Cold War Spymaster Wolf Surrenders in Germany : Espionage: His arrest could unlock the secrets of his old network or pry open a political Pandora’s Box.

Markus Wolf, the Cold War’s most cunning spymaster, coolly walked into the hands of his old enemies Tuesday in an intriguing plot twist to a real-life thriller that has spanned more than 30 years.

But it remained to be seen whether Germany’s arrest of the legendary “man without a face” will finally unlock the secrets of the brilliant East German spy network that Wolf once ran or will merely pry open a political Pandora’s Box.

The fate of thousands of Communist spies left out in the cold by German unification a year ago could also hinge on what happens to the crafty Wolf, who is believed to be the model for the spy chief “Karla” in novelist John le Carre’s bestsellers.

Germany’s highest court is deliberating whether East Germany’s former spies can be prosecuted, but a decision is not expected for months. A Berlin court has already refused to try Wolf’s successor on grounds that a fairness clause in the German constitution would mean prosecuting all West German agents as well.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government considered granting a blanket amnesty to the ex-spies when the two countries united a year ago but dropped the plan under public pressure. Much of that pressure came from easterners who feared that a pardon would also wipe the slate clean for the hated secret police, under whose auspices Wolf’s agency fell.

Although some of his former West German rivals have privately advocated immunity for Wolf, critics argue that East Germany’s ruthless system and Wolf’s support of it make him a criminal who was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the torture and murder of innocent people.

“I can say in good conscience . . . that there is absolutely no blood on my hands,” Wolf said in an interview in the current issue of the weekly German magazine Bunte.

“It was the Cold War confrontation,” he reportedly added. “On both sides. It is illogical to now try to criminalize my side. . . .”

Wolf fled to the Soviet Union just before unification to avoid certain arrest, zigzagging his way across Eastern Europe and through the Ukraine by auto until he reached Moscow, where he spent his childhood with his exiled parents--Communist Jews who fled Germany before Hitler came to power.

But the failed Soviet coup last month sent Wolf on the lam again, this time to Austria, where he applied for political asylum and was turned down. A similar query drew the same response from Sweden.

So, at 8:32 a.m. Tuesday, the 68-year-old Wolf arrived at the German frontier in a dapper blue suit and red tie to turn himself over to waiting federal police, who drove him across the Bavarian Alps in an armored Mercedes-Benz.

Wolf gave a tight, dimpled smile but declined to comment later as he entered the courthouse in Karlsruhe, where he spent the day behind closed doors with his attorney and federal prosecutors who hope to try him on charges of espionage, treason and bribery.

Late Tuesday evening, a magistrate ruled that Wolf could remain free on 50,000 marks (about $30,000) bail. Wolf surrendered his passport and went to dinner with his third wife, Andrea.

If prosecuted, the enigmatic “Mischa”--a childhood nickname acquired in the Soviet Union--has hinted that he might spill embarrassing secrets about the West German establishment that was riddled with his agents for decades. Since unification, double agents have been unmasked at the highest levels of West Germany’s own intelligence services, and “moles” have been discovered in the government and industrial sectors as well.

“But of course there is information that politicians and authorities of (West) Germany would not necessarily be interested in seeing publicized,” Wolf was quoted as saying in Bunte.

It is not a threat Bonn is likely to take lightly from the man whose most spectacular coup triggered the collapse of the West German government in 1974, when Guenther Guillaume, a top aide to Chancellor Willy Brandt, was revealed to be an East German spy who had been operating in West Germany for more than 20 years.

Reached at his elegant home outside East Berlin, Guillaume politely refused to comment Tuesday about the man he described in his memoirs as a warm and compassionate boss. “I don’t concern myself with that,” he said of Wolf’s arrest.

Wolf also masterminded the so-called “Romeo” capers, sending East German operatives to seduce Bonn secretaries in government offices during the late 1970s and early ‘80s. At one point, the plot involved four secretaries working in the West German chancellor’s office alone, authorities have since learned.

“One of our agents was assigned to the secretaries, and a genuine love affair developed,” Wolf was quoted as saying in Bunte. “It made this woman a convinced socialist.”

He said the spy and the secretary eventually had a child together.

Justice Minister Klaus Kinkel, who was Wolf’s archrival when he headed West Germany’s intelligence agency from 1978 to 1982, is keen on ferreting out the 400 or so former East German agents still believed to be active in the West, possibly for the KGB.

“We want to know this, we must know this,” Kinkel said, “but I have my doubts he will tell.”

Indeed, Wolf has vowed never to betray his former agents.

“That would be reprehensible,” he told Bunte. “I will never come to that.” Besides, he added, what would the KGB want with “such a depressed, unmotivated band” of spies whose country no longer exists?

Kinkel was cryptic in a television interview Tuesday night. “We’ll wait it out,” he said.

The cat-and-mouse game dates back to 1958, when Wolf was given the task of building an espionage network for the fledgling German Democratic Republic. Under the auspices of the hated Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, Wolf choreographed thousands of agents.

Intelligence officials believe that, besides East Germans deployed in the West, Wolf ran a network of 5,000 to 6,000 agents recruited in West Germany to betray their country for money or ideology.

Only a relative few have been identified and brought to trial.

To the post-unification humiliation of West German authorities, the East Germans proved to have easily penetrated every nook and cranny of Bonn counterintelligence, often leaving valuable agents in place for 10, 15, even 20 years.

The West German intelligence officer whose job was to handle East German double agents was himself charged with spying for East Germany instead of against it. And at the Cologne-based headquarters of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution--the agency responsible for internal security--hundreds of telephones were found to have been bugged by the East Germans.

“He was no dumkopf, “ government spokesman Dieter Vogel said of Wolf in an interview Tuesday. “He was not just some dumb Communist. He was intelligent. He was successful. He had a flair. . . .”

Wolf’s father was a doctor and playwright, and his brother was a respected filmmaker who headed the East German Academy of the Arts. Wolf himself returned to postwar Germany to report on the Nuremberg war crimes trials for a leftist newspaper.

Exactly how he rose to power under the East German dictatorship of Erich Honecker has not been made public.

When his brother died of cancer, Wolf “retired” from espionage in 1988 and wrote a novel based on their youth.

As the anti-Communist revolution in East Germany reached its climax in November, 1989, Wolf tried in vain to win public acceptance as an advocate of reform. He was jeered from the microphone at East Berlin’s biggest demonstration four days before the Berlin Wall fell.

Now Wolf is subject to the laws of the country he sought to undermine for most of his adult life.

“The fairness clause in the German constitution could be interpreted to mean that prosecuting Wolf would make it necessary to prosecute our own justice minister as well, since Kinkel did the same job for the West,” said a government official who asked not to be identified.

But Wolf did not have to play the game within the rules of a democracy, and intelligence experts say West Germany’s open-door policy for East German refugees, as well as a common language and culture, practically gave East Germany an engraved invitation to spy.

Over decades, Wolf became an irresistibly romantic figure in the media as the spymaster who managed to avoid being photographed until 1978, when he took his wife on a shopping trip to Stockholm.

The magazine Bunte insisted on conducting its current interview with Wolf in a gondola of Vienna’s famous Prater, the giant Ferris wheel made famous by the movie thriller “The Third Man.”

Wolf himself could not resist the touch of melodrama.

“I know that in this gondola stood Orson Welles, the ‘third man,’ and betrayed his friend,” Wolf told the Bunte reporters in the interview. “I’m telling the truth: I have never killed.”