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 with a mandate from the Federal State Prosecutor, under the allegation of having sold BND information to a foreign power.
The arrest was a staged event, in the stricter meaning of the term. The media had been previously informed, and the BKA agents found reporters and cameras waiting for them on site. Spiegel TV ran video footage of the action.
The operation has the features of a fishing expedition. The prosecutor did not specify which foreign intelligence power the charges reference. The agents seized 2,000 allegedly “sensitive” documents. They will now be screened. To have sensitive documents at home is no crime, said former BfV head Hans-Jörg Maaßen, and therefore this is non-news.
According to Die Welt, weeks before he was arrested, Hanning learned that a former intelligence agent had lodged an explosive accusation against him within the BND. The former agent had put together a dossier explicitly accusing Hanning of being a Russian spy. Instead of opening an internal investigation, the BND passed the dossier directly to the State Prosecutor. Hanning wrote a furious letter to current BND chief Martin Jäger, demanding explanations, but he received no answer.
Here is the last paragraph of the Die Welt September 9 article:
