Germany’s Former Spy Chief Arrested for Treason and Espionage
August Hanning, who ran the BND from 1998 to 2005, has been arrested on suspicion of espionage, attempted treason and acting as an agent for a foreign intelligence service. Prosecutors allege he received around 2,000 classified documents over several years in exchange for payment. A second former officer, his one-time bureau chief, has been arrested for aiding and abetting. Neither foreign service has been named.
The second man is the more alarming detail. He remained inside the BND until this year and served as chief of staff to Hanning’s successors from 2012, which means the alleged pipeline ran from a serving officer at the top of the service to a retired chief working as a private consultant. The federal prosecutor’s office says that “on one occasion, Hanning used classified intelligence provided by Manfred D to draft an analysis for an officer of a foreign intelligence service”, while conceding it has yet to establish whether the material reached its intended recipient. He is separately accused of years of close contact with a representative of a second foreign service, to whom he is said to have passed political information. Two services are implicated and neither has been identified, which is the gap everything else will be read into. Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the Bundestag’s intelligence oversight committee, said that “whoever allies themselves with the enemies of our liberal democracy will be found out” and that Germany would not tolerate the betrayal of secrets. The documents are reported to have surfaced through an unrelated investigation. It follows the case of a serving BND officer charged in 2023 with passing Ukraine and Wagner material to Russia for around €400,000. Watch the court appearances this week.