wonderful and exacting insight to the many gizmos and gadgets being used in the field of spying. From weapons to decoding devices "The Ultimate Spy" has it all. I recommend this book to anyone interested in anything clandestine or who is looking to expand their knowledge of the CIA, the FBI or the private sector of spying. This book is loaded with excellent photos of spy personalities, guns, secret hiding spots, good guys and bad guys -- everything is in here to make yourself a fantastic investigation. An exceptional book, one that I now keep right next to my computer.

This book--by a real expert in the field--has a unique combination of pictures, words, and topics. It is magnificently illustrated, making it easier to understand a complex subject. The text is accurate and informative, but not too wordy, and the reader can skip around to whichever topics interest him or her the most. The topics covered in this book range from the basics of espionage to the history of spying to examples of spy gear used over the last several decades to the latest in spy technology. This book will interest both those with little background in the world of spying and those who have already studied it a great deal. The collection of illustrations in this book is definitely the best available anywhere.

This book is basically the autobiography of Markus Wolf, who was the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service (their version of the KGB). The best parts of the book for me were the accounts of his organizations dealings with world wide terrorism and the trade craft his group used. The details of the Stasi and his work history seemed to me to be only presenting the most positive sides. He was the head of one of the nastiest groups out there during the cold war yet he tries to present the Stasi as closer to the CIA / FBI then the Nazi SS they were more like. I was also disappointed that there was really nothing all that new here. The book is well written and given this was his first book and there was a translation involved, I am sure the other writer did most of the heavy lifting. All in all this is not a bad book, but it is definitely not the definitive account of the Stasi.

Markus Wolf has an amazing talent for telling stories, listing dates and names, while avoiding the more substantive issues of personal thoughts and feelings, motivations, and heart issues. He tells the stories of major events in his career as head of East German Intelligence, however he doesn't tell, on the whole, how these events made him feel, what the mood and tenor of discussions were as he and his colleagues planned drops/rescues/spy-baiting/blackmail, etc. Most of the information in the book is interesting, but not personal. It's a provocative read, and you won't be sorry you bought the book, but it just seems to lack that ineffable something that really makes the book a five-star read--a truly autobiographical perspective. It's a bit antiseptic. What you will read is a book that contains a perspective you will not read anywhere else. Wolf was shrewd and cunning and tireless and he writes what he knows. He did little first-hand field-work, but he did know how to manage an agency. If you want to see what administrating a Cold War spy agency was like from behind the curtain, then this is one of the few authentic books that will give you the perspective you desire. I would not want to be a NATO spy-master up against Wolf.

As any John le Carre fan knows, the master spy, code-named "Karla", who runs the East German Intelligence Service, is the nemesis of George Smiley's Circus. After all he turned the Circus' former head, Bill Hayward, into a mole and it is up to Smiley to pick up the pieces and continue the espionage duel and save the Free World. Karla was modeled on Markus Wolf who was the former chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, part of the Ministry of State Security, known as the Stasi. Wolf was arguably the greatest spymaster of the 20th Century. Certainly, he made East Germany, which was a puppet of the Soviet Union, into an intelligence super-power on the level of Britain, France and West Germany, if not the United States, the Soviet Union or China. Now Wolf has written his own memoirs. Naturally, like all such memoirs one has to read it with corrective lens and, where possible, cross-check from other sources but the book gives a fascinating insight into the heart of the Cold War from the other side. There are several themes in Wolf's book that bear paying particular attention to. One is the hiring of ex- and not so ex-Nazis by the CIA and the West German Intelligence Service after World War II. This is well documented from other sources on the Western side. Operation Paperclip, The Belarus Project and the Klaus Barbie Affair have been exhaustively researched and material published over the last 20 years. Another matter of vital concern is Wolf's insight into the infiltration of Western intelligence agencies. The Blount, Philby, Burgess and Maclean cases in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and the unmasking of Aldrich Ames and others in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s are the fruits of this infiltration. We now know that Wolf had completely penetrated West German intelligence and political agencies and his account of the Gunter Guillaume case (the aide to Willy Brandt, the former Mayor of West Berlin) is particularly revealing. On a profounder and more philosophical level, Wolf's book deals with many of the political and moral issues of the 20th Century as explored by such writers as Andre Malraux and Albert Camus. Wolf, of course, is basically a bureaucrat and nowhere near as deep a thinker as these writers. He is an unrependent Communist and Marxist yet he touches the philosophical roots of political action. His story is at the heart of 20th Century politics from Hitler to Stalin to contemporary Consumer Capitalism and should be read by anyone interested in the history of the second half of the 20th Century. Victor De Mattei July 13, 1997