Their agreed first objective was that she should join the West German diplomatic service at the . That was achieved in 1982. In April 1983, she embarked on a traineeship in Bonn for Foreign Ministry work as a diplomatic attachée. She came through any necessary security checks without problems. In 1986, the West German authorities gave her a lifelong employment contract. The diplomatic career that followed took her first to Bangladesh and then, in December 1988, to the in Paris. In Paris, she worked as the deputy to the official in charge of the so-called "CoCom" section. That gave her access to key reports and minutes of meetings of the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. This international committee's principal purpose was to prevent the export of western technologies - especially military technologies - to countries under close Soviet influence or control. She prepared reports on these and passed them to her handlers. As the changes which led, in March 1990, to the end of the one-party dictatorship in East Germany unfolded, Pöttrich initially continued with her work for the eastern intelligence services. She had participated in more than sixty meetings with contacts from the East German intelligence services, and that the last of these meetings took place in Aachen in February 1990. She continued to work for the West German diplomatic service till 1 December 1993 when she was unmasked and arrested. Information about her work for the HVA appears to have reached the authorities from a copy of the so-called Rosenholz files, although details on this point are unclear. At the time of her arrest Lilli Pöttrich had recently been promoted to the rank of a ) and appointed as head of the German consulate in Sibiu (formerly Hermannstadt), but she was arrested before she could take up this new appointment, and as a result of her arrest she was dismissed from public office. On 28 April 1995 the in Düsseldorf sentenced Pöttrich to two years in jail for , but the sentence was suspended, so that subject to various conditions she remained at liberty. Conviction was accompanied by a ban on working as a lawyer, but after this expired she returned to the profession, setting up in practice in Düsseldorf. She has been far more willing to speak freely to journalists and researchers about her espionage for East Germany than most of those who were involved in the HVA networks, although that does not preclude a certain studied vagueness on several aspects of those experiences. According to information in the created, originally, by the HVA, between February 1984 and November 1986 Lilli Pöttrich delivered 38 important reports to her spymasters, of which 34 were considered worth passing on to the Soviet KGB (КГБ / security service).