Karl Linke

Karl Linke (born Görsdorf 10 January 1900: died Zittau 16 May 1961) was an officer in the East German army. Between 1952 and 1957 he was head of the country's Military Intelligence service.

Following the discovery of security breaches, on 31 August 1957 he was reduced in rank to reserve colonel.

Life

Early years Karl Linke was born in Görsdorf, then on the north-western frontier of Bohemia which was a quarter in the industrial town of Grottau, and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the time the town was bi-lingual, but following the creation in 1918 of Czechoslovakia the official language would become Czech in 1920. Linke came from a working-class family. He left school and undertook an apprenticeship in weaving in 1914, working as a weaver in a factory till 1918. Meanwhile, he joined the SAJ, which was effectively a youth branch of the Social Democratic party. In 1918, in the closing months of the war, he reached the age of 18 and joined the army. A brief period as an Italian prisoner of war ensued.

To Czechoslovakia and then to (East) Germany In 1946 Karl Linke returned to Czechoslovakia, between 1946 and 1949 taking a middle management job in a tape weaving factory in Hrádek nad Nisou ("Grottau" in some older German sources). Fifteen years in the Soviet Union had left him with fluent Russian, and Linke then moved on, at the end of 1949, to Berlin where between 1950 and 1951 he worked as a simultaneous translator for the Soviet representative in the Allied Control Council. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) had been formally founded (from what had previously been designated the Soviet occupation zone) in October 1949, and in 1951 Karl Linke and his wife both took East German citizenship. There was a move from Pankow to new premises in central Berlin (Behrenstraße 42–45) and in 1956 a change of name to "Verwaltung 19" ("Administration [department] 19") apparently in order to conceal the true nature of the organisation.

By 1957 it was clear that regardless of its new name, "Verwaltung 19" under Karl Linke had been penetrated by western intelligence at a high level. Suspicion fell in particular on Siegfried Dombrowski who was placed under close counter-intelligence surveillance in February 1957, and who had entered the service, like Linke, via the Kasernierte Volkspolizei. The memoirs of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German intelligence chief would later confirm that from 1956 Dombrowski was indeed supplying intelligence both to West German Intelligence and to the American CIA, and in August 1958 Dombrowski fled to the west, although the extent of the information he provided remains unclear. Closer to home in July 1957 Karl Linke's housekeeper, Anna Kubiak, disappeared, accompanied by "sensitive documents", and leaving behind her a West German passport in his name and ten thousand Marks in cash for a "start in a better life". Linke's own household had been penetrated by the CIA's "Agent Martha".

On 30 August 1957 an army personnel chief reported that Karl Linke would be pensioned off at his own wish. He was reduced in rank to colonel. He was also given a ban on entering Berlin. He retired to Zittau, near to the frontier with Czechoslovakia, and it was here that he died on 16 May 1961.