Infiltrated into West Germany from Colmar (France) in 1966 or 1967, she moved to Bonn in 1969 and obtained work as a secretary with a senior politician.
Fearing that the passport had fallen, or could fall, into the hands of western counter-intelligence services, which would lead to her unmasking, her handlers hurriedly ordered her back: she was smuggled into East Germany near Lübeck within the week.
[2][3][4][5] Johanna Olbrich was born in Lauban, a small manufacturing town in Silesia and to the west of Breslau (as Wrocław was known at that time).
During 1944/45 Silesia had been the scene of extensive ethnic cleansing and frontier changes implemented in April/May 1945 meant that the entire region was now part of Poland.
A large chunk of what had been central Germany was now administered as the Soviet occupation zone and it was here that Johanna Olbrich, despite not having completed her training, embarked on a career as a teacher and, later, as a school head.
[2] In 1960 she took a job in the Ministry for popular training and education where Margot Honecker was already installed as a "deputy minister" and exercising her powerful influence.
The next event of significance occurred when the Stasi officer, before leaving the apartment at the end of one of his meetings, stopped to ask Olbrich directly if she would be prepared to move across to the west and obtain information for the East German authorities.
Sixteen years later, her relationship in the west having broken apart, she made the mistake of returning to her former home in East Berlin.
Instead, the Ministry for State Security had her held in a detention centre for nearly a year and then placed in a psychiatric institution where she was treated with a series of injections, tablets and electric shocks.
[6] In 1993, it was reported that the real Sonja Lüneburg was still alive, still institutionalised, but living by now in a retirement home in Berlin (Wilhelm-Kuhr-Straße), finding her only comfort in the "Cabinet" cigarettes which she chain smoked.
She undertook several overseas foreign trips to London, Sweden and France, enabling her to gain a detailed knowledge of how frontier formalities worked.
[5] Her application was successful, and she found herself working, between 1969 and 1972, as secretary for William Borm, a FDP member of the West German parliament ("Bundestag").
One of these, Helmut Müller-Enbergs, calculated that between December 1970 and July 1985, 492 items were passed to the Stasi from Agent "Anna" of which 394 were identified as documents.
Many had been annotated "very good" and 29 contained information that it had been thought appropriate to pass to the leadership of East Germany's ruling SED party.
[5][10] Beyond her allotted tasks she was taking time carefully to make notes of important meetings, photocopying critical documents.
For years, each month she would pack two or three photographic film rolls each of 36 images in a little envelope which she then left in the toilet of a train travelling to the east.
[5] In 1984, after an election which had led the FDP to "change sides" and join the governing coalition, Martin Bangemann became West Germany's Minister for Economics.
Returning from a visit East Germany via an indirect route, in an uncharacteristic moment of carelessness she left her travel bag in a Rome taxi.
[8][12] In Lübeck she met a "smuggler" employed by the Stasi, who as she later wrote, was more normally involved in helping East Germans escape to the west.
[15] Writing later of the uncomprehending reaction by the prosecuting team at her Düsseldorf trial, she would observe "they simply could not grasp my motives, because they were prisoners of their own prejudices".
[2] One reason that Johanna Olbrich's story is relatively widely known is that she featured prominently in a 2003 memoir published by the retired former spy chief Markus Wolf.