August Hanning, 80, appears before judge after being accused of treason and espionage on behalf of foreign state A formal arrest warrant has been issued against Germany’s former top spy, with a judge ordering him to be held in pre-trial detention, a day after he was arrested on suspicion of treason and spying on behalf of an overseas intelligence agency.
August Hanning, 80, is accused of buying secret documents from a former colleague and using them to advise a foreign intelligence service, according to the office of the federal prosecutor.
Hanning’s arrest on Tuesday, along with that of his former office head, referred to as Manfred D.
It has sent shock waves through Germany’s political and intelligence community, with analysts calling it potentially the country’s biggest espionage scandal since the end of the cold war.
It has raised questions in Berlin over how Germany’s foreign intelligence service can uphold its reputation internationally, particularly at a time of heightened security concerns.
Also under scrutiny is the sustainability of rules governing the conduct of retired senior officials and their ability to earn extra income based on their insider knowledge and professional networks.
Hanning was head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND) between 1998 and 2005.
A lawyer for Hanning denied he had been involved in any wrongdoing on Wednesday, telling the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt: “While it is true that he was in possession of confidential documents, the allegation that he passed on information contained therein to the detriment of Germany, let alone for payment, is incorrect.” Manfred D, who was also placed under formal arrest on Wednesday by the judge in Karlsruhe, has yet to respond to questions via his lawyer.
Hanning is alleged to have agreed in 2010 to pay for information from Manfred D, who allegedly then smuggled it out of the BND.
Manfred D, 64, had worked under Hanning and went on to serve subsequent BND bosses after Hanning, before retiring in March this year.
Members of the media attempt to take a photograph of Hanning as he is driven away from court on Wednesday.
He is alleged to have used the information in his papers for his private consulting work.
Prosecutors were alerted to Hanning’s alleged criminal activities by investigators gathering evidence in a separate child kidnapping case involving a steakhouse restaurant dynasty, which the former spy chief is accused of participating in using his former contacts with Israeli intelligence.
Christina Block, an heiress to the business, allegedly paid Hanning and a retired police officer more than €100,000 (£85,000) for their roles in the alleged abduction of her two children from her ex-husband.
A report in Der Spiegel on Wednesday said investigators were looking into a possible connection to the foreign intelligence service of Azerbaijan as one of the agencies Hanning may have been passing information to.
Azerbaijan’s media and broadcasting council denied any connection to Hanning or the investigation.
“The malicious intent of the forces behind this disinformation operation is to damage Azerbaijan-Germany relations,” the council said in a statement.
The scandal has awakened memories of the Günter Guillaume affair, when an East German Stasi spy and his wife posing as refugees infiltrated the government of the then chancellor Willy Brandt, leading to Brandt’s resignation in 1974.
Marc Henrichmann, the head of the parliamentary committee overseeing the intelligence services, which has repeatedly raised questions about the post-career consulting activities of intelligence agency employees but has been told legal obstacles stood in the way of challenging them, said he was “fairly flabbergasted” by the affair, but stressed it was as yet unclear the breadth and extent of the alleged wrongdoing.
“As yet we don’t know exactly what happened,” he told the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, while acknowledging the need to “restore broken trust” in the BND.
Police officers stand outside Hanning’s home in Nordwalde on Tuesday after his arrest.
The scandal comes at a time when Germany is attempting to make its intelligence agencies, including the BND and its domestic sibling, the BfV, more robust, efficient and independent from those of its allies, in particular boosting their powers of surveillance to more effectively tackle sabotage and hacking attacks, amid rising threats from external powers such as Russia and Iran.
The scandal is yet another blow to the BND’s reputation.
Not only is it notoriously dependent on information from foreign agencies to foil terror attacks on German soil, but it has faced other cases of its staff allegedly spying for other countries.
It has also been reeling from the case of a department head, Carsten L, who was accused in December 2022 of spying for Russia.
His trial is now being heard by Berlin’s higher regional court.
Sensitivities over the country’s past, when dictatorships misused their powers of surveillance to spy on their own people, have made reform of the agencies hard to pursue.
Hanning, the son of a brickyard owner, rose through the ranks of the intelligence service to become its head.
After the attacks of 11 September 2001, he oversaw the investigation into some of the terrorists who had studied in Hamburg.
He initiated wide-reaching reforms of the BND including bringing it closer to politics, becoming a close adviser to the then interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
He spoke out against a “culture of leaks” and was deeply critical of the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, calling him an “internal offender”.
Once his civil service career was over, Hanning continued to hold a role as a respected behind-the-scenes negotiator, and frequently intervened in government security policy debates.
At the same time he built up his consultant business, founding an agency with his wife, Ruth, called Hanning Consult, and worked for various other global consulting agencies.
He even produced a “spy cookbook” with his wife, called “Top(f) Secret” (Topf being the German word for saucepan).
Explore more on these topicsGermany Europe news Share Reuse this content
