Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A rare arrest at the top of German intelligence history has broken open on Tuesday morning.
Germany’s federal prosecutors do not often reach back more than a decade to put a former spymaster in handcuffs, and almost never one who once ran the country’s foreign intelligence service.
On October 6, that is exactly what happened.
The Federal Prosecutor General’s Office, the Generalbundesanwalt, announced the arrest of Dr. August Hanning, 80, who led Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) from December 1998 to November 2005.
He is strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and intelligence agent activity for a foreign power.
A second man, named only as Manfred D. under German privacy rules, was arrested the same morning. He had served as chief of staff to several of Hanning’s successors as BND president from March 2012 to March 2026, according to Der Tagesspiegel.
Nearly 2,000 classified documents over 12 years
Investigators allege that from spring 2010 through June 2022, Manfred D. passed Hanning approximately 2,000 documents, many marked as restricted material intended only for internal BND use, including executive intelligence briefings prepared for Germany’s leadership.
Hanning allegedly paid for the material in order to use it in his private consulting work, prosecutors say.
Hanning is accused of being “in intensive exchange” with an employee of another state’s intelligence service, according to the Tagesspiegel’s reading of the prosecutor’s filing.
The country behind that service has not been publicly named. German public broadcasters WDR and NDR, together with Süddeutsche Zeitung, have reported it is not Russia.
A case uncovered by a separate investigation
The espionage investigation did not begin as a counterintelligence case.
It grew out of a September 2025 search of Hanning’s premises by Hamburg prosecutors in the unrelated investigation into Hamburg hotel heiress Christina Block, as the Romanian wire Agerpres also reported, citing the Federal Prosecutor’s Office.
Material found during that search prompted a new line of inquiry, which the Generalbundesanwalt took over in early May 2026.
What the leak means for allies
The timeframe cuts straight through a decade in which Germany, the United States, and other NATO partners shared intelligence on Russia, Islamist terrorism, and cyber threats.
Allied services routinely funnel sensitive reporting to the BND for inclusion in the briefings prepared for the Chancellery, the very material prosecutors say was in the pipeline of leaked documents.
After leaving the BND, Hanning served as state secretary in Germany’s Interior Ministry under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first cabinet before moving into private consulting. He has not publicly commented on the allegations.
Both suspects were to be brought before an investigating judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe for a formal detention ruling.
