If Spymasters Lead Nations Everybody Feels Suspicious : Spies: Qualities of a good intelligence official--obsession with detail--make a person unsuited to be a head of state.

The improbable rise of the East German spymaster Markus Johannes Wolf as a “reformer” puts new stress on an old question: Is a career in intelligence suitable training for a chief of state? This can hardly be dismissed as academic when a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, President George Bush, is meeting in Malta with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, one-time protege of a former KGB chief.

Since intelligence professionals know what is really going on, the argument goes, and since they have seen too much to be carried away by blind ideology, perhaps they are what we need to keep big modern states out of trouble. Sounds good, but it ain’t necessarily so.

The metamorphosis of Wolf, who ran espionage operations against the West for more than 30 years, says much about the troubles of the die-hard East German Communist Party. Once a gray eminence of the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service), Wolf has abandoned anonymity with a memoir and TV appearances. Beginning last January, he says, he told East German leader Erich Honecker that events in Poland would turn things upside down in East Germany.

Wolf’s new liberal image may make him a “reformer” in East German’s Communist Party, but still open to question is whether the East German people will take him seriously. Wolf regrets his party’s failure to head off trouble, and even admits it may have to surrender a monopoly on political power. But Wolf insists “we’ll fight” for socialism. Whatever he may mean, it’s a formula for strife with the real reformers who want free elections, an end to state control of the economy and all the other trappings of bourgeois liberal democracy. Does Wolf’s long career in intelligence prepare him for the political struggle now under way?

The answer is: yes and no. Wolf is a classic apparatchik of Cold War communism. His memoir, “The Troika,” is the story of three emigre families in Moscow after Wolf’s father, the German writer Friedrich Wolf, moved there in 1933 following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The book’s criticism of Stalinism and of East German repression of dissident artists and writers in the 1970s is the heart of Wolf’s claim to be a reformer--but it says nothing of his espionage training at the Soviet Kushnarenkovo school.

Wolf joined the security service in 1951 and soon rose to become head of the Hauptverwaltung fur Auflarung (HVA)--the foreign-espionage branch, a position he held until his retirement three years ago. By all accounts Wolf was a master of his trade; among other achievements, the HVA in his time recruited Hans Felfe, the chief of counterintelligence in the West German intelligence service, and Gunter Guillaume, the longtime assistant of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. But throughout his career Wolf was East German in passport only; he was assigned by Soviets, his most important operations were closely monitored, even controlled, by Soviets. Even now he refers to his “good friend” Yuri V. Andropov, who ran the KGB before a brief tenure as Soviet chief of state.

Thus Wolf is suited to the political style of the East German Communist Party, with its emphasis on secrecy and central control so like an intelligence service; and he presumably retains the trust of the Soviets. But the very background that makes him a known quantity to the Soviets makes him suspect to East Germans and anathema to West Germans.

This only suggests the problems facing any longtime intelligence professional who thinks he might like to run the state he has served. Andropov’s career is a case in point. When he arrived at the Kremlin, Andropov, too, was touted as a “reformer”--he was said to enjoy the records of American jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, he read the work of Russian dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he wanted to get the Soviet economy moving again. The last, perhaps, was true, but his approach was a policeman’s--he sent the KGB out to arrest drunks and AWOL workers standing in queues when they should have been on the job. His anti-corruption campaign consisted of arresting the late Leonid I. Brezhnev’s relatives and cronies for crimes committed--and recorded in the KGB’s files--while Andropov had been running the agency. It is questionable whether this inspired the Soviet masses.

The truth is that intelligence professionals have been trained in a narrow school, invite fear when they take office and are unsuited to lead the broad political constituencies whose support gives legitimacy to government. The heart of the problem lies in the ethos of the intelligence business, which is much the same everywhere. Its goal is the pursuit of secret advantage and its principal tool is detailed knowledge. The subject of this knowledge may be great public questions--the power of rival nations, the health of economies--but the content of this knowledge is fact piled upon fact, ever growing, never enough.

Intelligence professionals say their work is based on files. Any lawyer could say the same, but intelligence files beggar description. The ideal file on Soviet political personalities--the CIA has been building one for more than 40 years--would contain every Soviet official, from the lowest provincial party functionary up to Politburo members. Every step of every career would be included. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals. Concealed in this data would be interesting patterns, such as the personal doom that follows an assignment in agriculture, which eats Soviet political careers the way nuclear-waste management does those of Americans. Since next to nothing is known about Soviets’ personal lives, factions can only be spotted by the advancement of officials in groups following each other up the ladder.

Intelligence officials not only collect this stuff in vast quantity, they know it backward and forward. Each image interpreter who handles the vast take of reconnaissance satellites--a major source of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union-- has a specialty, railroad marshaling yards, say, or the activity of petroleum drilling rigs. They look at successive images, week after week, year after year; when a new shed goes up, they know.

So it goes with every specialty, from radio traffic of Soviet missile fields to the movements of diplomats thought to be KGB officers. The latter is now a sophisticated art. When a Soviet diplomat boards a train or plane, that goes into the computer. So do his phone calls. Computers are ideal for spotting patterns. If Sergei makes the occasional trip to Paris, but each one follows a trip by Ivan to Brussels, questions will be asked. Intelligence officers are obsessed with what adversaries are up to. They are good at spotting the wince when a point has been scored. But this anatomists’s knowledge of adversaries is poor preparation for the broader goals of international politics.

Obsession with detail is no help to a national leader; neither is a career shrouded in secrecy. This is only partly because secrets can be dangerous. J. Edgar Hoover kept his job as FBI director, for example, largely because the men who reappointed him over a 50-year period had a healthy fear of what he had been collecting in his notorious “do-not-file” file. Andropov had something on everyone when he moved to the Kremlin, and his colleagues knew it. The CIA is not supposed to gather information on U.S. political figures but any agency monitoring the international movement of money and information is going to learn a great deal about official Washington and sequester it in do-not-file files. Official Washington is going to think twice about the meaning of the studied gaze of anyone who ever handled those files.

But the best reason to keep intelligence officers out of politics is to preserve the integrity of intelligence. During the Vietnam War, the CIA often twisted itself into an analytical pretzel to avoid saying that bombing North Vietnam would not “work” when President Lyndon B. Johnson was trying to persuade the country it was going to work fine. For his first year or two in office, President Ronald Reagan had the CIA tied in knots trying to prove the Soviet Union was behind international terrorism. The agency dragged out studies till the White House didn’t care, then admitted in a whisper the case couldn’t be proved. The common plaint of intelligence officers is that people don’t want to know; what they don’t want to know changes with administrations.

Intelligence agencies have a tough time holding up the flag for simple truth and often fudge under pressure. But once agencies were seen as a stepping stone to higher office, the battle would be lost. The rise of Bush does not make it routine; he ran the agency for such a brief period and seems to have carried away from the job the same gee-whiz attitude he brought to it. But his long delay in making up his mind about Eastern Europe seems to betray the intelligence officer’s instinctive suspicion that it may all be a trick--better wait till the last bit of evidence has been secreted in the files.

The fate and independence of East Germany matters a great deal to the Soviets and they may convince themselves that their intimacy with Wolf makes him just the man to guide the decrepit party through the shoals. Accustomed to following orders, the party may succumb. But the East Germans have already voted with their feet on the question of government by police; it is hard to imagine they will find much to cheer in a man whose boldest claim is that he had private misgivings during a long career--please, no details--of treating Germans as enemies.