Germany just arrested its own former spy chief for selling state secrets
1 hour ago · 6 October 2026Share
Headquarters of the Federal Intelligence Service in Berlin. File photo. Olaf Kosinsky · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Germany just arrested one of its own former top spies.
August Hanning ran the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence service, from 1998 to 2005. He's 80 now. This morning, Germany's Federal Criminal Police showed up at his home in Nordwalde, near Münster, and arrested him.
The charges are serious. Espionage. Treason. Obtaining classified information for a foreign power.
He wasn't alone. A former close associate was arrested at the same time, in Bad Tölz. German reporting names him only as Manfred D., and says he was Hanning's former chief of staff.
Germany's Federal Public Prosecutor's Office is now running the investigation into both men.
So what are they accused of?
Investigators say Hanning paid that former BND employee, over several years, for around 2,000 secret documents.
And here's what was reportedly in them. According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR, the material included threat assessments, documents from partner intelligence services abroad, and papers on Iran's nuclear programme and Russia's military. Some of it was reportedly meant for the Nachrichtendienstliche Lage — the regular intelligence briefing written for the German Chancellery.
So one of Germany's most senior former spy chiefs is accused of buying his own agency's secrets, years after he left it.
Prosecutors say he planned to resell the material through his private consulting work.
The rest of this story is for members.
Aerial view of Berlin. File photo.dronepicr · CC BY 2.0
And here's the question nobody can answer yet. Investigators are also looking into whether any of this information reached a foreign power. Which one, if any, has not been said.
Think about that for a second. Germany's intelligence agencies exist to find out exactly this kind of thing about other countries. Now they're asking it about one of their own former chiefs.
Handelsblatt alone reports that Hanning is suspected of drawing up at least one security analysis for a foreign intelligence service. No other outlet has confirmed that detail.
Neither the BND nor the Federal Prosecutor's Office has said much publicly. Both have confirmed the arrests and the investigation, and that's it. The BND did not immediately respond when Reuters asked for comment.
The leaked Chancellery documents reportedly surfaced during a search linked to a separate case, over a year ago. Hanning has denied any involvement in that case.
After he left the BND in 2005, Hanning went on to serve as State Secretary in Germany's Federal Interior Ministry, until 2009. He spent four years running the agency whose own secrets he's now accused of buying back.
So what don't we know? How much material actually left German hands. Who might have received it. What the co-suspect was paid. Whether any BND operation has been compromised because of this. And whether either man has responded to the allegations at all.
Germany's Federal Prosecutor's Office has not set out a timeline for when any of those answers might come. For now, two men who once sat at the top of Germany's intelligence machinery are in custody.
And the country that trusted them with its secrets is still trying to work out who else might have seen them.
That question — which foreign power, if any — is the one this investigation was actually built to answer. Right now, nobody is saying.
Nothing here was paid for by an advertiser. Members are the entire business model. Bronze is where it starts, and it opens the last seven days in full.
