Oct. 15—In the early morning of Oct. 6, a massive deployment of German federal police (BKA), heavily armed and masked, entered the house of former counterintelligence (BND) head August Hanning and arrested him on the charge of allegedly selling information to a foreign power. The arrest was a staged event, in the strict sense of the term. The media had been informed beforehand, and the BKA agents found reporters and cameras waiting for them on site. Spiegel TV ran video footage of the action.

The operation smells of a fishing expedition. The prosecutor did not specify which foreign intelligence power the charges refer to. The agents seized 2,000 allegedly “sensitive” documents, which will now be screened. To have sensitive documents at home is no crime, as pointed out by the former head of the domestic intelligence agency BfV, Hans-Georg Maaßen. Therefore, this is non-news.