Germany has arrested the man who used to run its foreign intelligence service. On Tuesday, BKA officers took August Hanning, a former president of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), into custody in a treason and espionage investigation. They also arrested his former head of office. Hanning denies the allegations.
The case rests on a simple accusation. According to German reporting, Hanning is suspected of paying his former office chief over several years to obtain secret BND documents. Investigators believe he used that knowledge, among other things, to write an analysis for an intelligence officer from Azerbaijan. No charges have been announced, and the allegations are unproven.
Hanning led the BND from 1998 to 2005. He later served as a senior official in the interior ministry. His arrest is a remarkable fall for someone who spent his career inside the German security state.
The timing hurts. Berlin's foreign intelligence service had been trying to move up in the Western intelligence hierarchy, seeking a return to the top table after years of scandals and doubts about how much partners could share with it. A case that involves a former chief and a former insider handling secret files, with a foreign service as the end user, goes straight to the question of trust.
It is also the second time a former head of a German intelligence agency has drawn this kind of scrutiny. Commentators have already asked whether the services pick their leaders as carefully as they guard their sources.
For now this is an allegation, not a verdict. But the case will test whether Germany's partners keep sharing sensitive material with Berlin. If prosecutors show that BND papers reached a foreign intelligence service through a paid insider, expect tougher questions about how former officials keep access, and about how Berlin supervises people who leave the service with a lifetime of secrets.
