The exposed alleged double agent at the BND shows: Russia spies in Germany on a large scale. The German services, on the other hand, had a false sense of security for a long time. What is known about the case and how can it be explained?
About a third of the employees are said to be spies: the roof of the Russian embassy in Berlin.
He was just a small cog in the 6,500-strong machinery of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) – and yet the employee of the German foreign intelligence service, Markus R., who was exposed in 2014, was at the center of one of the biggest German espionage scandals after the end of the Cold War. Until now.
The BND employee arrested on Wednesday could possibly challenge his rank. The German Carsten L. is said to have transmitted a state secret to a Russian intelligence service in 2022. According to reports from “Welt” and “Focus”, Carsten L. is said to be a high-ranking employee of the BND’s technical foreign reconnaissance. The case points to long-standing failures within the secret service.
What is known about the case?
Further information about the suspect and the content of the state secret remain under wraps for the time being. BND President Bruno Kahl said that restraint and discretion were particularly important in this case. Because with Russia you are dealing with an actor “with whose unscrupulousness and willingness to use violence we have to reckon”. This has been known since the so-called Tiergarten murder in 2019, when a Russian agent shot a Georgian in Berlin.
At least two findings can be gleaned from the statement by the federal prosecutor on Thursday. First: It is a substantial betrayal of secrets to Russia. At least one state secret was leaked by what is believed to be a high-ranking secret agent. Second, the suspected traitor may have been discovered relatively quickly. The message only mentions that he submitted information in 2022 – a longer period is not mentioned.
But even without knowing further details about the specific case, the arrest points to a fundamental phenomenon: Russian intelligence services are still extremely active in Germany. They seem to have mastered the supreme discipline of espionage, recruiting internal sources from foreign secret services. While Russia never stopped doing so-called counter-espionage, the BND shut down the associated department in the early 2000s. In the current confrontation with Russia, this indulgence is taking its toll.
counterintelligence? We don’t need it anymore
The office clerk Markus R., who was exposed in 2014, passed on over 200 secret documents to the CIA. When he also wanted to offer himself to Russia, he was caught. He sent three secret documents to the Russian Consulate General in Munich. However, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitored the consul’s e-mail communication and thus found out about the employee in the registry and post office of the BND location in Pullach, Bavaria.
It is particularly ironic that one of the three documents passed on was a BND concept paper for setting up a counter-espionage unit, i.e. a department for the targeted recruitment of internal sources in foreign services. The fact that this was still in the process of being set up shows that until then the German foreign intelligence service had not systematically dealt with the infiltration of foreign services.
Gerhard Conrad worked in a leading position for the German foreign intelligence service until 2019.
“After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the ‘War on Terror’ was also the declared priority at the BND,” says Gerhard Conrad, who was a senior BND official until 2019. “Focuses were shifted and a lot of money was saved. After the end of the bloc confrontation, politicians thought they could largely do without some intelligence activities – including counter-espionage.” Decentralized terrorist groups now had top priority, state actors like Russia were classified as less dangerous.
It also fits that a certain Vladimir Putin was a guest in Berlin just two weeks after September 11, 2001 and spoke before the Bundestag. At the time, the Russian President said: “Terrorism, national hatred, separatism and religious extremism have the same roots everywhere and bear the same poisonous fruits. That is why the means of combating these problems should also be universal.” Shortly thereafter, there was loud applause from the German parliamentarians. At the time, Putin was not an enemy but a close ally in the fight against global terrorism.
Only the Russian side saw it very differently. In the field of espionage, from the point of view of former KGB agent Putin, the Cold War was never over.
Blackmail as a favorite tool of Russian agents
According to ex-secret agent Conrad, there was only a small break in Russian secret service activity in Germany in the early 1990s. “But since the 2000s, there has been increasing talk of substantial intelligence activity by Russia in the Federal Republic.” For years, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has estimated that around a third of the Russian embassy staff in Berlin are actually spies.
Since the beginning of the war, Russian espionage activity in Germany has increased even further, the heads of the German domestic and foreign intelligence services reported to the parliamentary oversight body of the Bundestag in October. For this reason, Germany, like many other European countries, expelled some diplomats in the spring.
Basically, little has changed in the methods used by Russian secret services since the end of the Soviet Union, says Conrad. However, recruiting internal sources from other secret services remains extremely difficult and usually lengthy. On the one hand, this could be the result of network formation within the framework of private contacts, for example if a BND employee tells a friend about his work and this friend serves as a direct or indirect link to a Russian agent.
“On the other hand, it is known that the Russian ‘colleagues’ like to work with compromising material,” says Conrad. Blackmail is a common tool used by Russian intelligence services to recruit sources of all kinds. The BND forbids the use of so-called kompromat.
The intelligence «turning point»
The intelligence services are a reflection of foreign and security policy. After a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards Russia at the beginning of the millennium, also in view of the common threat posed by international terrorism, the BND has taken the threat from Russia very seriously since the Georgia conflict from 2008 and especially since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, says Conrad.
Just as the Bundeswehr was neglected in the past, the intelligence services in Germany received fewer resources. The long-standing neglect of counter-espionage is now taking its toll: the security authorities regularly groped in the dark about Russian activities. In the case of the Tiergarten murder mentioned, for example, it was the Bellingcat research network that unearthed evidence that was unknown to the services.
In the recent past, however, the foreign secret service has been awarded continuously and substantially more money. Last year, the BND received more than one billion euros from the federal budget for the first time – about twice as much as in 2013. Since 2017 there has even been a small department for counter-espionage.