The assessment was made in The Spectator’s latest issue by journalist and historian Nigel Jones, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s polskieradio24.pl website reported on Monday.
Jones noted that earlier this month, Germany detained a military aide working for the Bundeswehr army’s procurement agency, identified only as Thomas H., on suspicion of spying for Russia.
Jones said the detention came in the wake of two similar cases in late 2022, when “an agent of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, was arrested and accused of betraying secrets to the Russians, and an officer in the Bundeswehr reserve was put on probation for supplying information to Moscow for years.”
'Bureaucratic oversight and interference'
Moreover, the detention of Thomas H. came days after two former BND chiefs, August Hanning and Gerhard Schindler, wrote to the Bild newspaper arguing that “bureaucratic oversight and interference” had made the spy agency “hobbled and toothless,” Jones wrote.
Hanning and Schindler revealed that “no fewer than seven political and legal committees had to approve and supervise their work" as heads of the BND, "forcing them to rely on information from friendly foreign intelligence agencies rather than their own work.”
According to The Spectator article, this revelation “seems to confirm that the arrest of the spies last year came because of a tip-off from an allied agency rather than Germany’s own counter-espionage efforts.”
Jones noted that since the Cold War, “Germany has long been on the front line of the spy wars,” and Chancellor Willy Brandt had been brought down in the 1970s when his aide Günter Guillaume “was exposed as a long-term communist spy.”
Moreover, “the Russians and East Germans trained handsome agents” to target secretaries working for the Bonn government and “seduce them into espionage,” according to The Spectator.
'Prone to penetration by Russian spies'
Jones assessed: “It is not hard to discern why Germany is so prone to penetration by Russian spies: it is yet another legacy of the country’s dark past. The totalitarian experience of Nazi dictatorship so inoculated the country against all aspects of a police state, that suspicion of domestic spy agencies became endemic.”
He added: “The country that produced the Gestapo and SS has always had a healthy distrust of spies — hence the excessive checks and balances hampering their own secret agents today. Coupled with this is Germany’s ambivalent relationship with Russia, including German guilt arising from the shadows cast by World War Two and the subsequent division of the country until 1989.”
According to Jones, the combination of these factors is making Germany “a weak link in the Western world’s defense against Russian aggression and espionage that has followed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, launching the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II.
Monday is day 544 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: polskieradio24.pl, The Spectator