Federal Intelligence Service

Operations

1960s

During the first years of oversight by the State Secretary in the federal chancellery of Konrad Adenauer of the operation in Pullach, Munich District, Bavaria, the BND continued the ways of its forebear, the Gehlen Organization.

The BND racked up its initial east–west cold war successes by concentrating on East Germany. The BND's reach encompassed the highest political and military levels of the GDR regime. They knew the carrying capacity of every bridge, the bed count of every hospital, the length of every airfield, the width and level of maintenance of the roads that Soviet armor and infantry divisions would have to traverse in a potential attack on the West. Almost every sphere of eastern life was known to the BND.

Unsung analysts at Pullach, with their contacts in the East, figuratively functioned as flies on the wall in ministries and military conferences. When the Soviet KGB suspected an East German army intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel and BND agent, of spying, the Soviets investigated and shadowed him. The BND was positioned and able to inject forged reports implying that the loose spy was actually the KGB investigator, who was then arrested by the Soviets and shipped off to Moscow. Not knowing how long the caper would stay under wraps, the real spy was told to be ready for recall; he made his move to the West at the appropriate time.

The East German regime, however, fought back. With still unhindered flight to the west a possibility, infiltration started on a grand scale and a reversal of sorts took hold. During the early 1960s as many as 90% of the BND's lower-level informants in East Germany worked as double agents for the East German security service, later known as Stasi. Several informants in East Berlin reported in June and July 1961 of street closures, clearing of fields, accumulation of building materials and police and army deployments in specific parts of the eastern sector, as well as other measures that BND determined could lead to a division of the city. However, the agency was reluctant to report communist initiatives and had no knowledge of the scope and timing because of conflicting inputs. The erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 thus came as a surprise, and the BND's performance in the political field was thereafter often wrong and remained spotty and unimpressive.

There was a great success for the Federal Intelligence Service during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the BND was the first Western intelligence service to have information about the stationing of Soviet medium-range missiles on the Caribbean island and passed it on to the United States. Between 1959 and 1961, Reinhard Gehlen called on Washington several times in vain to "insert the dangerous communist bastion, which at the same time represents an excellent starting point for the communist infiltration of Latin America, into the [USA] sphere of power by rapid access." Gehlen's influence on the US government should not be underestimated, because the BND was able to regularly provide the CIA with detailed information about Soviet arms deliveries through its very good sources in Cuba. There are indications that the secret service was also informed about military actions against Cuba. Ten days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Gehlen reported to Bonn: "Within a relatively short period of time, large-scale military operations to defeat Fidel Castro will begin." In 1962, the BND also found out from its sources, the Cuban exiles living in Miami, that Cuba was also trying to get hold of weapons through German dealers. According to a BND report, Cuba was also able to recruit four former Waffen-SS officers as instructors for the Cuban armed forces. However, the identity of the men was blacked out in the report.

"This negative view of BND was certainly not justified during ... [1967 and] 1968." The BND's military work "had been outstanding", and in certain sectors of the intelligence field the BND still showed brilliance: in Latin America and in the Middle East it was regarded as the best-informed secret service.

The BND offered a fair and reliable amount of intelligence on Soviet and Soviet-bloc forces in Eastern Europe, regarding the elaboration of a NATO warning system against any Soviet operations against NATO territory, in close cooperation with the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces).

One high point of BND intelligence work culminated in its early June 1967 forecast – almost to the hour – of the outbreak of the Six-Day War in the Middle East on 5 June 1967.

According to declassified transcripts of a United States National Security Council meeting on 2 June 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms interrupted Secretary of State Dean Rusk with "reliable information" – contrary to Rusk's presentation – that the Israelis would attack on a certain day and time. Rusk shot back: "That is quite out of the question. Our ambassador in Tel Aviv assured me only yesterday that everything was normal." Helms replied: "I am sorry, but I adhere to my opinion. The Israelis will strike and their object will be to end the war in their favor with extreme rapidity." President Lyndon Johnson then asked Helms for the source of his information. Helms said: "Mr. President, I have it from an allied secret service. The report is absolutely reliable." Helms' information came from the BND.

A further laudable success involved the BND's activity during the Czech crisis in 1968; by then, the agency was led by the second president, Gerhard Wessel. With Pullach cryptography fully functioning, the BND predicted an invasion of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia. CIA analysts on the other hand did not support the notion of "fraternal assistance" by the satellite states of Moscow; and US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Llewellyn Thompson, quite irritated, called the secret BND report he was given "a German fabrication". At 23:11 on 20 August 1968, BND radar operators first observed abnormal activity over Czech airspace. An agent on the ground in Prague called a BND out-station in Bavaria: "The Russians are coming." Warsaw Pact forces had moved as forecast.

However, the slowly sinking efficiency of BND in the last years of Reinhard Gehlen became evident. By 1961, it was clear that the BND employed some men who were Soviet "moles"; they had come from the earlier Gehlen Organization. One mole, Heinz Felfe, was convicted of treason in 1963. Others were not uncovered during Gehlen's term in office.

Gehlen's refusal to correct reports with questionable content strained the organization's credibility, and dazzling achievements became an infrequent commodity. A veteran agent remarked at the time that the BND pond then contained some sardines, though a few years earlier the pond had been alive with sharks.

The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German communist Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of the staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies. Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism (at one time Gehlen had 16 members of his extended family on the BND payroll). Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences.

Gehlen retired on 30 April 1968. His successor, Bundeswehr Brigadier General Gerhard Wessel, immediately called for a program of modernization and streamlining. With political changes in the West German government and a reflection that BND was at a low level of efficiency, the service began to rebuild. Years later, Wessel's obituary in the Los Angeles Times, reported that he "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists".

Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs, The Service, The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (English title), were published in 1977, (World Publishers, New York). A Review of the book published by the CIA makes this comment about Gehlen's achievements and management style:

"Gehlen's descriptions of most of his so-called successes in the political intelligence field are, in my opinion, either wishful thinking or self-delusion. ... Gehlen was never a good clandestine operator, nor was he a particularly good administrator. And therein lay his failures. The Gehlen Organization/BND always had a good record in the collection of military and economic intelligence on East Germany and the Soviet forces there. But this information, for the most part, came from observation and not from clandestine penetration".

1970s

The agency's second president, Gerhard Wessel, retired in 1978. According to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times in August 2002, the "former intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler's anti-Soviet spy operations" ... "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists". The New York Times News Service obituary lauded the BND's many successes under Wessel but noted that there had been "a number of incidents of East Germans infiltrating the West German government, particularly intelligence agencies, on Gen. Wessel's watch".

Munich Olympic bombings

The kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich was a watershed event for the BND, following early warnings from other countries, because it led the agency to build counter-terrorism capabilities.

Acquisition of Crypto AG

In 1970 the CIA and the BND bought Crypto AG, a Swiss information and communication security firm, for $5.75 million. The BND had already tried in 1967, in cooperation with the French intelligence service, to buy the company from its founder Robert Hagelin. The deal though fell through due to Hagelin refusing, who was already cooperating with the CIA. The CIA at the time did not cooperate with the French. In 1969, after negotiations with the US, the BND approached Hagelin again and bought the company in secret, jointly with the US intelligence service. Crypto AG produced and sold radio, Ethernet, STM, GSM, phone and fax encryption systems worldwide. Its clients included Iran, Libya, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. The BND and the CIA rigged the company's devices so they could easily decipher the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

1980s

Libyan bombings in Germany

In 1986, the BND deciphered the report of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin regarding the "successful" implementation of the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing.

Infiltration into Stasi HQ

According to an interview with Stasi defector Col. Rainer Wiegand, BND agents were assigned to use the anti-Stasi protests in East Germany in order to covertly obtain files from Building No. 2, which houses the counterespionage directorate. Wiegand assisted by providing the blueprints of the building and indicated which offices the agents should prioritize.

Operation Summer Rain

Operation Summer Rain was a highly classified joint mission involving the Federal Intelligence Service and special units of the German Armed Forces during the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s. The primary objective of the operation was to gather intelligence on the weapons systems utilized by Soviet forces.

1990s

Spying on journalists

In 2005, a public scandal erupted (dubbed the Journalisten-Skandal, transl. journalists scandal) over revelations that the BND had placed a number of German journalists under surveillance since the mid-1990s, in an attempt to discover the source of information leaks from the BND about its activities relating to the war in Iraq and the "war against terror". The Bundestag constituted an investigative committee (Parlamentarischer Untersuchungsausschuss) to investigate the allegations. The committee tasked the former Federal Appellate Court (Bundesgerichtshof) judge Dr. Gerhard Schäfer as special investigator, who published a report confirming illegal BND operations involving and targeting journalists between 1993 and 2005. As a consequence, the Chancellery issued an executive order banning BND operational measures against journalists with the aim to protect the service.

The committee published a final report in 2009, which mostly confirmed the allegations, identifying the intent to protect the BND from disclosure of classified information and finding a lack of oversight within the senior leadership of the service but did not identify any responsible members from within the government.

Tiitinen list

In 1990, BND gave the Finnish Security Intelligence Service the so-called Tiitinen list—which supposedly contains names of Finns who were believed to have links to Stasi. The list was classified and locked in a safe after the Director of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service, Seppo Tiitinen, and the President of Finland, Mauno Koivisto, determined that it was based on vague hints instead of hard evidence.

Unlicensed armament exports

In the wake of the German reunification in 1991, Israel requested access to GDR weapon systems. In March 1991 a parliamentary commission decided to not give the requested weapons to Israel. Six month later, under the supervision of BND-director Volker Foertsch, the service, in conjunction with elements within the Federal Ministry of Defence, still without political clearance to do so, arranged several transfers of the requested GDR weapon systems (an SA-6 system, a ZSU-23/4 and other equipment) to Israel. The transfers were shipped using the ports and airports of Hamburg, Wilhelmshaven, Manching and Alhorn. In late 1991, a shipment labeled "agricultural machinery" was unexpectedly inspected by the Wasserschutzpolizei and weapons were discovered. A state’s attorney started an investigation and parliamentary designated BND-overseer Willy Wimmer concluded, that control over the BND has been lost. An exasperated Chancellor Helmut Kohl called the service "idiots". A few weeks later BND president Konrad Porzner and minister of defence Gerhard Stoltenberg rated the transfers as not to be problematic, since the equipment was only handed over for trials and was supposed to be returned afterwards.

2000s

Promoting the invasion of Iraq

On 5 February 2003, Colin Powell made the case for a military attack on Iraq in front of the UN Security Council. Powell supported his case with information received from the BND, instead of Mr. Hans Blix and the IAEA. The BND had collected intelligence from an informant known as Rafid al-Janabi alias CURVEBALL, who claimed Iraq would be in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, apart from torturing and killing over 1,000 dissidents each year, for over 20 years. Rafid was employed before and after the 2003 incident which ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq. The payments of 3,000 Euros monthly were made by a cover firm called Thiele und Friedrichs (Munich). As a result of the premature cancellation, al-Janabi filed a lawsuit at the Munich labour court and won the case.

Several former senior BND officials publicly stated that the agency had repeatedly warned the CIA not to take the information shared by CURVEBALL as fact. Hanning, the BND president at the time, even formulated his concerns about that in a letter to then CIA Director George Tenet. The CIA however ignored those warnings and presented the information as facts.

Israel vs. Lebanon

Following the 2006 Lebanon War, the BND mediated secret negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, eventually leading up to the 2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner exchange.

Fighting tax evasion

In the beginning of 2008, it was revealed that the BND had managed to recruit excellent sources within Liechtenstein banks and had been conducting espionage operations in the principality since the beginning of the 2000s. The BND mediated the German Finance Ministry's $7.3 million acquisition of a CD from a former employee of the LGT Group – a Liechtenstein bank owned by the country's ruling family. While the Finance Ministry defends the deal, saying it would result in several hundred millions of dollars in back tax payments, the sale remains controversial, as a government agency has paid for possibly stolen data.

Kosovo

In November 2008, three German BND agents were arrested in Kosovo for allegedly throwing a bomb at the European Union International Civilian Office, which oversees Kosovo's governance. Later the "Army of the Republic of Kosovo" had accepted responsibility for the bomb attack. Laboratory tests had shown no evidence of the BND agents' involvement. However, the Germans were released only 10 days after they were arrested. It was suspected that the arrest was a revenge by Kosovo authorities for the BND report about organized crime in Kosovo which accuses Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaçi, as well as the former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj of far-reaching involvement in organized crime.

Austria

According to reporting in Der Standard and profil, the BND engaged in espionage in Austria between 1999 and 2006, spying on targets including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Austria Press Agency, embassies, and Austrian banks and government ministries. The government of Austria has called on Germany to clarify the allegations.

2010s

In 2014, an employee of BND was arrested for handing over secret documents to the United States. He was suspected of handing over documents about the committee investigating the NSA spying in Germany. The German government responded to this espionage by expelling the top CIA official in Berlin. In December 2016, WikiLeaks published 2,420 documents from the BND and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The published materials had been submitted in 2015 as part of a German parliamentary inquiry into the surveillance activities of the BND and its cooperation with the US National Security Agency. The BND has been reported to store 220 million sets of metadata every day. That is, they record with whom, when, where and for how long someone communicates. This data is supposedly collected across the world, but the exact locations remains unclear to this date. The Bundestag committee investigating the NSA spying scandal has uncovered that the German intelligence agency intercepts communications traveling via both satellites and Internet cables. It seems certain that the metadata only come from "foreign dialed traffic", that is, from telephone conversations and text messages that are held and sent via mobile phones and satellites. Of these 220 million data amassed every day, one percent is archived for 10 years "for long-term analysis". Apparently though, this long-term storage doesn't hold any Internet communications, data from social networks, or emails.

2020s

According to information that has since become public, the BND misjudged the concrete risk of a Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022. Economics Minister Robert Habeck openly criticized the fact that the BND had completely misjudged the situation in February 2022. While US and British intelligence agencies issued precise warnings and even correctly predicted the time of the attac, BND downplayed the risk. Habeck stated that he had received information from foreign partners much earlier and more precisely than from his own country's intelligence service.

BND President Bruno Kahl had traveled to Ukraine for talks shortly before the invasion. When Russian bombers launched their attack on February 24, 2022, the BND chief found himself stranded and had to be evacuated overland to Poland in a security convoy under dramatic circumstances.

In December 2022, a high-ranking employee of the BND was arrested on alleged treason. Carsten L. is said to have disclosed information from his professional activity to the Russian domestic secret service FSB. The Public Prosecutor General accuses him of treason (Landesverrat) because it is said to have been state secrets. Prosecutors alleged L. that he had given intelligence about the war in Ukraine and the Wagner mercenary group to Russia and received roughly €400,000 for that.

Another major BND scandal occurred in 2026: On October 6, 2026, former BND President August Hanning was arrested on suspicion of high treason and the disclosure of state secrets. He allegedly paid his former employee, Manfred D., to obtain up-to-date secret situation reports from the BND for use in his commercial consulting work. He is also said to have written reports for foreign intelligence services using his knowledge.

New headquarters

The new BND headquarters in Berlin, near the former Berlin Wall, was completed in 2017. At the official opening in February 2019, Angela Merkel, then Chancellor of Germany, made this statement: "In an often very confusing world, now, more urgently than ever, Germany needs a strong and efficient foreign intelligence service". At the time, some 4,000 employees were expected to work from this location, moving here from the former headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich. The agency's total number of employees, in Germany and other countries, was approximately 6,500.

Structure

The Bundesnachrichtendienst is divided into the following departments:

1. Regionale Auswertung und Beschaffung A (LA) und Regionale Auswertung und Beschaffung B (LB) (Regional Analysis and Procurement, A/B countries)
2. Internationaler Terrorismus und Internationale Organisierte Kriminalität (TE) (Terrorism and International Organised Crime)
3. Proliferation, ABC-Waffen, Wehrtechnik (TW) (Proliferation, NBC Weapons)
4. Technische Aufklärung (TA) (Signal Intelligence)
5. Gesamtlage und unterstützende Fachdienste (GU) (Situation Centre)

1. Informationstechnik (IT) (Information Technology)
2. Zentralabteilung (ZY) (Central Services)
3. Eigensicherung (SI) (Security)
4. Umzug (UM) (Relocation [to Berlin])

Signals intelligence

BND is responsible for the global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes with content of German interest. The department of Technische Aufklärung (TA) is the most significant unit within BND and has the highest number of employees. The department is located at the former BND HQ in Pullach, Bavaria. One of the major SIGINT stations after WW2 was Bad Aibling Station, which was operated for decades in cooperation with the National Security Agency (NSA). Furthermore, Station Gablingen, Station Husum, Station Rheinhausen, Station Schöningen, Station Starnberg-Söcking and Station Stockdorf.

BND does not operate its own satellites but uses instead the reconnaissance satellites of the Bundeswehr (SARAH-system), foreign partners, or commercial providers. The BND's first proprietary satellite project started in 2016, with systems built by OHB, and was supposed to have entered service in 2022. After investigations by German public media, the start was delayed, such that BND was likely to be unable to launch satellites into space until 2025.

Internet interception

BND intercepts the data traffic of DE-CIX in Frankfurt, the largest European hub for internet traffic.

Details concerning the BND's collaboration with the NSA between 2004 and 2008 have been published. In Frankfurt, Internet data was captured by filters and sent via a Deutsche Telekom line to the BND headquarters in Pullach and from there to the Bad Aibling station, where the NSA and BND have a joint headquarters.

Presidents of the BND

The head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst is its President. The following persons have held this office since 1956:

The president of the BND is a federal Beamter paid according to BBesO order B, B9, which is in payment the equivalent of a lieutenant general.

Deputy

The President of the BND has three deputies: one Vice President, one Vice President for Military Affairs (Since December 2003), and one Vice President for Central Functions and Modernization (Possibly Since 2013). Prior to December 2003, there was only one Vice President. The following persons have held this office since 1957: