00:00From spy chief to suspect, August Hanning, who was the head of Germany's foreign intelligence
00:06service, has been arrested on suspicion of espionage. The allegations strike at the heart
00:12of Germany's intelligence community and come as officials warn of an increasingly aggressive
00:18campaign of foreign espionage and sabotage. So let's get more on this breaking story from
00:27our chief political editor, Michaela Kufner. Michaela, great to have you on today. So just
00:32how extraordinary and damaging is a case like this for Germany's security establishment?
00:40It is actually a huge damage that is being done here in real time to the credibility of
00:48the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, German intelligence currently in the process
00:54of getting greater powers to actually act. And now this devastating blow, if these allegations
01:02do turn out to be true, but it would be highly unusual for arrests to be made and for the
01:09authorities, the prosecutor general here in Germany who takes on such cases only if they
01:16are of national security relevance. And this happened from day one in this case.
01:21So one thing's for sure, there will be a movie made out of this, a former intelligence chief
01:27accused of treason. That is quite something. And there seems to potentially be a highly
01:32commercial motivation behind this. This is the domestic, this is the foreign intelligence chief
01:39who was head of the foreign intelligence agency BND from 1998 to 2005. So he left more than 20 years
01:47ago. But his chief of staff is also arrested, is also accused of treason. And there appears to have
01:55been a longstanding relationship of potentially providing August Henning long after he left
02:02continuously with highly classified information, which was not supposed to leave that building even
02:08to then use for his consultancy business potentially. And there's also talk of foreign powers,
02:14one in particular, the prosecutor appears to have evidence pointing towards him having used the
02:22information he gathered to brief a particular individual of a foreign intelligence agency,
02:27which is not specified. And that, of course, would go way beyond even the commercial use that amounts
02:35potentially to treason. So although authorities insist that the presumption of innocence does continue,
02:43there is quite a lot of evidence here already on the table.
02:48All right. So everything that you've just said to us there, Michaela, what does all of this tell us about
02:53the scope of this investigation? And do we know anything about how long perhaps prosecutors have been looking
03:01into all of this? Well, it appears that they first learned about this in connection with a case of a
03:13German
03:13national, a very wealthy woman, heir to a restaurant business who stood accused of having her own children
03:24abducted in Denmark. That itself a very unusual case. And she appears to have used the services of the former
03:31head
03:32of foreign intelligence, Henning here, to get some kind of assistance in conducting this. Now, as part of this case,
03:41which is civil, a criminal case applying to civil, to a civilian person, ordinary person, it appears that the
03:50intelligence services got hold of information, got hold of that track that led them straight to the former chief of
03:57staff of the, the former head of the, their agency. And this is highly unusual. This must be stretching back
04:04a couple of
04:04years now, although we're not getting that official information. And we understand that the investigation has been
04:12going on for some time. And there's also an expectation that this flow of information had been going on for
04:18some
04:18time. So this is the former head of the BND, the foreign intelligence chief who left more than 10 years
04:25ago, actually 20
04:26years ago. So that gives you an idea of the potential magnitude of what this could mean for the credibility
04:33of German
04:34foreign intelligence. Absolutely. Now, and Michaela, this is all coming, of course, as Germany's intelligence
04:42chief, the current intelligence chief, is warning that Russian espionage and sabotage operations are
04:49becoming more aggressive. So does this case essentially then sort of reinforce the general concerns that we are
04:59seeing from the intelligence community here? Look, there's never a good time to discover that your former head of foreign
05:10intelligence might have sold his own country out to potentially, and they're not named here, but potentially Russia or China,
05:18which would be the most likely ones that are on everybody's mind. So at this moment in time, as Germany
05:25is working hard to
05:26establish credibility and actually new legal means to be at eye level with the UK and US services, this comes
05:37at a
05:37really bad time, but it was always going to be a very bad time. You can take a different view
05:43of it. Maybe it's a helpful
05:46time to discover this because it makes the public here in Germany more sensitive towards actual threats that are out
05:53there and damage that can be done from within. But, you know, they will have to just face it. This
05:59is a significant loss of
06:01credibility at a time where Germany was gearing up to establish new credibility by giving its own intelligence
06:08services more powers. Michaela, can you just remind everyone what the latest developments are and what you're going to be
06:15looking out for in the coming hours and days? Yes, well, we've just seen the arrest of the former head
06:24of
06:24foreign intelligence services here in Germany and also his former chief of staff. There is an accusation that
06:33together they may have not just accumulated highly classified information, but potentially use this
06:40commercially for the services that August Henning, the former head of the BND did provide as part of an agency
06:49that he worked through in Switzerland. And what we are waiting to hear and learn is the exact scope and
06:58the
06:59potential foreign intelligence service, which is mentioned, but there's no individual country mentioned here
07:07that might have benefited from this. This is not just a loss of face. This is a loss of credibility
07:14of the German
07:15foreign intelligence BND, both externally but also internally. This is a significant blow as
07:23politics, politicians, lawmakers had geared up by giving the BND new powers to put it on a par with other
07:31foreign
07:32services, the likes of the UK and the US. A very serious situation to say the least. We'll leave it
07:41there.
07:42Michaela Kufner, thanks so much. That's DW's chief political editor Michaela Kufner. Thanks so much.
07:49All right, so what do you think? If the allegations are true, what does this say about Germany's ability
07:54to protect its own secrets and what might this mean for trust among Germany's partners at a time of growing
08:01security threats? Let us know in the comments. I'm Pablo Folilias here in Berlin. Until next time, take care.
