Germany has long been vulnerable to infiltration from the East. The Stasi spymaster Markus Wolf was famed for his success in penetrating West Germany’s institutions, going so far as to plant an agent in the office of Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was forced to resign when the truth emerged. Today, the country’s leaders still clearly have much to reflect on. Gerhard Schröder’s nauseating chumminess with Vladimir Putin is well known. But Angela Merkel somehow retains her spotless reputation among liberals despite overseeing a series of strategic blunders with regard to Russia, for which she will not properly apologise to this day.
Now the country’s intelligence agency is in crisis. The Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, is investigating a second possible Russian spy in its ranks, amid allegations that secrets were passed to the Kremlin. The gravity of the case is exceptional, but is surely typical of the vulnerability of a country that has long been breathtakingly naive about the true nature of the Russian threat. It has been reported that Ukraine was fearful about sharing its defence plans with its friends in the West, lest they end up in the hands of the Russians via double agents in Berlin. If so, that may turn out to have been a wise decision.
A year ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a radical change in German foreign and defence policy. “President Putin created a new reality with his invasion of Ukraine. This new reality requires a clear response. We have given it,” he said then. Yet those words have since rung increasingly hollow. It is time to show that he truly means what he says by turning Germany’s back on Moscow once and for all.
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