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. According to the account he later gave of himself (disputed by his brother) he was a member of a Communist youth organisation from an early age. During the twelve Hitler years he spent time as an inmate of various concentration camps and other places of detention, ending up at the infamous Majdanek camp near Lublin, which had been under German occupation since 1939. He was freed when what remained of the camp was liberated by Soviet forces towards the end of July 1944. 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.
Under suspicion Starting in February 1957, Dombrowski was placed under surveillance by the Homeland Security counterintelligence service, after they had noticed how often he had been using his position to defy the ban on travel to West Berlin (and, indeed, to West Germany) which covered Kasernierte Volkspolizei members. That was also the reason that Homeland Security placed a block on his appointment as operations head of "Verwaltung-19" section of the military intelligence. The block was simply ignored by the Ministry for Defence, which is what triggered the targeted surveillance operation initiated on the home front on 14 February 1957. The surveillance operation, identified internally as "Operation Nebelkrähe" ("Operation hooded crow") was headed up by a senior Stasi officer called Friedrich Busch, whose special area of expertise was military intelligence. The immediate objective was to identify the people with whom Dombrowski was associating. The nature of the assignment was relatively routine, but the findings were less so. It was established that Dombrowski had been listed as an informant by foreign intelligence services since October 1951 under the code name "Rebell", but it was also established that "Rebell" had evidently not been "active" in this role. Enquiries were also made of Dombrowski's friends and relations concerning time in the Soviet Union during 1945, following his liberation from a Concentration Camp. Discrepancies were identified between the "official" version held in the files by the Kasernierte Volkspolizei and the versions subsequently provided by his contacts, leaving it unclear whether he had attended a Communist Party College near Moscow, or had used the time to recuperate at Zaporizhia. Then investigators then undertook further "in depth enquiries" of Dombrowski's neighbours and relatives.Walter Richter: Der Militärische Nachrichtendienst der Nationalen Volksarmee der DDR und seine Kontrolle durch das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Die Geschichte eines deutschen Geheimdienstes. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2002, , pp. 63, 66, 67. 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".
While the Dombrowski family were away on holiday their apartment was thoroughly searched, and further discrete enquiries were made of their neighbours and other contacts. Employees at a language school in Chemnitz reported that Dombrowski had promised them well-aid job in a decryption office near Bernau (just outside Berlin). It was also reported that he had disclosed the true nature of a college for intelligence agents to the head of an "Engineers' Regiment" ("Pionierregiment"). Busch also pursued his enquiries with the wife of Alexander Karin, who came up with more testimony concerning the loose tongue of Dombrowski's wife, who was said to have shared items of supposedly secret information concerning the increasingly sophisticated "Inner German border" defences. In response, at the end of 1957 Homeland Security, having concluded that Dombrowski was unreliable, dishonest and unnecessarily talkative, set in place an operational plan to end the matter. His letters - sent and received - were subjected to intensified scrutiny and secret investigations were extended to relatives and other acquaintances in Selchow, Mahlow, Kolberg and Radegast. Dombrowski's fellow concentration camp inmates were located and questioned, and his official driver was recruited as an informant. Intriguingly, the security services remained confident that their target would remain blissfully unaware of their investigations, but it is clear that by July or August 1958 at the latest, Dombrowski sensed that the Homeland Security was closing in on him.Wolfgang Krieger: Geheimdienste in der Weltgeschichte. Spionage und verdeckte Aktionen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. C. H. Beck, München 2003, , pp. 54, 55, 65, 71, 72, 76, 92
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".)
Flight to West Berlin On 28 July 1958 Dombrowski asked the relevant duty officer for some keys and casually enquired when the security guards ended their shift. The enquiry from the departmental deputy chief-of-staff of Intelligence Administration evidently triggered no suspicion. On 2 August 1958 Dombrowski a had himself a duplicate set of keys created for the safe containing "operational cash". He then took approximately 71,000 West German Marks from the safe.
On the night of 5/6 August 1958 Siegfried Dombrowski crossed into West Berlin, accompanied by his wife and sons. He identified himself to US Military Intelligence officers, who may have been expecting him. From an East German perspective he disappeared. He was taken to a US facility at Oberursel in West Germany for a period of questioning that lasted for several weeks. He was then flown to the United States where he was questioned at length by the CIA at Langley, Virginia. He had no secret papers with him, but had carried in his head a large amount of valuable operational information about East German military intelligence, and this he shared.
On 22 January 1959 Dombrowski surfaced unexpectedly at a press conference in Bonn. Representatives of "Berlin Operating Base" distributed handbills to the assembled journalists, providing a briefing on the Dombrowski story. The context for the Bonn press conference was a demand issued on 27 November 1958 by Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev for the rapid demilitarisation of West Berlin and its conversion into a "free city". Khrushchev had at the same time accused the United States and her allies of abusively turning West Berlin into a "swamp of spies". Producing Dombrowski at the press conference was part of a public relations counter-blast from the western side, intended to demonstrate that the true nest of Spies was East Berlin, operating under the direction of East Germany and her Soviet allies. The journalists were also provided with a 153-page memorandum entitled "Östliche Untergrundarbeit gegen Westberlin" ("Eastern Underground Work against West Berlin") that had been compiled, it was said, by Berlin's Senator for Interior Affairs. 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.Friedrich-Wilhelm Schlomann: Operationsgebiet Bundesrepublik – Spionage, Sabotage und Subversion, München 1984, pp. 354 & 357 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.