His name is August Hanning and for a time he was the head of the BND, the German equivalent of the CIA. Today, Hanning was arrested for espionage, meaning the country's former top spy was spying on Germany after leaving his post. One of his former deputies was also arrested.
The federal prosecutor’s office announced it had detained the former spy chief, August Hanning, 80 — who led Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, from 1998 to 2005 — but did not say which foreign countries he was accused of helping.
The prosecutors said they had also arrested a former chief of staff to Mr. Hanning at the agency, who they said sold 2,000 government documents to Mr. Hanning — many of them classified — in the years after Mr. Hanning left his post and worked as a consultant, joining several corporate boards.
Mr. Hanning, the prosecutors said, had used some of the classified information to create an analysis for a foreign intelligence officer. He also supplied a representative of a separate foreign intelligence service with information over the years, the prosecutors said.
We're not getting a lot of information beyond that, but Reuters is reporting that the former chief of staff, identified as Manfred D. has continued working in the intelligence field until this year.
Manfred D. served as office manager to successive BND presidents until March 2026, potentially giving him access to some of Germany's most current intelligence at the time that prosecutors say documents were being siphoned from the service.
Prosecutors said D. is suspected of having supplied around 2,000 documents over the years, including classified material intended solely for internal use within the BND and senior-level intelligence briefings at the chancellery.
Those included documents relating to the Iranian nuclear programme and the Russian military, as well as highly sensitive material classified as secret by allied intelligence agencies in other countries, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) newspaper reported...
The case does not involve Russia, according to information obtained by Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Politico Europe adds that the documents bought by Hanning cover 12 years, up to 2022. All of this is being seen as a huge embarrassment for Germany and could have an impact on the willingness of other Western spy agencies to share information with them.
The allegations amount to a huge embarrassment for Germany’s scandal-plagued foreign intelligence agency. The BND has a history of being infiltrated by other foreign intelligence services — at times making Western spy agencies reluctant to share sensitive information with the agency.
In 2022, authorities arrested former BND department head Carsten L. on suspicion of spying for Russia, charges he denies in a court case that is still ongoing.
The new allegations come at a particularly sensitive moment for the BND as the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz moves to grant it major new powers to hit back at Moscow, giving the agency much broader authority to perpetrate acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and carry out espionage more aggressively.
Many questions will now be raised in Germany about how such a massive intelligence breach could have gone on undetected for more than a decade.
The same report from Politico also rules out China:
In neither case were Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies involved, according to a German intelligence official granted anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
As for his motive, that seems pretty clear. Hanning was broke after being sued over the collapse of a Latvian bank on whose board he sat. He had a consulting firm but was apparently desperate for cash.
If Hanning is brought to trial the whole thing is likely to happen in secrecy because the evidence will be classified. We may have to wait a while to find out who he was spying for.
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