Concerning the recent arrest of former German counterintelligence (BND) head August Hanning earlier this month, we wrote in the current issue of the EIR Strategic Alert service: “The Hanning case may well signal the beginning of a purge of the old BND apparatus from the Kohl/Schroeder/Merkel era, for the purposes of the Merz government’s drive to give the BND and the BfV extensive police, surveillance and covert action powers, ostensibly to better deal with Russia’s ‘hybrid warfare’ against Germany. (…) August Hanning indeed is a veteran of the era in which German foreign policy was based on good relations with Russia. Not only was he an undersecretary of State in the Schröder government, which built the Nord Stream, but after the sabotage of that pipeline, he was an outspoken critic of the government response to it. After the German State prosecution indicted Ukrainian citizens for the terror act, he insisted that they could not have done it without backing from the Ukrainian and Polish governments, and demanded compensation from the latter.
“Last but not least, August Hanning has been in the crosshairs of the U.S. neocon faction since, back in 2002, he tried to prevent the G.W. Bush government from using phony evidence to accuse Saddam Hussein of developing chemical weapons. When CIA head George Tenet signalled that he wanted to use a BND informant named “curveball” to support the accusation, Hanning told him that the BND considered that source to be unreliable. Eventually, “Curveball” did confess that he had invented his story.”
An Oct. 13 the Münchener Merkur interview with British-trained journalist and author Birgit Jennen confirmed the EIR evaluation, that a purge operation is underway. “I would describe the network surrounding Hanning and several other security officials as the ‚Pullach network‘ —a web of personal contacts that dates back to the time when the BND was headquartered in Pullach. The connection between Hanning and the arrested BND employee Manfred D., which has now come to light, also leads back to this circle,” Jennen said.
The BND headquarters moved to Berlin in 2019. Thus the term “Pullach Network” refers to the Kohl-Schroeder-Merkel era described by the EIR Alert: 1982-2021.
Ms. Jennen avoids calling Hanning a Russian agent, but “even without concrete evidence of espionage on behalf of Russia—she wrote -, the risk of information leakage should not be underestimated—given the wide range of contacts Hanning maintained over the years. Even after leaving public service, he remained active in business sectors with ties to Russia and was involved in East-West dialogue.
Among the other “crimes” committed by Hanning, she reports that “Hanning also attended the opening event of the controversial think tank ‘Dialogue of Civilizations‘ (DOC) in Berlin. This think tank was to be financed by Vladimir Yakunin, a former KGB colleague of Putin’s, and was intended to develop geopolitical solutions beyond a ‘Eurocentric perspective’.”
“In 2019, Hanning also appeared in Moscow as a representative of the investment firm Pluteos at a conference intended to explore opportunities for cooperation with Russia beyond the framework of sanctions policy. At the British consulting firm G3, he served as regional director for Russia and the former Soviet republics. Given this involvement with Russia and the former Soviet republics, one must ask whether Russia also benefited from his contacts here in Germany. However, no evidence of this has been found to date.”
On the “Anklagebank” is, for ms. Jennen, the German “wandel durch handel” (transforming through trading) policy of the pre-Scholz-Merz era. This is the evidence that the background of the current events is British geopolitics of putting Germany against Russia.
Birgit Jennen graduated at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London, and pursued postgraduated studies specializing in Broadcast Journalism at Highbury College in Portsmouth. She has worked for Bloomberg and the Financial Times Deutschland. She acquired notoriety with her 2025 book Putin’s Marionetten, which however did not reach dramatically high sales numbers.
As “Putin’s Marionetten” she singled out, among others: Gerhard Schroeder, Angela Merkel, Former Foreign ministers Sigmar Gabriel and Frank-Walther Steinmeier (the latter is currently State President) and Manuela Schwesig, incumbent governor of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
