Germany Arrests Ex-Spy Chief August Hanning, 80, on Treasonous Espionage Charges
Federal prosecutors say the former BND president used about 2,000 classified documents supplied by his old chief of staff and wrote an analysis for a foreign intelligence officer.
German authorities on Tuesday arrested August Hanning, the former president of the country's foreign intelligence service, on suspicion of treasonous espionage, in one of the most striking spy cases to hit Berlin in years. Hanning, 80, led the Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, from December 1998 to November 2005.
The federal prosecutor's office said Hanning is "strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage." He was arrested in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen in southern Germany. A former aide identified only as Manfred D., in line with German privacy rules, was arrested the same day in Steinfurt in the west of the country. He is charged with aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage.
Prosecutors say Manfred D. served as Hanning's chief of staff at the BND and later at the Interior Ministry, where Hanning was a state secretary until 2009. He is believed to have supplied Hanning with around 2,000 documents, including classified material, up until at least mid-2022.
According to prosecutors, the two men agreed in the spring of 2010 that Manfred D. would keep passing valuable BND material to Hanning in exchange for payment. On one occasion, prosecutors allege, Hanning used that material to draft an analysis for an officer of a foreign intelligence service. Investigators have not established that the analysis was delivered. Hanning is also accused of keeping close contact for several years with a representative of a second foreign service and of passing on political information that was partly drawn from the documents.
After leaving government, Hanning moved into private security consulting. Investigators have described the documents as having been used for his work in that field, which would mean sensitive state intelligence flowed into a commercial business for more than a decade.
The arrest lands at a tense moment for German security services. Berlin has been dealing with a run of sabotage, espionage and hybrid-warfare cases tied to Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and officials have repeatedly warned that Germany is a prime target. The prosecutor's statement did not name the foreign services involved, and it did not say that either was Russian. That question is likely to dominate the coming weeks.
Both men are presumed innocent unless convicted. Under German procedure, a judge will review the arrests and the evidence, and prosecutors can bring formal charges later. Treasonous espionage is one of the most serious offenses in German law and carries a heavy prison sentence on conviction.
For the BND, the case is a reputational blow. Hanning ran the agency in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, when German and U.S. intelligence cooperation deepened, and he later became one of the country's most visible security voices. The allegations suggest that the leak of its material did not end when he left office, and that a former top official's private dealings may have reached into the agency for years.
