Intelligence Scoop: Former German Spy Chief Arrested for Treason

David McCloskey (0:03)

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Gordon Corera (0:25)

Germany's former foreign intelligence chief has been arrested for treason and for spying for a foreign power. But who has he been accused of spying for? And how dangerous could this be for Germany and its intelligence agency, the BND? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Corera.

David McCloskey (0:43)

And I'm David McCloskey.

Gordon Corera (0:44)

And David, let's look at what we know so far about this amazing story, which is hitting the BND, German's foreign intelligence service, focusing on this individual, August Hanning.

David McCloskey (0:54)

Well, first off Gordon, greetings from Edinburgh.

Edinburgh. Edinburgh.

Viewers will see that I'm looking as vampiric as you often do, Gordon. I've dotted my usual cave. All right. So August Hanning, he is not important. He's not the chief of the BND right now. He was the chief from 1998 to 2005 He took a job at the Interior Ministry afterward. And since about 2010 has opened up a private consultancy.

Gordon Corera (1:27)

And we should say he's not a career spy, is he? He's a public official. He was a lawyer who was appointed to the head of the intelligence agency, did it for a few years, including those kind of 9-11 years, and then went into kind of other public service jobs and then into this consultancy role.

David McCloskey (1:43)

That's right. And we should say that the charges that have been levied against him, and we'll go much deeper into what this all entails, but the charges of espionage, treason, passing intelligence to a foreign intelligence service. I mean, these are in the German context, unprecedented. I mean, this is an app. It is impossible, I think, to overstate the seriousness with which the Germans are taking this case. It seems that he received as many as 2,000 Classified documents between about 2010 and this year. So it is a massive, massive trove of information that he got access to.

Gordon Corera (2:28)

Yeah, and it's interesting because the documents come from, it's alleged, his chief of staff. It's alleged, let's be careful at the moment, he's just been arrested, but his former chief of staff. So there's a man called Manfred, the Germans tend to use only the first names with these cases, who was his chief of staff when August Hanning was head of the BND, but then continues to be the chief of staff for subsequent heads of the BND and serves enrolled until March of this year. The claim is that in 2010, Manfred and August Hanning come into this relationship in which Manfred is going to pass documents from the BND where he's still working to August Hanning, who's obviously now out. This starts in 2010 and goes on for at least 12 years. It's an extraordinary allegation. We're going to look a bit more deeply into what it was behind all of this and who the documents might have gone to. But first, a quick note from our sponsors at HP.

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David McCloskey (4:43)

So, Gordon, the documents. What do we know about what was in those documents?

Gordon Corera (4:48)

Well, we obviously don't know all the details because they're secret and classified documents. But so what it looks like is that Manfred, so the source, if you like, in the BND was passing particularly a set of documents which were used to prepare for these what are called intelligence situation meetings which happen in Germany. So, there's a regular meeting. I was reading about this. It's held every Tuesday, 10 a.m. on the fourth floor of the federal chancellery building. It's known as NDLager.