A fortnight ago an obituary in The Economist examined the life and death of one Markus Wolf. An accompanying photograph revealed an elderly man peering somewhat disconsolately through a hole in the Berlin Wall, with eyes possessing all the warmth of sleet gusting through a disused barbed-wire factory.
Perhaps his mood that day was forgivable: the breach in the wall was a physical manifestation of everything he feared and loathed; for Markus Wolf was the head of East Germany’s extensive network of spies during the Cold War, a man who had dedicated every polyester fibre of his being to preventing his compatriots from being exposed to the decadence of mail-order exercise machines. He understood instinctively that, in the ideological battle between the spymaster and the Thigh Master, there could be only one victor.
Details of his death were sketchy. It’s possible that he met the typical fate of the spy, either dying alone in the rain behind a hedge, gunned down by a thrice-turned quadruple agent in a trilby hat or else bolted to a steel table where a laser laboriously sliced him in twain. Yet, Wolf was, by all accounts, old school. He would have disdained the gauche Western flippancy of on-off switches: if someone was going to have their testicles electrified, he would have insisted that it be done via a hand-cranked mini-generator. It is therefore far more likely that the 83-year-old passed away after being ambushed by frogmen as he tried to cut his way into a British Trident submarine on the floor of some far-flung lagoon, his assailants severing his air-pipe in a frenzied underwater knife-fight and ultimately firing his frail frame out of Number Four torpedo tube.
Given these safe assumptions about the man and his methods, his passing becomes all the more poignant in light of recent revelations from the world of international espionage. Indeed, had the relentless Thigh-Master jokes not made all allusion to gym machines painful to Wolf, one might even suggest that he has been spinning in his grave these last two weeks.
To posit that the poisoning of former KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko was clumsy and inelegant might imply that there are aesthetically pleasing ways of rubbing people out. But, surely Wolf’s surviving protégés must be thinking, a gentle nudge into the path of an onrushing tube at Piccadilly would have done the trick? What was wrong with chloroform and a cement mixer or a Bechstein Grand slipping its winch and falling three floors to the pavement below?
The answer, of course, is that it wasn’t the Kremlin’s spooks that killed Litvinenko, but rather its environmental policies. Radioactive sushi has taken the blame, but one must consider the possibility that Litvinenko, being a homesick Russian exile, ordered Caspian salmon, and that it was therefore radioactive long before it reached that fateful kitchen. Indeed, had he seen it lying on the chef’s block, its six tumour-encrusted eyes blinking blindly and its fins with their stubby half-formed opposable thumbs groping desperately around it, he might have opted for Burger King, avoiding an international incident altogether.
Russia’s shadowy operators, pilloried in the international media for a crime they may not have committed, would do well to learn from their American counterparts, who have emerged almost entirely smirchless from the Argentine Handbag Affair, or AHA! as it has been classified by the CIA. The circumstances of AHA! have been thoroughly publicised — Barbara Bush, daughter of the president, had her purse snatched while dining out in Argentina, despite being enveloped by Secret Service agents — but the intricacies of the case remain veiled in the kind of admirable secrecy that would have brought a watery thaw to the permafrost heart of Markus Wolf.
Once again, the media has failed to obey the principle of Occam’s Razor in its analyses; that the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one. Did an extremely complicated series of events lead to Litvinenko being slipped a plutonium mickey or did he simply cross paths with a chemo Nemo? Likewise, did the hawk-eyed Secret Service — able to detect incoming sniper bullets by smelling disturbed pollen in the air — fail to spot a purse-snatcher or was there something in that handbag they didn’t want their president to see?
A small scrap of paper, perhaps, inscribed with a simple code? ”Call me, you hot American minx. Emilio.” The repercussions in the White House would have been appalling. ”They hate our chastity because they hate our freedom,” the president would have intoned as the first B-52s reached Buenos Aires. ”We will stay the course against sexual terrorism. These depraved tango monkeys will not prevail.”
Muchas gracias, spymasters of the world.