How Germany's intelligence agency became a liability for Europe

On February 24 of last year Bruno Kahl, Germany's spy chief, was in Ukraine when Vladimir Putin ordered his forces over the border.

He had travelled for "urgent talks" in Kyiv seemingly unaware of the imminent danger of invasion.

The man heading one of Europe's most important intelligence agencies ended up being escorted home by special forces in a desperate retreat.

His two-day journey overland was the latest in a string of embarrassments for Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency (BND), an organisation hollowed out since the Cold War.

The BND once confidently predicted Moscow would not launch an attack, despite US and British intelligence warning Putin was on the cusp of invading.

There were red faces among Berlin’s spooks again this week, after 52-year-old father of two Carsten Linke was exposed as a suspected spy for Russia.

To make matters worse the double agent, feared to be passing sensitive battlefield information to Moscow, was found by a foreign intelligence agency.

Had the BND been shown up by the Americans again? It wouldn’t be the first time, it was only after Edward Snowden’s leaks that Berlin found out Washington had bugged Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

Britain, meanwhile, is fuming over the possibility that some of its intelligence has been passed to Moscow by the officer. How has it come to pass that the foreign intelligence service of Europe’s richest country could be found so lacking?

Germany’s Der Spiegel blames former chancellor Gerhard Shroder, a close friend of Vladimr Putin, who infamously took the Kremlin’s shilling through his business links to state-owned Gazprom.

Back when he was Germany’s answer to Tony Blair, he did nothing to rebuild the country’s hollowed out intelligence services.

The BND completely shut down its counter espionage unit in 1997 after a massive cull of staff following the reunification of Germany in the 1990s; an error that Russia has been exploiting ever since.

Other countries close to Russia, such as the Scandinavian nations, maintained first class intelligence units so why didn’t Germany?

Part of the reason why this was possible is cultural and historical. Germans have a deep distrust of state agencies and a strong belief in the need for privacy because of their experience of the Gestapo and Stasi.

The counter-espionage unit was only reopened in 2017, three years after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and had to start the delicate work of building up sources from scratch.

Despite the threat from Russia, China and others, it had, until very recently, just a few dozen staff.

There isn’t even a dedicated team to root out Russian agents. Little wonder Moscow felt confident enough to execute a Chechen dissident in a Berlin park back in 2019.

Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, a leading expert on the German spy service, says the BND has always had problems with its internal security.

Back in the 1950s its first head of counter-espionage Heinz Felfe was a double agent for the KGB.

BND 'complacent and arrogant'

While other Western secret services have their moles, they don’t have as many as often as the BND, which is seen as complacent and arrogant by other European agencies.

Experts say that once spies are recruited, they are hardly ever checked to ensure they remain loyal.

The Carsten Linke case looks set to be one of the biggest scandals yet and a fresh blow for a German government so often accused of getting it wrong on Ukraine.

The revelation that Putin had a man in the upper echelons of its foreign intelligence is yet more evidence that Germany has underestimated the danger posed by Russia.

There are now calls to give the BND the same kind of radical overhaul Olaf Scholz has promised - but not yet delivered - to the moribund and under-equipped German army.

In October last year, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of domestic intelligence, told the Bundestag that Russia was an “aggressive actor with dishonest means and motives”.

Sitting next to him in a blue shirt with a purple tie and wearing rimless glasses was Mr Kahl, who had fled Ukraine eight months earlier.

If he knew there was a Russian mole buried deep in his organisation at the time, he didn’t let on.