Not all secrets were heard on wiretaps or caught on hidden cameras during the Cold War. Some were whispered in bedrooms, between lovers who didn't know they were pawns in a much bigger game. Markus Wolf, East Germany's elusive spymaster, built an army of heartbreakers, and some women willingly crossed the line for love.
Markus Wolf: The Spymaster
Markus Wolf wasn't your typical spy chief. He was known as the "man without a face" because Western intelligence couldn't get a photo of him for decades.
At 30, he was heading the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi - East Germany's feared state security service.
While most people associate espionage with gadgets and car chases, the Stasi realised something else could be just as effective. Love. Or at least, the illusion of it.
The Romeo Spies
So Wolf created a unit of attractive, charming, and emotionally intelligent men.
Each "Romeo" had a target, a "Juliet", usually a woman working as secretaries, assistants, or clerks in West German ministries, NATO offices, and other high-value organisations.
The Romeos were trained in psychology, romance, and even literature to better connect with their targets. Their mission was to seduce, earn trust, and steal secrets.
Romeos studied their targets thoroughly before staging "accidental" meetings. Once they built trust and emotional intimacy, they asked their Juliets to pass on confidential information.
Many of these women were single, often older, and working in male-dominated spaces that left them isolated. When a charming man appeared, seemingly by chance, with flowers and genuine interest, defences dropped.
There was only one rule: no marriage. Even if genuine feelings developed, Romeos were warned not to propose. Marriage required background checks, which risked exposing the operation.
Love, Lies, And...Classified Files
Once a Romeo gained their target's trust, sometimes over months or even years, they began to request favours. He might propose marriage or invent an emergency that required help, say, accessing classified documents. Some knowingly crossed the line for love. Others didn't even realise they were leaking state secrets to the Stasi.
One of the most famous cases was that of Gabriele Gast, a West German analyst who fell for a Romeo named "Karl-Heinz." After years of a secret affair and staged love letters, she eventually began passing documents to East Germany, believing it was for their future together. She would later say in interviews that she felt used and manipulated, but at the time, she believed it was love.
Some Broken Hearts
By the 1980s, Western counterintelligence began piecing things together. Multiple arrests followed. Many of the women were shocked to discover their lovers were trained spies. Their relationships had been nothing but carefully scripted operations.
Some lives were destroyed. Others rebuilt.
As for Markus Wolf, he eventually defected to Austria and later returned to reunified Germany, where he faced trial but avoided jail time. In interviews, he remained unapologetic, insisting that what mattered were results, and his Romeos had delivered.
"As long as there is espionage, there will be Romeos seducing unsuspecting Juliets with access to secrets," he wrote in his autobiography. "After all, I was running an intelligence service, not a lonely-hearts club."
The Romeo spy programme remains one of the most audacious and controversial intelligence tactics of the 20th century.
