The former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has been arrested on suspicion of “treasonous espionage,” including seeking to hand state secrets to foreign governments, in what could be the worst security breach to roil the agency since the end of the Cold War.
August Hanning is accused of illegally acquiring nearly 2,000 documents from the top of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, via his former chief of staff at the agency, who continued to serve there. He sought to sell the information from the documents to at least one foreign state power, German prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday.
The documents included briefings prepared for the head of the foreign intelligence service for weekly security meetings at the German chancellor’s office detailing major issues. “These are the crown jewels that the BND was producing,” said one former senior BND official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “It sounds really bad.”
The revelations — at a time when the BND has been seeking to acquire new powers from parliament to carry out active operations to try to thwart hybrid attacks, and when it has been seeking to boost cooperation with European partners — risked undermining the agency’s standing, the former official said.
Two senior German officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information, said there was no indication that the foreign intelligence service Hanning sold classified information to was Russia. Hanning did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
Hanning, 80, was arrested at his home in the German city of Steinfurt on Tuesday morning. His former chief of staff, whom prosecutors identified only as Manfred D. in line with German privacy laws, was also arrested, and properties belonging to both men were searched.
Current BND chief Martin Jäger said the agency had launched extensive internal investigations. “There can be no compromises on internal security,” he said.
Hanning served as BND chief from 1998 to 2005, during Gerhard Schröder’s term as German chancellor, and then as state secretary in the Interior Ministry until 2009 in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet. He went on to set up his own commercial consultancy company, where, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, he built up a roster of controversial clients, including Russian businessmen and bankers.
In his capacity as a private consultant, Hanning arranged for his former chief of staff Manfred D., who continued to work in the same position for other BND chiefs, to supply him with a steady stream of classified information in exchange for payment over a 12-year period until 2022, German prosecutors said.
Hanning had fallen on hard times after losing most of his pension following the 2019 collapse of a Latvian bank, where he served on the board, Der Spiegel reported in 2023.
German law enforcement stumbled across the alleged scheme by accident during an investigation into a separate high-profile case involving allegations a German heiress, Christina Block, had sought to abduct her children from her former husband. Hanning had served as a consultant to Block, and German prosecutors searched Hanning’s residence in September 2025 in connection with that case, prosecutors said, discovering a trove of classified documents from his former workplace.
Jessica Berlin, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis who is based in Germany, said the fact that the breach was uncovered by accident showed it was not an isolated case. “It’s systemic and ongoing for decades,” she wrote in a post on X. “… Anyone who thinks we’ve found the last breach is kidding themselves.”
It’s far from the first time the BND has been rocked by a spying scandal. Most recently, a department head whom prosecutors named only as Carsten L. was arrested in 2022 on suspicion of spying for Russia. He is alleged to have handed over highly sensitive documents from the BND to the Kremlin. The BND’s then-leader Bruno Kahl described his activities as a “catastrophe.”
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