"Have you heard of Karla? He is an old fox, the most cunning in the Center, the most secret.'' --John le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

WHILE MARKUS WOLF HEADed East Germany's foreign-intelligence network, his foes failed to find a photograph of him, and he was known as the man without a face. In united Germany, though, his face is ubiquitous. The once feared spy chief, now 72, is a frequent--and well-paid--guest on TV talk shows, chatting about his past, touting his recipe book of favorite Russian dishes and presenting himself as a charming, idealistic bureaucrat who harmed nobody and served his government with honor. But Barbel Bohley, one of the former East Germany's most outspoken democratic reformers, takes a cynical view of the newly innocent sheep in Wolf's clothing, telling Der Spiegel: "The way things are going, it won't be long before Wolf is beatified as a dissident who all along was seeking to undermine" the communist government of East Germany.

Author John le Carre created the wily chief of Soviet intelligence known as Karla. Le Carre denied that Karla was modeled on Wolf, but knowledgeable Western readers believed they saw in the character a portrait of the enigmatic East German. The first biography of Wolf, Spymaster, by American journalist Leslie Colitt, has just appeared in Germany, and Wolf's real-life exploits surpass fiction. The book details the personal life of the spook, who had three wives and several affairs and retired after three decades in foreign intrigue to a luxurious East Berlin apartment with a pension 20 times as large as that of the average East German. Chapters about his professional successes document the placing of "moles'' in top Western government agencies and sending East German "Romeo'' male agents to seduce female West German government employees, who then spied on their bosses.

Based in Berlin for 25 years for London's Financial Times, Colitt was perfectly placed to observe the G.D.R.'s finely calibrated spy operations. "Espionage and sports were among the few fields of endeavor,'' he writes, "in which the German Democratic Republic was able to prove itself superior to the West," crediting the supremacy in intelligence gathering to the brilliant Wolf. His father was a charismatic physician, an anti-Nazi playwright, a Jew who renounced Judaism and a passionate communist. The family fled Hitler's Germany, and Markus, or Mischa as he was known, lived in the Soviet Union from 1934 until 1945, becoming a Communist Party member and a student at an elite Comintern school. At the age of 30, on Moscow's recommendation, he took on the task of transforming the G.D.R.'s foreign espionage service. It was part of the Stasi, East Germany's paranoiac internal-security system, and he became second in command to Stasi chief Erich Mielke.

After more than a dozen conversations with the spymaster, Colitt concluded that Wolf had managed to wipe his conscience clean of any guilt for what happened in the totalitarian East German regime. Concerning his own culpability, Wolf spoke with aggressive sharpness. "I'm not prepared to be made solely and personally responsible for all the ills of the regime. I worked for the G.D.R., that's all,'' he told Time. "In that context I feel no legal guilt, though in a sense I certainly recognize a moral responsibility.''

Wolf's allegiance to the Soviet Union never wavered, and the agency he headed until retiring in 1986 was a primary intelligence source for the KGB. At a ceremony on the anniversary of the founding of the KGB's predecessor, the Cheka, the Stasi customarily presented a KGB official with a stolen classified document. In one East Berlin tribute during the early 1980s, Colitt recounts, the present was a copy of the Bonn government's annual secret intelligence report. Looking on proudly was Wolf: the gift had come courtesy of one of his most effective moles, who had risen to deputy head of the Soviet section of West Germany's intelligence agency.

Colitt, whom the Stasi harassed for years, insists that Wolf was a "mastermind in an organization that for 40 years suppressed an entire nation, violated the human rights of its citizens, imprisoned and even executed them on flimsy charges, supported terrorism against the West and kidnapped hundreds of people from West Germany.'' Earlier this year Germany's highest court granted amnesty to East German spies who had operated only on G.D.R. soil; an appeals court last month overturned Wolf's 1993 conviction for treason. Nonetheless, federal prosecutor Kay Nehm is determined to pursue Wolf, partly by studying his suddenly talkative quarry's interviews and writings for evidence that he made many forays into the West. If that is the case, says Nehm, he may be condemned for "activities outside East Germany and for corruption, kidnapping and violations of personal freedom.'' Five years after unification, Wolf is a free man, but the spymaster has not yet escaped justice's net altogether.

--Reported by Bruce van Voorst/Bonn