Berlin. It is an unprecedented case in the history of the Federal Intelligence Service: August Hanning (80), former president of the German foreign secret service, was arrested this morning in the Steinfurt district in North Rhine-Westphalia on suspicion of espionage - at the same time as the arrest of his former office manager Manfred D. in the Bavarian district of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen, as the Federal Prosecutor General announced in Karlsruhe. Hanning is under strong suspicion, among other things, of attempted treason and secret service agent activity, while Manfred D. is accused of being an accomplice.
According to information from WDR, NDR and “Süddeutscher Zeitung”, the allegations are not about Russia. When asked, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor General did not want to comment on which foreign service or country Hanning was said to have worked for. According to information from the German Press Agency, these are probably Hanning's business partners from his consulting work, for example in the Central Asia region. A spokesman for the federal government did not want to comment on the arrests because of the ongoing investigation.
According to the status of the investigation, his former office manager Manfred D. Hanning is said to have made almost 2,000 documents available by June 2022. This often included classified information that was intended exclusively for internal BND tasks. According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the material served to inform and prepare the BND leadership for the so-called ND situation (intelligence situation briefing), a regular, often weekly meeting of top officials from various ministries and security agencies in the Chancellery.
Hanning was BND president from December 1998 to the end of November 2005, and Manfred D. was his office manager at the time. According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, he followed Hanning as an assistant to the Federal Ministry of the Interior between December 2005 and November 2009, where Hanning was State Secretary. Hanning then switched to the private sector and worked as a security consultant.
According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Manfred D. worked again as an office manager for several BND presidents between March 2012 and March 2026. In this role he had access to confidential information. According to dpa information, Manfred D. is now retired.
According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Hanning and Manfred D. probably agreed in the spring of 2010 that the ex-office manager Hanning would continually obtain valuable BND intelligence for a fee. Hanning is said to have used this information profitably in his consulting work. If this is true, Hanning would have had information for a period of possibly at least twelve years that was intended exclusively for BND internal matters.
In one case, according to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, Hanning is said to have used information to prepare an analysis for employees of a foreign intelligence service. It has not yet been possible to determine whether this has reached the addressee. In addition, Hanning is said to have been in close contact with a member of another intelligence service for years and to have provided him with political information, some of which was based on the material transmitted by Manfred B.
After his work at the BND and in the federal government, Hanning worked as a political advisor. For example, at Pluteos AG, which is based in Lucerne, Switzerland, he is President of the Board of Directors. The company advertises Hanning's “competences” as being “a renowned civil servant” and former BND president.
The company's website says about Pluteos that they are a "group of world-class intelligence and security experts" that have come together "to offer independent advice, support and integration in accordance with Switzerland's uncompromising quality standards and using their enormous experience and large network of contacts".
According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, there is a cross-connection between the current espionage allegations against Hanning and the Block case. “The proceedings are based on findings from a search of the accused Hanning, which the Hamburg public prosecutor’s office carried out in September 2025 as part of investigations against Christina Block and others,” said the Federal Prosecutor General. “The case was submitted to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office for takeover at the beginning of May 2026.”
The Hamburg entrepreneur Christina Block is accused of having commissioned an Israeli security company to kidnap her then 13-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son from her father's home in southern Denmark to Germany on New Year's Eve 2023/24 after a bitter custody dispute. The 53-year-old protested her innocence in a trial before the Hamburg regional court.
A good year before the children were brought back, there was said to have been a failed kidnapping attempt. The Hamburg public prosecutor's office announced in autumn 2025 that it was investigating Hanning and a retired officer from the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office because of the incident in 2022. Hanning denied the allegations through his lawyer.
For the new BND President Martin Jäger, who took over the office from his long-time predecessor Bruno Kahl in September 2025, the Hanning case is likely to be the first major test. In the BND, immediately after the service became aware of a possible leak via the detour of the block search, “extensive internal investigations” were initiated early and immediately, which substantiated the suspicion, explained Jäger. The Federal Prosecutor General has taken over the investigation.
“For the BND and me, there are no compromises when it comes to internal security,” emphasized Jäger. He added: “None of my goals, none of my priorities will be compromised by this process.” Jäger is working to ensure that the service can work more operationally than before and, for example, take action against cyber attacks by foreign services. The president informed the BND staff in the morning immediately after the arrests.
Even if the espionage suspicion against Hanning concerns the most prominent BND case to date, there have been repeated scandals and affairs in the service in the past. The then employee Carsten L. is said to have passed on internal documents to the Russian secret service FSB with an accomplice in 2022. The trial for particularly serious treason is ongoing.
Hanning himself admitted in 2005 that BND employees had been spying on journalists for years in order to track down leaks. In 2014, BND employee Markus R. was exposed as a CIA source. He had passed on more than 200 documents, some of them top secret, over the years and was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2016.
Green Party domestic politician Konstantin von Notz was shocked. “This is an iron-hard and abysmal story, we expect the outrageous allegations to be clarified quickly and completely,” said von Notz, who is also a member of the Bundestag committee for the control of the secret services (PKGr), to “Spiegel”. “We have been criticizing the dubious and diverse lobbying activities of former top officials and the most secretive people in the Federal Republic for years.” According to the “Spiegel” report, he specifically called for former secret keepers to be banned from such activities after their term in office.
