Siegfried Dombrowski (13 October 1916 - 20 June 1977) was an East German army officer who rose to the rank of "Oberstleutnant" (loosely, "Lieutenant colonel").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
[7]) On 28 July 1958 Dombrowski asked the relevant duty officer for some keys and casually enquired when the security guards ended their shift.
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.
[1] 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".
Individuals' identities and telephone numbers were changed and regional offices in Schwerin, Magdeburg, Erfurt and Leipzig were relocated.
[5] Towards the end of October 1958 the security services established that Dombrowski was living in Moers, an industrial town a short distance down-river from Düsseldorf on the north-western side of Germany.
The East German intelligence services had been humiliated by what was known of Dombrowski's espionage career, so there could be no question of the perpetrator's nemesis going unnoticed.
Busch may have enjoyed his holiday on the west, but in terms of the security service goals of capturing or killing Siegfried Dombrowski, nothing came of the plan.
[4] There was a further development at the end of 1959 when HVA II/4, a department of the East German state security agency, the Staatssicherheitsdienst (commonly called the Stasi), the that focused on "abroad",[a] located a former neighbour and friend of the Dombrowskis.
The envelope in which the letter was received came with a postmark from Gmund am Tegernsee, a remote municipality in the northern Alpine foothills south-east of Munich.
[13] 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.
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.