Berlin’s spies ‘rendered toothless by bureaucracy’

Former spy chiefs sound alarm over hemmed in intelligence services, fearing partners are withholding information to avoid leak to Russia.

Germany’s spy agency has become tied up in red tape, say August Hanning, right, and Gerhard Schindler, centre, both former presidents of the BND. Bruno Kahl, left, the current president, was left trapped in Ukraine last year. Picture: The Times

Germany has to “outsource” its security to foreign spy agencies because its intelligence services are hemmed in by bureaucracy, two former officials have warned.

The previous heads of the country’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), which performs a role comparable to that of MI6 in the UK, said the German security apparatus was degenerating into a “toothless watchdog, muzzled and hobbled with an iron chain”.

In a rare public broadside against the system they used to oversee, they argued that the BND had glaring holes in its intelligence because it did not have the power or resources to recruit adequate sources overseas.

They also questioned the security agencies’ collective technological capacity, suggesting that it should be bundled together into a single organisation modelled on Britain’s GCHQ or the US National Security Agency.

A series of mishaps relating to Russia and Ukraine have piled pressure on the BND. The agency’s president, Bruno Kahl, 61, was trapped in Kyiv as the Russians invaded last year and had to be extricated in a risky operation.

Since then criticism has intensified after a senior BND officer was arrested on suspicion of spying for Moscow and the service failed to alert the government to the impending Russian coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin.

These errors have amplified longstanding concern about the credibility and effectiveness of the BND, whose powers are circumscribed to an unusually high degree by German law and whose activities are scrutinised by at least seven external bodies. The agency is reliant on tip-offs from allies such as the US and the UK and is believed to have acted against the suspected Russian mole only after a discreet warning from another intelligence service.

There are now worries that partners are withholding information from the BND to avoid it leaking to the Russians.

Yesterday (Sunday) August Hanning, who led the agency from 1998 to 2005, and Gerhard Schindler, who did so from 2012 to 2016, said Germany was no longer treated as an equal by allies because its security services were subject to a “sprawling control-bureaucracy” of at least seven external oversight bodies.

The headquarters of the Federal Intelligence Service in Berlin. The service has been accused of 'glaring holes in its intelligence'. Picture: The Times/Alamy

“In the long run we can’t afford to outsource terrorism intelligence in Germany and the protection of our soldiers on overseas missions to foreign agencies,” they wrote in a joint article for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

The extent of the agency’s electronic surveillance powers has been a battleground for many years.

The BND’s freedom to spy on digital communications has been tightened since 2020, when Germany’s highest court ruled that the previously vague legal basis for those activities was unconstitutional.

Schindler and Hanning said too many Germans saw the intelligence services as a danger rather than an “indispensable” buttress of their safety. “Politicians and courts must no longer vilify the intelligence agencies,” they wrote. “Instead intelligence services should be accepted and treated as an indispensable component of our security architecture. It is taken as a normal matter of course by our western partners, it is the basis of any new security culture and it is long overdue.”

They also claimed that a culture of risk aversion was hampering BND efforts to acquire sources of intelligence abroad, often leaving Germany ignorant of important developments until too late.

“The closer these sources are to events, the more valuable the information they deliver,” Hanning and Schindler wrote.

Gerhard Schindler, former president of the BND, criticised the service and the bureaucracy that he says hinders it. Picture: Getty

“This is the principle on which the world’s intelligence agencies operate. The German practice goes in the opposite direction: risks are supposed to be avoided wherever possible. That may be good for politicians’ consciences but it leads to significant information deficits.”

Closer to home there has been scrutiny of the domestic security apparatus, a network of regional agencies led by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). In past years critics argued these organisations had been too slow to respond to the threat from right-wing extremism. However, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has challenged the classification of its branches as “suspected” threats.

Separately it emerged that Germany had issued 32,000 long-stay visas and 51,000 three-month Schengen “tourist” visas to Russians since the invasion of Ukraine. The Welt am Sonntag newspaper said Russian intelligence could use the influx to plant agents but some experts said the generous visa policies gave a channel for Russian opponents of the war to escape repression.

The Times