Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  “The man without a face”, he was called. His identity was so well concealed that his Western counterparts are supposed to have secured a photograph of him only in 1978. In fact, the CIA had identified him as early as 1959, from photographs taken when he had attended the Nuremberg war-crimes trials as a young radio reporter. Still, many thought he must be the model for the elusive Karla, the fictional Soviet spymaster who ran rings round his Western adversaries in the works of John le Carré, a British novelist steeped in the world of espionage. (Mr le Carré says he was not.)

  Mr Wolf was, if anything, even more glamorous in defeat. Spurning American offers of a deal if he would tell all, he sought political asylum in Russia. When that was denied, he returned, and eloquently defended himself against charges of treason. “Victors’ justice”, he called his trials; like Western spies, he was doing a dirty but necessary job, and his sins were “those of every other intelligence agency”.

  Yet there was nothing glamorous about the communist German state of 1949–89. Mr Wolf claimed that his subtle spycraft was a world away from the regrettable mistakes made by his Stasi colleagues in charge of internal repression and fostering terrorism abroad. After retiring – for mysterious reasons – from the Stasi in 1986, he published a book, “Troika”, which criticised Stalinism. Later he said he hoped that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms would save a system nobly based on the “combination of socialism and freedom”.

  He did admit that East Germany had proved a “sad reality”, but in truth it was far worse than that. The regime he served was a squalid dictatorship that jailed those who challenged it and shot those who tried to escape. Its secret police exploited the smallest weakness of anyone who might be useful or threatening. Husbands were coerced into spying on their wives, parents on their children. Mr Wolf’s spies played a full part in a huge security system modelled closely on the Soviet Union’s, and using identical tricks.

  Though cleared, on appeal, of his 1993 conviction for treason, Mr Wolf was given a two-year suspended sentence in 1997 for his part in the abduction and torture of a German woman who had worked for the Americans in West Berlin. Those may be the methods of the war on terror now, but they were not part of the West’s arsenal then, in a struggle won mainly by the potency of ideas, not by force or fear.

  Mr Wolf said his most successful tactic was the use of sex: his “Romeo” agents seduced and suborned the lonely spinstersecretaries of West German officialdom. The practice worked brilliantly, if you were prepared to overlook the attendant tragedies, such as the death of the hapless Leonore Heinz, who killed herself when she found that her husband had married her not for love but to steal secrets from the foreign ministry, where she worked.

  It was all clever stuff, but Mr Wolf’s chief target was an easy one. Every East German had the right to West German citizenship. That made it simple to plant sleepers, such as Günter Guillaume, an agent sent to West Germany in 1956, who ended up as a senior aide to the chancellor, Willy Brandt. He produced startling news – not just of Brandt’s womanising, but also, paradoxically, that the Social Democratic chancellor genuinely accepted the post-war division of Europe, including the sovereignty of East Germany.

  That may have usefully calmed Soviet nerves. But the East Germans’ carelessness was their star’s downfall: they sent him a coded message congratulating him on the birth of his son. When that was cracked, he was caught. Brandt resigned, and his policy of detente with the East – Ostpolitik – stalled. Mr Wolf admitted that this had been a blunder. Like other people, he said, he sometimes felt remorse.

  Maybe he did. Other communists, though, were much quicker to see not just the practical failures but the bankruptcy of the entire creed. Mr Wolf’s mild penitence fell far short of convincing contrition.

  Joseph Wolfson

  Joseph Wolfson, master of the surf, died on February 21st 2000, aged 50

  Will Joseph Wolfson become an American icon, in the manner of James Dean or Buddy Holly? His age could be against him. Dean was 24 when his brief screen career (starring in three films) was snuffed out in a car accident. Holly was 22 when he and other members of his pop group were killed when their small aircraft crashed. Youth, sudden death and unfulfilled talent are the reliable ingredients of legend. Mr Wolfson was 50, not old by today’s standards, but not young. All the same, as a surfing star, he was a product of America’s leisure industry, which has youth as its main customer. The kids who tried to mimic Dean’s cool looks and sang Holly’s songs longed to master the big waves as Joe Wolfson did. “Here’s a responsible adult who wants to remain a kid,” he said.

  He was a New Yorker whose family moved to California when he was a child. He never gave up playing on the beach. He was happy to call himself a beach bum, which, far from being a term of derision among the cognoscenti, identified him with the culture of the Californian seashore, where life is an endless sunny afternoon. “He lives by the beach and is ruled by the beach,” a friend said. Still, even beach bums need to make a living. After leaving university Mr Wolfson worked for most of his life for Carson City (motto, “Future unlimited”), a few miles south of Los Angeles, managing recreational activities. Running surfing classes was one of his jobs. Surfboards endorsed by him sold well.

  Surfing is not just walking on the water, he said. Like the movies and music, it has its own literature. Surfers have adopted Byron (died aged 36), who never knew the thrill of the board but seems to have had an uncanny feeling for the sport: “Once more upon the waters! yet once more! / And the waves bound beneath me as a steed / That knows his rider.”

  Joe Wolfson’s steed was a board known as a bodyboard, about four feet long, rather than the longer and heavier traditional Hawaiian type. Bodyboards, filled with plastic foam, were originally designed for children, and you can see them at seasides everywhere. The story goes that Mr Wolfson was lent one in the early 1970s and was hooked, and turned bodyboarding into an activity for grown-ups. It is now a worldwide sport, with its own magazines, clubs and language. They still look like slabs of plastic, but a custom-built board can cost a lot of dollars. Mr Wolfson’s most famous skill was to spin full circle up to half a dozen times as he came in on a big wave, a manoeuvre logically known as a 360. No one, it seems, had done this before. It is most easily carried out lying flat on the board. Mr Wolfson made the manoeuvre more difficult by doing it sitting up. He won numerous contests in surfing centres around the Pacific. To his admirers he was Doctor 360. He liked the title and made it his car registration.

  In 1998 Joseph Wolfson learnt that he had cancer. He seemed an unlikely victim. He did not smoke or drink. He was so fit that he could spend up to ten hours in the water without feeling ill effects. Still, a scan revealed a tumour, and it was inoperable. Mr Wolfson made careful preparations to end his life before it was taken from

  him. He drew out about $100,000 from his savings and distributed it to friends in need.

  One sum went to pay for a colleague’s eye surgery, and another to help out with a nephew’s university education. Gradually he gave away his possessions, including his car. In November 1998 he wrote a farewell note – “I’ve had a great life, and it’s time to say goodbye” – with a cheque for $5,000 for a party. He swallowed some sleeping tablets, put on his wetsuit and entered the sea at Manhattan Beach, not far from his home.

  He paddled out on his board to a buoy about 150 yards offshore, far enough to be in deep water, but not so far that he could be taken by a shark. He tied up to the buoy and went to sleep, believing that he would not wake up. However, about six hours later a lifeguard on the shore saw something bobbing in the water and went out to investigate. Mr Wolfson, now comatose and probably close to death, was given a kiss of life and recovered. His story was given much attention by newspapers and television. A movie was talked of, provisionally entitled Full Circle.From being famous in the specialised world of surfing, and a local hero with his picture in Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, Joe Wolfson became a national celebrity. In the 15 months that
remained of his life before he died in a car crash last week he was frequently asked in interviews about suicide and he tended to oblige with the conventional answer that suicide was bad.

  Among the letters he had received, many were from young people he had taught to surf. “If you can ride a 20ft wave, you can ride this,” one wrote. Mr Wolfson said that his wish to end his life was “the worst message in the world I could send them”. But no one knows what was going through his mind when his car unaccountably left the road and crashed into a eucalyptus tree. Byron’s line, perhaps, “And I have loved thee, ocean.”

  Shoichi Yokoi

  Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese survivor, died on September 22nd 1997, aged 82

  The hiding place on the Pacific island of Guam where Shoichi Yokoi lived for nearly 27 years was destroyed by a typhoon. Never mind, the replica that has replaced it looks just as inhospitable to the many Japanese who come to marvel how their compatriot survived. Only in January 1972, when he was 56, did Sergeant Yokoi of the Japanese Imperial Army abandon his jungle life after being spotted fishing by two local people, and, as he said, after being urged by the spirits of his dead comrades to come out of hiding.

  He was taken to hospital, where the doctors wanted to x-ray him. Unfamiliar with modern medical equipment, he told them, “If you want to kill me, kill me quickly.” The doctors calmed the living fossil who had adapted to the jungle, living on fruit and nuts, with fish and the odd rat or frog for protein. When his army uniform rotted away, Mr Yokoi dressed in clothes that he had woven from tree bark. It was helpful that he had been a tailor in civilian life.

  He returned to Japan, 31 years after he had left, to a flag-waving welcome, but he was a reluctant hero. “I have a gun from the emperor and I have brought it back,” he

  said. He apologised that he could not fulfil his duties. “I am ashamed that I have come home alive.”

  His was the guilt of the survivor. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers defending Guam, some 19,000 were killed when the Americans regained the island in 1944, and 2,000 survivors fled to the jungle. Most gave up when Japan surrendered in 1945, but Mr Yokoi and a few others did not, apparently unaware that the war had ended. His two remaining colleagues died in 1964, leaving Mr Yokoi on his own for another eight years.

  While admiring Shoichi Yokoi’s resourcefulness as a Japanese Robinson Crusoe, the post-war generations have not shown much sympathy for his grief that, by eventually returning, he had let down the army and Emperor Hirohito. Among older Japanese there may be nostalgia for the imperial days, but to most modern Japanese emperor worship is an historical oddity: fewer than half of the Japanese polled cared a cent about the ascension of Akihito, Hirohito’s son, to the chrysanthemum throne in 1990 after his father’s death. But to the likes of Mr Yokoi, doing the bidding of the emperor, a descendant of the Sun Goddess, was a religious duty relayed by his more worldly army superiors. As Muslims pray facing towards Mecca, so Japanese schoolchildren at that time turned towards Tokyo in morning assembly. These were the days of the kamikaze pilots who were prepared to crash into oblivion, because that was the emperor’s command. In Saipan, families hurled themselves over a cliff shouting loyalty to the emperor, rather than be captured by the advancing Americans. (So-called Banzai Cliff is another place that draws astonished Japanese tourists.) Only after the war, at the behest of the Americans, who thought that emperor worship contributed to the Japanese view of themselves as superior to other races, did Hirohito renounce divinity in his “Declaration of Humanity”.

  Although Mr Yokoi was the most famous of the old warriors to return from the jungle, there were others who refused to believe that Japan could have been defeated. Two years after Mr Yokoi returned, Hiroo Onoda, a lieutenant, was discovered in the Philippines with two other Japanese soldiers. His rifle (unlike Mr Yokoi’s) still worked and he had potted a few locals over the years. The strength ofhis commitment to emperor and country was, if anything, even fiercer than Mr Yokoi’s. Only when his former commander was flown to the Philippines was Mr Onoda persuaded to surrender.

  Mr Yokoi adapted to the hustle of modern Japan remarkably quickly. Nine months after returning he was married. He became a pacifist, wrote the first of his two books and became a television commentator on survival tactics. He even stood for election to Japan’s upper house of parliament in 1974.

  Yet he was unhappy with many aspects of Japan. The country was experiencing heady economic growth. What had happened to its old qualities of elegance, harmony and simplicity? “Golf courses should be turned into bean fields,” wrote Mr Yokoi. The Japanese people should live simply, frugally and without waste. Mr Yokoi was, according to the slogan of his election campaign, an “endurable-life critic”. His view of life contained much wartime puritanism: “Don’t eat excessively. Don’t wear too much. Don’t be vain, use your brain.” Evidently, Japanese voters preferred not to, and Mr Yokoi was not elected. Undeterred, he continued to preach the virtues of autarky.

  In his later years, Mr Yokoi faded from public life. He took up pottery and calligraphy, grew organic vegetables and became ever more disenchanted with modern Japan. “I’m not happy with the present system of education, politics, religion, just about everything,” he said. After several years of illness he died of a heart attack. And perhaps there was heartbreak, too, as he looked back fondly at his “natural” life in the jungle.

  Yasser Talal al-Zahrani

  Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, a prisoner in Guantánamo, died on June 10th 2006, aged 21

  NOTHING much distinguished Yasser Talal al-Zahrani from the 500 or so other prisoners held by the Americans at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba. In his loose-fitting orange clothes and flip-flops, he spent the long days sitting or lying in his wire-mesh cell. He washed with water from one bucket, made water in another.

  Five times a day, when the call to prayer came over the camp PA system (sometimes overlaid, or garbled, with announcements in English), he would spread a towel on the cement floor and pray. At least it was not hard to determine Mecca’s direction. The sun blazed in through the mesh and baked the roof of corrugated iron. If he left his cage to be escorted, in leg shackles, to interrogation or the hospital, humidity quickly soaked his shirts with sweat.

  In his letters home, Mr Zahrani told his father he was behaving well and had memorised the whole Koran. Guantánamo’s guards, however, said he was troublesome, surly and a rule-breaker. Unlike some other prisoners, he was angry rather than depressed. He did not have a lawyer, indeed refused to have one. If there were points to be made about conditions and legalities, he would make them himself.

  He was young, having come to the camp at 17. Whether he was innocent was a different question. Though born in Saudi Arabia, at 16 he was in Afghanistan: working for charities, his family said, or running guns for the Taliban, according to the Americans. After his capture, in Pakistan in 2002, he got involved in a prison riot in which a CIA agent was killed. As a dangerous element, he was flown to Guantánamo and kept there.

  Like all but a handful of the detainees, he was not charged with anything. He was not, therefore, a proven criminal. But nor was he a prisoner-of-war. The conflict he had fought in had not been between states, but part of the amorphous war on terror that America had been prosecuting, against brutal but shadowy jihadist networks, since the attacks of September 11th 2001. Mr Zahrani himself had never been a soldier, wearing insignia or a uniform and carrying weapons openly; the label “unlawful enemy combatant” therefore seemed right, in American eyes. It also seemed right to them that neither the Geneva Conventions nor the usual American rules of legal process should apply to him. He was to be confined without charge indefinitely; for, if released, it was clear that he would try to kill more Americans.

  Mr Zahrani’s ways of getting attention were fairly limited. One was to go on hunger strike. When the plastic pouch of breakfast came round – a pastry, cream cheese, an orange – he would refuse to open it. When lunch came – cereal bars, peanuts – he would push that aside, too. Once
the guards realised he was on hunger strike, they would make him sign a waiver form to show he was aware that he might die. But Mr Zahrani apparently had no interest in dying, just in being a nuisance.

  He was not alone. A hunger strike last September involved more than 100 prisoners. Most of them, like him, went back to eating fairly quickly, rather than be strapped in restraint chairs and force-fed – the usual practice in American prisons – with liquid supplements or Gatorade through tubes inserted in their noses.

  Others were more determined. Mr Zahrani was in touch with Ali Abdullah Ahmed, said to be a mid- to high-level operative for al-Qaeda, who had been force-fed after eight months on hunger strike. Together with another Saudi prisoner, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi al-Utaybi, allegedly a member of a jihadist recruiting group, they began to consider a different way of drawing attention to the cause.

  That way was suicide – forbidden under Islam, but reinterpreted, by bombers and others, as a glorious act of martyrdom.Since Guantánamo had opened, in January 2002, there had been 41 suicide attempts, most of them, according to the military authorities, “manipulative, self-injurious behaviour”. In mid-May, Mr Zahrani would have heard of the “suicide attempt” that had been used to lure guards to a cell where, as they slipped on a floor slicked with excrement and soap, they were set upon by prisoners.