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A joke is doing the rounds among the US officials who deal with Europe. What, they ask, is the fastest way to bring something to President Putin’s attention? Th
www.thetimes.co.uk
A joke is doing the rounds among the US officials who deal with Europe. What, they ask, is the fastest way to bring something to President Putin’s attention? The answer: give it to the Germans.
Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, is having a rough time. One of its officers stands accused of leaking secrets to the FSB, a Kremlin spy agency, and its efforts to uncover who carried out the bombing of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last September are understood to be proving fruitless. Yet the most potentially serious of its problems is also the least discussed in public: the steady erosion of trust in its competence.
The BND is a peculiar organisation. Founded after the Second World War as an unruly private espionage network of former Wehrmacht officers, Gestapo agents and sleazy aristocrats, its initial purpose was primarily to spy on the enemies of Konrad Adenauer, the first West German chancellor.
In the Fifties and Sixties, however, it was given a formal place in the German state and slowly professionalised. It acquired pockets of world-class expertise, including on Egypt and other parts of the Arab world, although it retained a certain anarchic quality.
The archives from its
Cold War years, opened up to independent historians in an admirable stab at transparency, are stuffed with deranged stories, such as the gifted ex-SS officer who went rogue in Latin America and plunged without authorisation into a series of gun fights, guerilla campaigns and momentous political intrigues. (Sadly, the exact details of the case were redacted under privacy rules.)
The BND has long been under particularly intense scrutiny because of the industrial-grade abuses of its totalitarian predecessors. Its grubby dealings and operational mistakes tend to surface more readily than those of its peers. Its surveillance activities are also circumscribed to a fairly unusual degree by German law. A couple of years ago, one of its former heads warned that these narrowing constraints put it at risk of a “descent into third-class status” in the intelligence world.
It is easy to judge the BND harshly, and that is precisely what some of its partners are now doing. The intriguing thing about the current suspected case of Russian espionage is not that it happened — several other countries, including Sweden, are wrestling with similar incidents of infiltration — but the window it offers into how the agency operates.
Carsten Linke, a senior officer in the BND’s “technical reconnaissance” department, is accused of using a Russian-German businessman to ferry documents to his FSB handlers in Moscow, possibly with help from a fellow member of the German intelligence service.
If reports in the German press are accurate, the Russians were after precise GPS data on the locations of some of Ukraine’s peskiest western-supplied armaments, such as Himars rocket launchers and the advanced Iris-T air defence systems.
While it is unclear whether they got everything they wanted, Linke is alleged to have smuggled papers out of the office and to have been paid handsomely in return: a six-figure sum in banknotes is said to have been found stuffed into envelopes and stashed away in his locker at the BND’s headquarters.
The agency used to carry out random spot-checks on staff to discourage this sort of thing but the practice was abolished under the previous chancellor, Angela Merkel. In the end Linke was caught only with help from a friendly foreign intelligence agency.
The punchline is that at the time of his arrest Linke had recently been promoted to oversee the security checks on staff and potential agents, even though his fruity hard-right views were allegedly notorious among his colleagues.
Any serious spy novelist would have rejected the incidental details as too clunky and picaresque to be plausible: the locker full of grubby Russian cash; the furtive dinners in Moscow caviar joints; Linke’s supposed YouTube account, adorned with the eagle symbol of the German empire and full of old marching songs from the Wehrmacht and the Prussian army.
Yet they hint at the institutional blind spots and carelessness that are causing more bother than the espionage itself. In private, several officials, MPs and diplomats suggest the suspected Russian penetration is one symptom of a deeper malaise in an organisation that seems to have lost its way over the past 12 months.
Sources claim the BND has repeatedly misjudged the situation in Ukraine since the night of the invasion, when Bruno Kahl, its president, was caught unawares in Kyiv and had to be spirited out of the country with a fiddly evacuation convoy. One senior figure from the coalition rolled their eyes when asked about the agency, replying: “I’m not inclined to trust anything from an intelligence service that allowed its own boss to get stranded in a war zone.”
The BND’s luck has scarcely improved since then. At first, like a number of other intelligence agencies, it predicted a rapid and fatal Ukrainian collapse. Unlike its peers, however, it is believed to have continued to provide Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, with doom-laden analyses long after the Russians were driven back from Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Last summer, as the Ukrainians were preparing for their highly effective counter-offensives on the Kherson and Donbas fronts, the BND suggested they would fold by October at the latest. Now it is said to have concluded that the war is heading towards a kind of Flanders Fields Mark 2, an essentially static attritional slog that will drag on for years and whose outcome will be almost entirely unaffected by any shipments of western tanks or fighter jets.
That may ultimately turn out to be the case. For now, though, these doggedly pessimistic intelligence reports are bolstering Scholz’s natural circumspection — and raising increasingly sceptical eyebrows elsewhere.