Markus Wolf was the head of East Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service. Born in rural Western Germany in 1923, Wolf fled from the Nazis to the Soviet Union. He came of age in Moscow in the 1940s and was picked out by the Party to be returned to the war-ravaged Germany for its political restructuring. Wolf quickly rose through the ranks of East Germany's foreign intelligence operations. He left the Stasi in 1986, three years before its collapse. He passed away in 2006.