The long shadow of the Gestapo and Stasi hung over the Berlin cabinet table on Wednesday as ministers backed a radical overhaul of German intelligence services.
The ambitious 730-page Bill aims to roll back many of the safeguards introduced in the late 1940s after the Allies defeated Nazi Germany. Eight decades on, Berlin officials say the safeguards are more a hindrance than a help.
“These days Germany is constantly a target of hybrid attacks by foreign powers and that is a real, very acute danger,” said Nina Warken, chancellor Friedrich Merz’s chief of staff, who is also responsible for the agencies. “We are simply too dependent on the intelligence services of other countries supporting us and, into many areas at the moment, this assistance is a one-way street.”
Leading the reform push is federal interior minister Alexander Dobrindt. He said Germany needs more robust intelligence services – the international BND and domestic BfV – to master daily challenges ranging from “espionage, sabotage, cyberattacks and hidden actions by foreign powers with the aim of destabilising our country, damaging our country, and bringing about political and social change ... We are turning our agencies into a real secret service.”
RM Block
Following the Nazis’ politicised persecution of enemies through the Gestapo secret police, West Germany’s intelligence services were established 70 years ago with more passive roles, including strict rules on spying as well as data collection and storage.
The East German Stasi was far less constricted, targeting and often persecuting private individuals in line with its role as the “sword and shield” of the ruling party.
The new Bill widens competences considerably to allow the BND/BfV carry out more “active measures”, a euphemism for accessing electronic devices as well as homes and offices of targets.
In addition the agencies will be allowed target supply chains to corrupt device components or even plant explosives, for instance in IT systems of drone factories or chemical plants.
Calls for intelligence reform date back 25 years to the aftermath of the September 11th, 2001, attacks, planned from Hamburg under the nose of oblivious German agencies.
Many subsequent terrorist attacks in Germany have been thwarted only by tip-offs from friendly services, in particular the CIA and NSA.
Less ambitious reform efforts in recent years have been pruned back by the courts, leaving German agencies struggling to cope with hack attacks and disinformation campaigns from Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
And last month’s Pride attack in Berlin, followed by last week’s drone attack in Leipzig, have exposed once more the limits – and human cost – of German intelligence work.
Despite the overhaul, Germany’s intelligence service employees will, in future, still lack key competences enjoyed by other agents.
In future BND staff will no longer need explicit permission to bring a gun for self-defence on foreign missions. Unlike Mossad, MI6 or the CIA, however, German agents will not be granted a licence to kill.
The Bill still requires parliamentary approval and is likely to face robust legal challenges.
Opposition parties welcomed the reforms in general but raised concerns at what they see as efforts to allow greater political influence of agency activities.
The Free Democratic Party (FDP) said plans to boost the powers of the parliamentary oversight committee were “taboo-shattering”, blurring the previous distinction between police and intelligence agency work.
Green Party interior policy expert Konstantin von Notz, a member of the oversight committee, agreed.
“In future,” he said, “agents can operate against [Germany] citizens without the kind of transparency and judicial review that is the case with police work”.
