Harry Dahl is a former East German police officer who switched to homeland security in 1956. Within the Ministry for State Security hierarchy he achieved rapid promotion, reaching the rank of “colonel”. Between 1975 and 1985 he was in charge at the service's “Department XXII”, a specialist section dealing with counter-terrorism. After 1990 he came to wider attention with the discovery that he had been centrally engaged in highly secret collaboration between East German homeland security and the West German ”Red army faction” (RAF), an extreme leftist terrorist organisation active between 1970 and 1998 which was widely believed to have been responsible for over 30 murders in West Germany. Many of the key details concerning the extent and nature of Dahl's involvement in the relationship between the East German security services and the West German terrorist group remained unclear even after Dahl's trial and conviction in 1997 (and his subsequent acquittal on appeal in 1998).
Life Provenance and early years Harry Dahl was born and grew up in Schönebeck, a small riverside town upriver from Magdeburg, some 50 miles (80 km) to the west of Berlin and to the north of Leipzig. At the time of his birth, and indeed throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the local economy was dominated by the town's extensive salt mining and processing operations, and various industrial and health-sector businesses based on them. He completed his schooling in 1945, which was also the year in which war ended together with the twelve year Hitler regime. Between 1945 and 1949 the entire region was administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone, relaunched in 1949 as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Between 1945 and 1948 Dahl trained for work in business administration.
An abrupt change in career direction came in 1949 when Harry Dahl, aged 20, was enrolled at the officers’ training college of the "People's Police" service. He was evidently well suited to the work, since in 1950 he became a member of the local management team for the "People's Police" in Burg bei Magdeburg. Further promotion followed in 1952 when he was appointed to a position as "stellvertretender Politkulturleiter" (loosely "deputy Head of Political Culture") within the police service.
Stasi Dahl's transfer in 1956 to the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) at the age of 27 was a slightly unusual move, despite the shortage of a working age population in the country after World War II (due to deaths during the war and the subsequent exodus of several million East Germans who escaped to the west). It indicates that among influential party comrades he was considered to be both exceptionally competent and politically reliable. His first posting was to Frankfurt an der Oder, where he was employed by the ministry's Department III (“Hauptabteilung III: Volkswirtschaft"). Departmental responsibilities included “security related tasks” covering the whole of industry, construction and economic development, to be secured through monitoring of national institutions such as ministries and centralised services, notably in the areas of planning – especially in respect of the (intrinsically powerful) State Planning Commission – and in respect of statistics, finance and banking, supplies, trade both within East Germany and “intra-Germany” (between East and West Germany), logistical oversight, research and development, intellectual property, trades union matters and more. As an apprenticeship for a high-level career within the Stasi, Dahl's first posting was exceptionally broadly based. Between 1958 and 1960 Dahl attended the ministry's (JHS) at Eiche-Golm (Potsdam). The name of the institution was intentionally misleading. Far from being a law college in any western sense, the JHS was a secret service training institute for senior Stasi officers. In terms of western understanding, course content was strongly ideological. The “Diplom-Jurist” qualification that Dahl received in 1960 was nevertheless classified as a Law Degree.
Within the Ministry for State Security, from 1962 Dahl was responsible for oversight of the regional military command of the People's Police in the region administered from to Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1966 he took on a new role as chief representative of the chief district administrator in respect of International Military Intelligence and reconnaissance. In 1974 he received a doctorate of laws from his alma mater, the Stasi's “Juristische Hochschule“.
That same year Dahl was appointed “Officer for Special Operations” in a working group set up by Lt. Gen. Bruno Beater, the First Deputy Minister of State Security. One indication of the importance of the special operations in questions was Dahl's promotion to the rank of a Stasi colonel in 1975. In August 1975 Harry Dahl became be the man heading up “Department XXII”. The department was a new one, and he was the first person to be placed in charge of it. The working group to which he had been assigned had been set up in 1972 as a response to the terrorist killings at the Munich Olympic Games, amid concerns that the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students, scheduled to take place in East Berlin the following year, might fall prey to a follow-up terrorist attack. Given that no follow-up terrorist attack took place in East Berlin following the 1972 Munich atrocity, it can be inferred that any anti-terrorist counter-measures set in train by Dahl were effective. The need for a permanent counter-terrorism department within the East German Ministry for State Security was nevertheless reinforced by a surge in terrorist killings in West Germany and other parts of (mainly western) Europe during the 1970s. “Department XXII” was the Stasi Department for Counter-terrorism, based in East Berlin. Following its launch in 1975 it grew steadily in terms of manpower and of reach under Harry Dahl's leadership.
Inge Viett During the spring of 1978, Inge Viett, a member of the West German left-wing militant organisation, "2 June Movement", was returning from Italy to West Berlin via a slightly indirect route, having avoided arrest in Vienna at the conclusion of a successful kidnapping and ransom operation. Her itinerary took her through Berlin Schönefeld Airport, then in East Germany. At the airport she was approached by four officers from the Ministry for State Security who evidently knew her real identity. She was invited to participate in an impromptu meeting. Her principal interlocutor, who introduced himself as Günter, was none other than the head of “Department XXII”, Harry Dahl himself. Sources indicating that this was the first time that Stasi officers had met with leaders of leftist West German terrorist organisations are probably incorrect. The airport meeting between Dahl and Viett was nevertherless highly significant for both parties. In West Germany the security services had responded to terrorist outrages by the leftist "2 June Movement" and "Red Army Faction (RAF)" terrorist organisations by enhancing their own anti-terrorism operations. At the time when Dahl and Viett met in 1978, several escaped West German terrorists were imprisoned in Sofia, facing the threat of extradition to the west. Dahl was able to assure Viett that, despite their shared adherence to socialist ideals, there could be no question of the East German security service endorsing the terrorist methods of the RAF. Given that the East German government had signed up to the Helsinki Accords, he was officially required to arrest her without delay. But instead he offered to give her access to items of information that the Stasi had acquired through their own channels from the West German security services. Importantly, he was able to tell her which of her various aliases were known to the West German security services, and which remained secure. Dahl, almost certainly with the agreement of the East German leadership, was aware that a more collaborative relationship with the West German terrorist groups might prove of use if war were ever to break out across the Iron Curtain. More immediate operational challenges arose for the extensive network of East German spies whenever a terrorist atrocity led to a concentration of police resources on a given city quarter in the west. Advance notice of such atrocities would give any Eastern agents in the area the chance to be somewhere else while police searches were undertaken. Any such collaboration would have to be completely unofficial and everything possible must be done to conceal it from western agencies.
The initial meeting between Dahl and Viett is reported to have lasted only a couple of hours. Both of them reportedly expressed themselves with singular candour. The increasing effectiveness of anti-terrorist activity by the security services was placing the "RAF” (which during 1980 would absorb what remained of the “2 June Movement”) under significant pressure. A number of terrorist members were looking for opportunities to retire from activism. Pressure on the RAF to support the retirement goals of members came both from the habits of close co-operation and from the risk of terrorist secrets coming to the attention of the security services if bonds of comradely loyalty were ever be broken. Clearly if terrorists were to retire within West Germany the danger that they might subsequently be subjected to investigation was intensified. Viett took the opportunity of the unexpected meeting with Dahl to seek practical support from the East German security services. She had a somewhat incomplete idea that a remote retirement destination for former terrorists might be found in “Black Africa”. Viett herself had travelled extensively in North Africa in the years before she became a notorious terrorist suspect, and more recently she had on more than one occasion found a safe haven from the West German security services beyond Africa, in a Palestinian terrorist training camp in South Yemen. From Dahl's perspective her appreciation of the possibilities for creating permanent retirement homes for pink-skinned ex-terrorists with German accents in ”Black Africa” were hopelessly impractical. It was Dahl who suggested that a better alternative might be for the terrorists to retire to East Germany. The idea had evidently not occurred to Viett: she was not instantly persuaded. But following further discussion Dahl's remarkable offer was accepted. The exercise would involve new identities for the individuals involved, but they would be protected from the risk of arrest by western agencies. Creating new identities and scrupulously coaching people down to the tiniest detail how they might convincingly inhabit new selves involved sets of skills that were at the heart of the surveillance activities in which the Stasi specialised. The number of former terrorists on Viett's list initially stood at 8, but in the end, during the early 1980s 10 former terrorists were spirited across to East Germany, coached in their new identities and successfully concealed from western agencies for nearly a decade."Nie war ich furchtloser" ("I was never free from fear"): Autobiography. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 1997, . Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag Reinbek 1999, ; pp. 18, 45, 53-61, 68, 80-86, 91-94, 107, 202, 256, 263, 307-326
Reunification