Aug 7: James Jackson, Germany’s spy agencies need to be more like the US and UK
As published on The Telegraph on 6 Aug 2023
Germany’s spy agencies need to be more like the US and UK
By James Jackson, The Telegraph, 06 Aug 2023
Germany’s beleaguered foreign intelligence agency must become more like its British and American counterparts so it can “look Western allied services in the eye again”, two of its former chiefs have warned.
Writing in Germany’s Bild tabloid, August Hanning and Gerhard Schindler complained of “excessive” political oversight, listing seven different committees and ombudsmen they had to respond to, describing “this sprawling bureaucracy of control” as “the sister of inefficiency”.
They want the country’s competing domestic, foreign and military intelligence agencies to cooperate more closely and become part of the ministry of defence.
They currently fall under the control of the chancellor’s office, which reportedly posed significant challenges to their operations under pro-Russian Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
The two ex-spy chiefs said Germany needs a new agency focused on signals intelligence, like Britain’s GCHQ or the NSA in the United States.
“We need a new technical intelligence service based on the successful models of the NSA in the USA and the GCHQ in the UK,” they wrote. “We cannot afford to outsource terrorism investigations in Germany and the protection of our soldiers on deployments to foreign services in the long run.”
Earlier this year it was revealed Carsten Linke, an experienced agent with far-right sympathies, was leaking information to Moscow.
It also emerged that Bruno Kahl, the agency’s current head, was stranded in Kyiv amid “urgent talks” when Russia’s invasion began in February 2022. Mr Kahl had to be taken home overland in a humiliating and gruelling two-day special forces operation when Ukraine’s airspace was closed.
And this summer, the intelligence agency only informed the German government of the abortive rebellion by Russia’s Wagner group once it was already in full swing, with Chancellor Scholz saying the spies “didn’t know beforehand”.
‘Arrogant, incompetent and useless’
Germany’s BND has long been seen as a weak link within the western intelligence community, with former senior CIA agent John Sipher calling them “arrogant, incompetent and useless”.
Nathalie Vogel, a security expert at the Institute of World Politics, welcomed the suggestions made by the former spy chiefs, but said she believed the agencies’ challenges go even deeper.
“They want to establish a system after the British model of oversight committees, but an intelligence service is only as good as the worst member who sits on an oversight committee,” she told The Telegraph.
“In Germany you have far-left and AfD MPs who maintain direct relationships with Moscow, visit the Russian embassy and even make trips to [Russian occupied] Donbas.”
Ms Vogel also criticised the BND’s poor relationship with Berlin’s allies in Central and Eastern Europe. “There are countries who think twice before exchanging information with the Germans,” she said.