Bruno Kahl, head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, was in Ukraine on February 24 last year when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to cross the border into the neighboring country. The invasion has begun. Kal went to Kiev for “urgent negotiations”, apparently unaware of the imminent threat of invasion.
The head of one of Europe’s most important intelligence agencies was eventually desperately retreated home by the commandos. His two-day overland trip was the latest in a string of embarrassments for the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND), an organization that has seen personnel and functional wear and tear since the end of the Cold War. morning paper .
At one point, the BND predicted that Moscow would not launch an attack, despite warnings from US and British intelligence that Putin was on the verge of an invasion.
Last week, German intelligence circles again blushed with shame and embarrassment after Carsten Linke, a popular football coach at the local club in Weilheim, was exposed as suspected of spying on Russia. According to media reports, Linke was a double agent and worked for the BND, and then passed information to the Russians. To make matters worse, this double agent, who is feared to have been transmitting highly classified information from the battlefield to Moscow, has been discovered by foreign intelligence, writes Britain’s The Telegraph.
The question is whether the Americans have exposed the BND again, because this will not be the first time – namely, Berlin only learned after the leaked information of the American “whistleblower” Edward Snowden that Washington tapped the mobile phone of former Chancellor Angela Merkel. . Meanwhile, London is outraged by the possibility that Linke passed some of his intelligence to Moscow.
The Unpleasant Experience of the Gestapo and the Stasi
The question arises how the foreign intelligence service of the richest European country could make so many mistakes. Germany’s Der Spiegel lays the blame for this on former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a close friend of Vladimir Putin who has long been on the payroll in Russia thanks to his business ties to the state energy giant Gazprom. During his tenure as Germany’s “response” to British Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair, he did nothing to repair the country’s damaged intelligence services.
Thus, the BND completely shut down its counterintelligence arm in 1997 after massive layoffs following German reunification in the 1990s, and Russia has exploited this mistake ever since.
The counterintelligence unit was reorganized only in 2017, three years after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and had to start the delicate work of creating a network of sources from scratch. Despite threats from Russia, China and other countries, until recently, only a few dozen employees worked in the unit. The BND doesn’t even have a dedicated team dedicated entirely to detecting and rooting out Russian agents, so it’s no surprise that Moscow felt confident enough to take out a Chechen dissident in a park in Berlin in 2019.
Erich Schmidt-Enboom, a leading expert in the German intelligence service, says the BND has always had internal security problems. So, back in the 1950s, the first head of counterintelligence of the BND, Heinz Felfe, was a double agent for the infamous Soviet KGB.
Smug and arrogant
And while other Western intelligence agencies have “moles” in their ranks, they are nowhere near as common and frequent as the BND, which other European agencies consider extremely smug and arrogant. Experts say that when spies are recruited, they are rarely tested for loyalty.
The Carsten Linke case looks like one of the biggest scandals to date and a new blow to the German government, which is so often accused of being wrong when it comes to Ukraine. The revelation that Putin had a man in the upper echelons of his foreign intelligence service is further evidence that Germany underestimated the danger posed by Russia. There are now growing calls for the BND to carry out the same kind of sweeping reform that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has promised but has yet to deliver on the weakened and under-equipped German military.
Last October, Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the security service responsible for internal security, told the Bundestag that Russia was “an aggressive player with dishonorable means and motives.” Beside him, in a blue shirt with a purple tie and rimless glasses, sat Bruno Kahl, who had fled Ukraine eight months earlier. If he knew that a Russian “mole” lurked in the depths of his organization then, he did not reveal it.
