Siegfried Dombrowski

Siegfried Dombrowski (13 October 1916 - 20 June 1977) was an East German army officer who rose to the rank of "Oberstleutnant" (loosely, "Lieutenant colonel"). He combined this with his role as deputy chief-of-staff of Intelligence Administration of the East German military intelligence agency. On 5 August 1958, accompanied by his wife and children, along with a substantial sum of cash, he escaped to West Berlin. For the western intelligence services he subsequently turned out to be a highly valuable source of information about the organisational structures under which their eastern counterparts operated.

Life Provenance and early years Siegfried Dombrowski was born at the height of the First World War. His father worked as a delivery driver. Between 1946 and 1950 he worked as a party official for the newly formed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) in the Soviet occupation zone (relaunched in October 1949 as the Soviet-sponsored German Democratic Republic). In 1950 he joined the "Kasernierte Volkspolizei", the quasi-military police service which at this point was the closest thing to an army that was acceptable in any part of Germany to the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States. Following the creation, in 1956, of the National People's Army he was one of many who switched into it, having already undertaken several military training courses. Within the army, he apparently joined as a senior member of the still embryonic military Intelligence Administration. The East German Ministry for State Security ("Stasi") warned Karl Linke, head of Military Intelligence (Verwaltung für Allgemeine Fragen), about Dombrowski's contacts in West Berlin, but it is unclear how detailed the warning s were, and they went unheeded. The suspicions of Homeland Security increased further when another senior intelligence officer, Alexander Karin, reported to intelligence chief Karl Linke that Dombrowski's wife had been talking to Karin's wife about a highly secret intelligence-related intervention. Linke himself was sworn to secrecy over the affair because, the men from Homeland Security explained, "we have recorded activities involving Dombrowski that are still unexplained".

Available sources remain imprecise on many of the details of Dombrowski's espionage activities against the German Democratic Republic during the 1950s. It is nevertheless apparent from Reinhard Gehlen's own memoires that Dombrowski was an active agent on behalf of the so-called "Gehlen Organization" (West German intelligence) from 1956. Subsequently, declassified CIA information confirms Gehlen's disclosure, along with the involvement of the agency in Dombrowski's handling, while resolutely refuting Gehlen's assertion that Dombrowski was "recruited by the CIA". (The unnamed CIA reviewer of Gehlen's book insists that Dombrowski "was a walk-in to [the] CIA". A little later a collection of documents appeared in a bulky volume published under the direction of the West German Intelligence Service under the title "Ost-Berlin, Agitations- und Zersetzungszentrale für den Angriff gegen den Bestand und die verfassungsmäßige Ordnung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Operationsbasis der östlichen Spionagedienste", which backed up the western allegations of multiple misfeasances by the eastern intelligence services against West Germany, using Est Berlin as a base. The volume reported various statements attributed to Dombrowski, in support of the western case that East Berlin was a hotbed of Soviet and East German spies, and his statements were enriched with additions inserted by Anna Kubiak, a remarkable CIA agent and information specialist identified by her handlers as "Agent Martha", who till shortly before the press conference had herself been working undetected as a western spy at the heart of the East German intelligence apparatus in East Berlin.

That same day B.Z., a West Berlin daily newspaper (not always associated with such serious news items) carried on its front page the headline "Nach West-Berlin übergelaufen, Spionagechef der Zonen-Armee": Dombrowski's defection to the west was no longer a secret. The termination of the career of Karl Linke as head of the East German Military Intelligence (Verwaltung für Allgemeine Fragen) service was reported at the same time, though in fact Linke had been removed from his intelligence post back in the summer of 1957.

Investigations in East Germany After his appearance at the press conference, Dombrowski disappeared again. The next time he resurfaced he would be accompanied by his family, and with a new identity.

Meanwhile, based on the investigations that had been in place by August 1958, the security services already had a clear picture of the sort of information that he could have taken with him to the west. He had an intimate knowledge of the internal workings of "Verwaltung 19", insofar as they did not touch directly on the dispersed regional operations of Homeland security.

Surveillance ended Once he had been located in his lakeside retreat in Upper Bavaria, Dombrowski evidently remained adequately accessible to East German surveillance, and there are no references to further attempts to abduct or kill him. By 1976 the Stasi had filed 37 report on his movements from their informants (and/or other sources). Post cards and letters from Gerda Dombrowski to her friends in the east continued to be monitored, and on 7 August 1977 her latest letter included the information that her husband had recently died. A subsequent letter from Mrs. Dombrowski, dated 24 August 1970, spelled out that her husband had suffered a fatal heart attack while changing a wheel on his car alongside the southbound carriageway of the Autobahn between Nuremberg and Ingolstadt. After carefully satisfying themselves over the relevant details, the eastern Security Services terminated their surveillance operations against Gerda Dombrowski on 15 June 1978. In the absence of her husband, she was no longer a "person of interest". Slightly over two months later, on 22 August 1978, the district court in Berlin-Köpenick, quietly filed away the arrest warrant they had been holding for Dombrowski that had, some time earlier, been issued by a Berlin military court.