German court orders ex-BND chief Hanning detained on treason and espionage

Prosecutors allege Hanning paid former colleague for 2,000 BND documents

A German judge ordered August Hanning, 80, the former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service (BND), held in pre-trial detention on Wednesday on suspicion of treason and espionage on behalf of a foreign state, a day after his arrest. The detention order was issued by a judge in Karlsruhe, home of Germany’s federal prosecutor.

Hanning was arrested Tuesday alongside his former office head, identified in line with German privacy conventions as Manfred D., 64, who was also placed under formal arrest Wednesday. Prosecutors alleged that Hanning agreed in 2010 to pay Manfred D. for information that Manfred D. then smuggled out of the BND. Manfred D. had served under Hanning and continued working for subsequent BND directors after Hanning’s tenure, retiring in March 2026.

According to the office of the federal prosecutor, Hanning received about 2,000 documents from Manfred D. through June 2022, some of which were classified, and used the information in papers for his private consulting work. A lawyer for Hanning denied the allegations on Wednesday, telling the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt: “While it is true that he was in possession of confidential documents, the allegation that he passed on information contained therein to the detriment of Germany, let alone for payment, is incorrect.” Manfred D. had not responded through his lawyer at the time of publication.

The espionage investigation surfaced through a separate child-kidnapping case. Prosecutors alleged that Christina Block, heiress to a steakhouse restaurant dynasty, paid Hanning and a retired police officer more than €100,000 (£85,000) for their alleged roles in the abduction of her two children from her ex-husband, an alleged plot prosecutors say made use of Hanning’s former contacts with Israeli intelligence. Investigators gathering material in that case were led to the alleged espionage.

A report in Der Spiegel on Wednesday said investigators were examining a possible connection to the foreign intelligence service of Azerbaijan as one of the agencies Hanning may have been passing information to. Azerbaijan’s media and broadcasting council denied any connection, saying in a statement: “The malicious intent of the forces behind this disinformation operation is to damage Azerbaijan-Germany relations.”

Marc Henrichmann, who heads the parliamentary committee overseeing Germany’s intelligence services, said he was “fairly flabbergasted” by the affair in remarks to the public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, while stressing the breadth and extent of the alleged wrongdoing remained unclear. “As yet we don’t know exactly what happened,” Henrichmann said, acknowledging the need to “restore broken trust” in the BND. The committee has repeatedly raised questions about post-career consulting by intelligence employees, Henrichmann said, but has been told legal obstacles stood in the way of challenging such arrangements. On Wednesday, politicians and intelligence analysts called for stricter regulation of how former security employees may use their influence and inside knowledge after retiring.

The scandal has drawn comparisons to the 1974 Günter Guillaume affair, in which an East German Stasi spy and his wife, posing as refugees, infiltrated the government of then-Chancellor Willy Brandt and led to his resignation. Analysts have called the current case potentially the country’s biggest espionage scandal since the end of the Cold War.

The case lands against a backdrop of recent espionage scandals inside the agency. The scandal is yet another blow to the BND’s reputation: the agency is notoriously dependent on information from foreign agencies to foil terror attacks on German soil, and has faced other cases of its staff allegedly spying for other countries. In December 2022, a BND department head identified as Carsten L. was accused of spying for Russia; his trial is now being heard by Berlin’s higher regional court. Germany has been attempting to make its intelligence agencies, including the BND and its domestic sibling, the BfV, more robust, efficient and independent from those of its allies, boosting their powers of surveillance to more effectively tackle sabotage and hacking attacks amid rising threats from external powers such as Russia and Iran. Sensitivities over Germany’s past, when dictatorships misused their powers of surveillance to spy on their own people, have made reform of the agencies hard to pursue.

Hanning rose through the ranks of the BND to lead it from 1998 to 2005. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, he oversaw the investigation into some of the terrorists who had studied in Hamburg. He initiated wide-reaching reforms of the BND, bringing it closer to politics, and became a close adviser to then-Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. He spoke out against a “culture of leaks” and was deeply critical of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, calling him an “internal offender.”

After his civil service career, Hanning built a private consulting business, founding an agency with his wife Ruth called Hanning Consult and working with other global consulting firms. He and Ruth also co-authored a book called “Top(f) Secret” — Topf being the German word for saucepan — described as a “spy cookbook.”