Dieter Popp (24 November 1938 – 27 November 2020) was a West German insurance agent who worked as a spy between 1969 and 1990. He was based in Bonn, at that time the so-called provisional capital of the German Federal Republic (West Germany). His espionage work was undertaken on behalf of the Military Intelligence Service of the East German National People's Army.
In 1990, during the run-up to reunification, Dieter Popp was arrested. In 1991 he was sentenced to a six-year prison term and heavily fined for what one source terms "aggravated espionage". Taking into account the time he spent held in pre-trial investigatory detention, he ended up serving four years of his six-year term. Released in 1994, he continued to believe passionately that East German intelligence operatives such as himself had been "missionaries of peace" ("Kundschafter des Friedens"). By keeping Soviet negotiators well briefed on the secret goals, methods, and red lines of their western counterparts in respect of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks he had contributed to the containment of east–west tensions and prevented the Cold War from exploding into a hot war as a result of western hubris and misplaced over-confidence. Over time it was the lessening of that east–west tension that opened the way to understandings between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl that put an end to the separate German Democratic Republic. In 1995 Dieter Popp co-founded and became the chair of an organisation of those whose beliefs in this respect were similar to his own, known as "Kundschafter des Friedens fordern Recht e.V." ("Missionaries of Peace demand Justice"). His powerful advocacy of his views continued to place him outside the German political mainstream.
Life Provenance and early years Dieter Popp was born in Berlin. His father was a Communist (which had been illegal since 1933) and involved in resistance activity. His mother was a "non-Aryan". In 1939 his mother's grandfather, a member of a Jewish family and a leading surgeon in Chemnitz, was arrested in the operating theatre where he was working and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was subsequently murdered. The family were bombed out of their Berlin home in 1944 and evacuated roughly to the north, to Fürstenberg/Havel, formerly his father's hometown. Here they ended up living very close to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. He later recalled seeing the emaciated women inmates - mostly left-wing political prisoners - being marched through the town in rows of five. He would never forget the reactions of the gawping townsfolk: they saw these women, not without a certain warped sense of pride, as "their own prisoners".
Growing up in postwar Germany War ended in May 1945 and his father was released from detention as an American prisoner of war in 1946. The family moved to Neustrelitz, a small town in the northern part of what was by now being administered as the Soviet occupation zone. The elder Popp helped set up the Neustrelitz branch of the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), established under contentious circumstances in the Soviet zone in April 1946. During this period the family secretly gave sanctuary to an SPD activist who had been released from a concentration camp and now faced detention by the Soviet occupation authorities in the context of Stalin's purges against non-Communist activists. The matter did not end well. Both the SPD activist and Popp's father were arrested by the Soviet authorities. After his father had been released from jail, in 1950 the family moved again, this time back to what was becoming known as West Berlin, as the military division of the city was increasingly reflected by administrative, political and, later, physical divisions. By 1956 Dieter Popp's father had died. In West Germany and West Berlin the old Communist Party had not been subsumed into the SED, but it had become increasingly marginalised, seen both by the West German political establishment and the population more generally as nothing more than a proxy for the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. In August 1956 the Communist Party was banned by the West German Constitutional Court. Popp, by now aged 18, could not understand why "in the west the Communist Party was banned and Communists were again being persecuted".
Volunteer for espionage Following a conventional schooling Dieter Popp took a job as an insurance agent. He was at the same time active on the left-wing intellectual scene in West Germany. During the mid-1960s he met the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, already becoming an iconic figure among those who believed that West Germany's pursuit of an American-style capitalist political-economic structure was a terrible mistake. In 1966 he offered his services to the East German military intelligence (die "Militärische Aufklärung der Nationalen Volksarmee"). Over the next few years he received from them payments totalling more than 110,000 Marks for his services.Friedrich-Wilhelm Schlomann: Die Maulwürfe. Universitasverlag, Tübingen 1993,
The winning team At the prompting of his handlers, in January 1969 Popp moved to Bonn, which at that time was the centre of the West German government. His target was the West German Defence Ministry. He cultivated the friendship of Egon Streffer, eight years his junior. Popp recruited Streffer on behalf of East German military intelligence. The use of so-called "Romeo-spies" - male intelligence officers who seduced female secretaries and other professionals for espionage purposes - was a common tactic of the East German spy chief, but successfully implemented cases involving a homosexual liaison, such as that of Popp and Streffer, were extremely rare. Popp and Schleffer were identified in intelligence sources by the cover names "Asriel" and "Aurikel". The two friends could barely believe their luck when Streffer, who had a background in business administration, found a job at the Ministry of Defence and was assigned in 1970 to the "planning staff", quickly becoming a respected civilian employee.
Modalities of espionage Within a relatively short time of his arrival at the ministry, Egon Streffer had access to Defence Ministry documents covered by virtually the entire range of "secrecy classifications". One reason for Streffer's rapid promotion was that most of his colleagues had taken jobs in the ministry hoping that foreign travel would be a part of the job. There was minimal competition for a desk job as a low-profile clerk based permanently in sleepy Bonn. He worked alone in his office, located in an annex of the main staff office. In the judgement of one commentator, supervision of ministry staff was clearly very lax ("Die Kontrolle der Mitarbeiter war offensichtlich überaus lax"). Popp, meanwhile, retained his job as an insurance agent. The two men formed a highly efficient spy team. Popp handled liaison. He was in receipt of coded messages from handlers in East Berlin, using a specially configured Panasonic radio receiver housed in a small suitcase. The messages he received enabled him to identify and pre-select for Streffer the orders and special requests from the eastern security services.
Streffer was in charge of intelligence gathering. His administrative role in the operations room of the planning staff meant that his ministry work included the recording and copying of documents, as well as the disposal of those documents not needing to be retained. His access levels included documents that were "Highly secret" ("Streng geheim"), "NATO secret" and "US-top secret". Streffer simply took those documents of interest to intelligence chiefs in East Berlin, and during his lunch break, while colleagues were otherwise preoccupied, placed them casually on the backseat of his car, loosely contained inside copies of popular magazines such as Spiegel or Stern. (It was widely reported later that he had removed documents from his office "stuffed under his shirt", but Popp insisted that this was an incorrect detail added by prosecutors at his (Popp's)) trial in 1991. Streffer then drove home at the end of the day: his partner took the magazines and made copies of the documents hidden inside them the same day. The next day Streffer took the documents back to the office and returned them to the files in which they belonged or, where they were not to be retained, destroyed them.
Popp was described in a subsequent court report as Streffer's contact agent ("Führungsoffizier"). He was responsible for technical aspects and transport of the copied documents, using a Minox subminiature camera. Much of the documentation to be transported was time-sensitive and needed to be passed across quickly. A rendez-vous point for meeting up with a courier from East Berlin would be identified by radio. It might be in a restaurant, a department store, or some other suitable location. Popp and the courier would each arrive with identical bags or briefcases. One contained a secret compartment with copies of documents: the other did not. It did, however, contain up to 8,000 Marks. The cases were swapped and the courier would head for East Berlin with the case containing the copies. Popp would head home with an empty case.
Between 1970 and 1989 the documents obtained and returned by Streffer, copied by Popp, and communicated to East German intelligence included large amounts of material provided to their Defence Ministry by the planning staff of the West German military, providing detailed insights into evolving strategic concepts within NATO, along with plans for military maneuverings and operations. East German military intelligence were particularly interested in the detailed planning for the Wintex / Cimex military exercises which NATO conducted every two years from 1968 until 1989. Other documents covered matters such as new armaments projects, the development of new weapons systems and the overall short and long-term strategic planning by NATO.
Defence Ministry documents copied for the pair's East German spy-masters also included parliamentary processes and briefings regarding matters such as negotiating positions in arms reduction talks between East and West Germany, along with other highly confidential reports and papers concerning ministerial discussions. According to one evaluation, some ministry submissions to the West German Minister of Defence had already arrived in East Berlin before the minister in Bonn had received them from his own ministry team. The progress of documents from the Ministry officials to the Minister's desk sometimes took longer than the railway or road journey from Bonn to East Berlin.
Death of Egon Streffer It was not the changes foreshadowing the end of the German Democratic Republic that put an end to this arrangement, but the death of Egon Streffer on 22 August 1989. Aged just 44 he suffered a fatal heart attack. There was no proof offered for the suggestions that his death had been AIDS related.
Arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing and imprisonment Some months before reunification, and during the dissolution of the East German security services, Popp's activities were reported to the authorities by - according to Popp's own report of the matter - Eberhard Lehmann, a former Stasi informer. Popp was arrested on 14 May 1990 at his home by "three friendly young men" who turned up at 7 in the morning, and whom he initially mistook for news reporters. He was taken to Meckenheim near Bonn for an initial interrogation session and allowed to secure the services of a lawyer of his choice. He decided, early on, to say nothing. After a night in a cell on a concrete bed with a blanket, he came before Judge Detter of the Federal Court at Karlsruhe, and was committed to be held in pre-trial detention. He remained for a year and a half in investigatory detention, first in Koblenz and subsequently in Düsseldorf and Cologne.