Following the Hanning affair, the BND doesn't need reform. It needs an order to disband.
Vlad Georgescu comments
On October 6, 2026, the Federal Criminal Police Office arrested August Hanning in Nordwalde. The 80-year-old headed the Federal Intelligence Service from 1998 to 2005 and was subsequently state secretary in the Interior Ministry. In parallel, investigators in Bavaria apprehended Manfred D., Hanning's former office manager, who held this position under his successors as well and was in service until March 2026. Hanning has been in custody since October 7. The Federal Prosecutor General is investigating for treasonous espionage, the reconnaissance of state secrets, attempted treason, and intelligence agent activity; against D. for aiding and abetting. The presumption of innocence applies. It does not save the agency.
According to the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the two agreed at least by spring 2010 that D. would continuously supply his former boss with internal information for money. Until June 2022, for twelve years, nearly 2,000 documents, including numerous classified documents from the leadership level and briefings on the intelligence situation in the Chancellery. Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, and WDR report on sensitive situation assessments, classified material from foreign partner services, allegedly also papers on the Iranian nuclear program and the Russian military. Hanning is said to have used the material for his private consulting. In at least one case, according to Der Spiegel, an analysis for an employee of the Azerbaijani secret service. The trail, according to the research, does not lead to Moscow. This does not diminish the significance of the event. It makes it more mundane: state secrets as a basis for fees.
The service did not find the leak. Hamburg investigators found it in September 2025 during a search in proceedings related to the failed child abduction in the Christina Block case. A chance find in another complex. Twelve years of outflow from the leadership staff, and the agency's own counterintelligence notices nothing until a state authority opens drawers because of an abduction.
D. was not a peripheral employee. He sat in the president's office, then next to Hanning in the Interior Ministry, then back in the leadership staff, under several bosses, with access to what the agency leadership knows and what it submits to the Chancellery. The fact that this very position is said to have been compromised for money over years is not a character issue of an eighty-year-old. It is the description of an agency whose inner circle considers itself to be in control.
The political reflex was ready the same day. Waiting periods. Stricter rules for former employees. More powers for the agency that just showed it can't keep its files. A waiting period wouldn't have stopped the office manager who was still in office. New oversight wouldn't have noticed the leak that existing oversight didn't notice. Parliament's oversight committee learns about such incidents when arrest warrants are already being written.
Nor is this the first crack. In 2022, an employee was suspected of selling information to a Russian agency; the trial is ongoing at the Kammergericht. The Selector affair showed how the agency deals with partners and its own parliament when no one is looking. Hanning himself was in consulting after leaving, testified in London in 2013 for Oleg Deripaska, and was associated with the Latvian PNB Banka. None of this is the current accusation. All of it describes the milieu in which a former president could treat secret intelligence reports as working capital.
An intelligence service sells a single commodity: that it can keep silent and that it sees what others do not. Both are damaged here in a way that cannot be delegated. Partners whose material is said to have been in the leaked stocks will reprice their cooperation. The Chancellery can no longer trust reports that are said to have ended up with the retiree over the years. The public, to whom secrecy is sold as the price of security, sees a leadership staff that delivers for a fee.
This does not lead to the next commission. It leads to dissolution. Not as punishment, but as an organizational consequence. An agency that cannot secure its own leadership against its own leadership for twelve years no longer has a claim to the continuation of its structure, its culture, and its special rights. The files go to a liquidation authority under parliamentary leadership, not to the same departments that failed to guard them. Ongoing operations will be reviewed individually and time-limited. What foreign intelligence is indispensable will be rebuilt: small, with strict exit rules, with a counterintelligence service that is not subordinate to the president whose office it is supposed to guard. Personnel from the leadership staff of the leak years will not go into the successor organization.
Whoever objects that a foreign intelligence service cannot be abolished as long as others have them is describing a need, not an agency. The need will outlive the BND. The BND did not serve it when it mattered. An institution whose former president ends up like this is beyond repair. It is used up.
