Comment: The Chancellery has to clean up the BND

Nearly 2000 internal documents for money. If what the Federal Prosecutor's Office is accusing August Hanning and his former office manager of is confirmed, a former president of the German foreign intelligence service BND would have used secret information for private business.

Hanning is not convicted. But the Chancellery cannot wait until the end of the criminal proceedings to examine the events. Because the suspicion of espionage hits the BND in a tense world situation. Germany now needs an efficient and reliable secret service more urgently than ever.

What is piquant is that this is not the first time that the BND has been in the spotlight because of traitors in its own ranks. In 2014, Markus R. was exposed as a CIA spy. He had passed on more than 200 documents. In 2016 he was sentenced to eight years in prison. In December 2022, Carsten L. was arrested on suspicion of supplying secrets to the Russian domestic secret service FSB. The then BND President Bruno Kahl spoke of “serious reputational damage”.

These cases do not prove Hanning's guilt. But they shed light on the question of what the BND has learned from previous affairs. According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Hanning is said to have had information over a period of possibly twelve years that was intended exclusively for internal matters of the German foreign secret service. How can that be? Which controls failed? Who should have noticed anything?