Former German spy chief arrested for attempted treason | Hacker News Reader

Former German spy chief arrested for attempted treason

reuters.com

118 pointssemiquaver108 comments

High key, maybe look at Gerhard Schröder for the same thing. His ceding of sovereignty over Germany's energy infrastructure and subsequent board seat at Gazprom is a flashing red siren.

No, the thing he was arrested for is having classified documents in his possession.

In my country, they posted the news translated as: 'Spy chief is detained in counts of espionage'

I just wanted to share the journalism pearl.

Well at least he paid for it and did not outright steal it :)

Any idea which foreign country he was spying for?

Mossad/Israel at least:

> Documents supplied to the Hamburg court indicated that Hanning was the go-between with the Israelis. According to media reports, these Hamburg court documents contained clues to his other business activity with classified BND information.

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and western intelligence precedent (eg russian “illegals program”) is that when it’s Russia/China, it’s named.

So the omission here itself (and denial of Russia) is some additional speculative information, on top of his already known ties to Mossad.

with friends like these…

Before I even clicked the link I said to myself "bet it was Israel". It would be nice to be wrong sometimes. It really is 'them' every single time.

Are you sure it says that? As far as I can see it only says he dealt with Israeli ex-spies in an (unrelated) kidnapping and that he was friendly with Israeli spies.

Spiegel says Azerbaijan.

> Hanning is strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, attempted treason, and espionage.

Well that clears that up.

Is anyone else shocked that the head spy was a spy, or that Germany was being blackmailed by Mossad?

He was a career bureaucrat who got position after position. BND was just one of them.

The list of German politicians and bureaucrats with scandals is long, ranging from Olaf Scholz to von der Leyen. So this isn't too surprising.

When it gets to bad, you send them to retire in strassbourg

or you elect them few times so they stop nuclear to save energy.

As a geopolitical nerd, I've consumed a lot of non-fiction espionage content. In general, there's a general theme that German intelligence is a joke at best. He must have gotten too greedy or very lazy/sloppy.

>German intelligence is a joke at best

i'm not qualified to pass any judgement here, just Wirecard comes to mind. Routing sensitive payments, including to the network of secret informants, through Wirecard while the Wirecard guy (son of a KGB spy) was safari-ing (and posting photos of it) in Syria with the Wagner mercenaries... He lives right now in Russia, and it looks like German intelligence hasn't exacted any revenge.

TBF, Jan Marsalek (the Wirecard guy) is Austrian, although Wirecard was a German company.

Neither has anybody else towards any individual living in "run away to Russia" street.

while Russia executes its runaway people across the Europe.

Name one EU country's intelligence service that has a reputation, any reputation - good or bad. European intelligence services (ex-Russia/Ukraine) are a bunch of jokers. They are lagging behind so much vs their adversarial peers.

Maybe that's what they want you to think.

The French have a reputation. And the British although they are part of Europe, not the EU.

> Name one EU country's intelligence service that has a reputation, any reputation - good or bad. European intelligence services (ex-Russia/Ukraine) are a bunch of jokers. They are lagging behind so much vs their adversarial peers.

MI5/MI6 (unless you literally mean the European Union). They benefit from Five Eyes, though.

The French system is considered quite good, but focused on the Middle East and Africa. It's actually quite capable, considering how independent minded they are, often refusing cooperation with others. Though their intelligence quality can vary outside those core areas.

The Dutch are quite highly regarded and punch above their weight. The AIVD got inside the Russian Gozy Bear hacking group and the MIVD also caught the GRU trying to hack the OPCW in The Hague - even exposing their taxi receipts.

The Nordic states are known to have capable services that operate quietly, especially focused on Russia. The Finns especially.

The Baltic states also take it seriously, obviously focused on Russia.

TL;DR there are many capable intelligence agencies working in the EU, but they're usually much smaller and focused. Also - they usually prefer to NOT be in the limelight.

I meant the EU. Obviously including MI5 is kinda cheating.

The French are too myopic around the Middle East and Africa. They don't have any visibility into, say, Russia, even though Russia is asymmetrically embedded into them. That's an example of the problem they, and most others, face - they can't adapt rapidly to changing trends in the global scene.

I still remember the disaster that is January 2022. The US was continually stating that the Russians were planning an invasion, based on CIA intelligence, yet in the lead-up to the war, literally every EU country was calling the US a warmonger. And now with the US becoming increasingly hostile to the EU, the EU countries have been completely blindsided by that too.

And let's not forget, no Western nation has any reasonable intelligence presence in Israel, the culprit here, except for maybe the US and UK. Israel enjoys a disproportionate amount of intelligence asymmetry vs them.

The culprit where?

It's mentioned in other articles that the spy chief in the above article was being handled by Israel.

I'm not saying the French are perfect, but French intelligence can be solid - their dossiers on Iraq WMDs were accurate and they (rightly) concluded that Saddam's opaqueness was to give Iran pause on any thoughts of attack. The myopia is more an issue with politicization, which I would argue is a real and persistent problem with French intelligence - and yes, they had a huge gap with Russia.

Politicization of intelligence is toxic anywhere it's applied. The US/UK fell victim to it in the 2003 Iraq invasion run up, and core to that politicization was politicians selectively bypassing intelligence analysts and grabbing raw collected data - which contains all manner of bad stuff from people just trying to get money, etc.

A counter example is back in the Iraq run-up, an American diplomat wanted to themselves present the Iraq WMD "evidence" to a senior Canadian official, and the Canadian official curtly responded "no, send it via our intelligence channels and our analysts will compile a report" - which the diplomat knew that via the five eyes alliance, they'd very quickly and correctly realize that the evidence was weak. I'm not saying that Canadians brilliant and invincible to politicization, but the incentives at the time for the Canadians were to "do it properly".

Israel is a special case, and it is not a fair comparison (even against the CIA) as a country constantly threatened and attacked . Even they fell victim to warning failures (if recent allegations are even half true) of the Oct 7th attacks when politicians wanted to focus more on Hezbollah over Gaza and ignored other warnings (including literal videos of Hamas training attacks on tanks and wall breaches that Israeli border guards recorded).

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, a good chunk of intelligence credited to the US/CIA is correlated and collected via the five eyes alliance. There is no intelligence alliance like it in the world and it gives a far greater picture than the US alone could.

MI5? You mean this lot: https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk...

Didn't European intelligence services warn US of specifics of 9/11?

Good luck untangling who is at what level. Especially if your connection to the outside world is barely more than a needle's eye.

"If you want to tell Putin something, say it to the BND" is more or less known in that context.

The CIA actually build the Gehlen Org (now BND) from some ex-Nazis as spy's against the communists. Is all a very sad joke.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/08/secondworldwar...

There is no evidence of Mossad involvement. Far from me to defend Israel's spy agency but the article only mentions a possible connection to Azerbaijan.

This one doesn't since it's a US outlet and they don't have free speech in the US, on Israel-related matters. The Irish Times reported the Israel connection though.

The Irish Times reported an Israel connection regarding a separate case involving him, the Block Scandal. As far as I am aware that case did not involve giving out state secrets to other governments. This article mentions Der Spiegel which reported the investigation on the possible Azerbaijan connection.

Azerbaijan doesn't give a rat's *** about German state secrets. :) It's either BS or they served as a proxy.

Azerbaijan is a former soviet republic. So them playing role of a proxy for Russia or stealing secrets to sell to Russians makes sense to me.

"they don't have free speech in the US, on Israel-related matters"

Is the sky in your world green?

Are you really this naive?

Are you really unironically claiming "Jews control the media" tropes as an 'everyone knows' fact? No, it isn't totally cool because you ran a find and replace with "Israel" first.

Oh wait. You're a Holocaust denier. So you are evil AND have vapor for brains.

The Russians claim otherwise - https://www.rt.com/news/646794-german-spy-chief-arrested/ -... According to them, his private agency also sub-contracted some high-profile kidnapping to Yaakov Perry, the former chief of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.

Actually the even more fun part is that they only found out because they raided his house due to this really sketchy case he was contracted for via his really sketcy swiss(!) private eye company: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/20/germany-christ...

“Among several alleged accomplices are August Hanning, a former head of Germany’s federal intelligence service, the BND, who according to prosecutors forged the initial contact between Block and the Israeli spy firm believed to have carried out the abduction.”

The connection to the current case may actually be a more direct one, via the Israeli spies.

Was it the country whose name triggers automatic comment cancellation?

That's not a thing. What triggers moderation and/or banning is when accounts break the site guidelines by going into political/nationalistic/ideological flamewar, as they unfortunately often do on divisive topics.

I assume you're asking about Israel. HN Search shows about 170k comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... All of those are live. That's a far cry from "automatic cancellation".

If you meant some other country, it's easy enough to check this about any of them.

I think the problem is better stated as a large flagging contingent, rather than anything intrinsic to the site's code or official moderation. And the real problem is that it has an outsized chilling effect on substantive comments, which require putting in actual effort just to possibly be killed. From what I've observed comments/stories get a penalty from flags (before they actually end up [dead]) and this seems to be the actual objective - to stymie concrete discussion while a topic is popular.

Yeah. I was just replying to someone's personal political perspective (which met the HN post guidelines) that I partly agreed-disagreed with - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983014 - but after typing out my thoughts on it, I found that I couldn't post a reply to it because it has now been flagged. That's 15+ minutes of my time wasted. And their time wasted. Which as you pointed has a "chilling effect" on the whole discussion, and is the intent.

That's not even what I had meant, but yes damn I have been bitten by that same thing many times. Sometimes I reflect and go yeah I guess I was just going to be feeding the trolls. But other times there was really good faith discussion to be had. It's especially galling with the thread kills.

edit:wrong assumption

It was Azerbaijan: https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/ex-bnd-chef-hanning-s...

It's like one of those "one last job before quiting for good but gone bad" movie plots.

I take BND less seriously since I learned they're eager to sell you merch:

https://www.bnd.shop/en

Someone downvoted you, but if you do look at the sweatshirt sales webpage, it does say this

"Licensor: Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German Foreign Intelligence Service

The BND logo is a registered trademark of the Bundesnachrichtendienst in Berlin, Germany. The BND is not involved in the operation, production, or sale of these products and accepts no liability. The BND does not receive any revenue from the BND Shop."

Which does seem a little bizarre.

the company that runs it calls it 'first official store'

https://www.antsandfriends.com/bnd-shop/

It very much sounds like this was not their idea originally... wouldn't be surprised if this was initiated by BND, and they are legally not allowed to run it themselves or sth like that

i'll take one Bemale Nody Dinspector shirt, please.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49975688

The German Roger Hollis.

This (paywalled) article in Süddeutsche Zeitung has a lot more background info, for instance about Hanning's Russian connections.

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/hanning-festnahme-spiona...

In 2013 he was a defence witness for the oligarch Oleg Deripaska who was then tied to Putin. He was also on the board of companies such as PNB Banka (operated by a Russian Grigory Guselnikov). Also connections to many shady "security consulting" firms, among them "Prevent" who were suspected to have planted child porn with a manager of HSH-Nordbank. Incidentally child porn was also planted with the husband of Christina Block in Denmark, a case in which Hanning is also involved.

On the angle of Azerbaijan who allegedly bought Hanning's secrets it's interesting that in the past there were several court cases about corruption against German politicians. It's summarised in the so called Aserbaidschan-Affäre (Azerbaijan Affair) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aserbaidschan-Aff%C3%A4re

A link to a non paywalled version of the Süddeutsche Zeitung article on archive.is https://archive.is/sJkwC

It's weird that so many Germans are sympathetic to Russia given that they were subjugated by Russia for decades.

Can someone please explain what's going on here? What am I culturally missing?

We don’t know what country he was spying for, but we do know it’s not Russia. From the very short article: > The case does not involve Russia, according to information obtained by Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Ah, sorry I was thinking of 2023.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyeedd6kzdko

> A German military officer has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for spying for Russia.

Even "allies" spy on each other. The US has been caught, several times, spying on allies, and Israel spies on everyone.

And that's probably why Israel is allied with everyone. They have such good spies, they have endless blackmail material for politicians.

For instance, it's suspected that Epstein worked for Israel to acquire blackmail material. We know Epstein recorded everything that happened on that island, and not secretly.

Israel doesn’t really have any allies other than the United States, and even that is a one-sided relationship.

They are adversarial to everyone, but everyone who wants to maintain friendly relations with the U.S. is obliged to play nicely with Israel.

Most of Europe and especially Germany; and Oceania; and half the gulf states. And that's just the places I know of, because the news about them is in English.

It's in the 3rd paragraph:

The Spiegel news magazine reported late on Tuesday that investigators were pursuing a possible connection to Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan and Russia signed a Declaration on Allied Interaction on 22 February 2022 when Russia escalated.

There's a certain subset of every population that just wants to be dominated. Some of these people don't have the courage to ask their romantic partner or a professional, so they try to realize their kink through political means.

Are you sympathetic to MBS when you buy oil from Saudi Arabia?

There are obviously people throughout the western world (including East Germany) who are sympathizers of Russia well beyond just buying energy from them. Pretty sure GP is referring to those people.

The are practically no sympathizers in the sense that they want to revive the Warsaw Pact. There are:

1) People who want to trade.

2) People who appreciate Russia's undeniable cultural achievements.

3) Organizations like the LaRouche Schiller institute that are most likely CIA fronts, double agents or both.

That is moving the goal posts quiet far. Being sympathetic to Russia does not require someone to want the Warsaw pact resurrected

Yes yes Vlad you are so right

There are just people who like Russian ballet and then the CIA. So long as you do not wish to recreate the Warsaw Pact, then you are not a sympathizer but just a Very Normal German

Thank you Vlad for your contribution

For the edification of the Ukrainian online hall monitor, here is the Washington Post on the value of the LaRouche network:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/01/15/s...

For the rest: Stop interfering with EU politics and free speech. I hope Ukraine never joins the EU, just as I hope Russia never does.

Your provided evidence of LaRouche being a CIA front is an article in which the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency orders the DIA to stop interacting with them for fear of them being a Russian front?

> Graham recalled that LaRouche associates came up with what he called good intelligence about the situation in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere. Graham said that in the mid-1970s, he and DIA colleagues concluded that some of the information was so sensitive that they suspected the LaRouche group was getting some of it from the Soviets or another government. Graham added that he couldn't prove the contention

Hmm... what's more likely: Russian sympathizing group with connections to Russia and advocating Russian positions and disseminating intelligence of likely-Russian origin is... Russia-aligned?

No no, it must be CIA-aligned because umm... they gave info to the CIA. There are no conceivable reasons that a truly Russia-sympathizing group would want to give the CIA information, right? Lmfao

> Russia's undeniable cultural achievements.

You mean war, genocide, destruction and misery?

I don't buy oil from Saudi Arabia. I buy gasoline from a local gas station. It doesn't say where the oil came from.

> Can someone please explain what's going on here?

Putin got'em addicted to cheap Russian gas and paid up anti nuclear NGOs who also got cash from big oil.

Also Berlin still has some Russian minority since the GDR. That includes anti Putin Russian diaspora or people that just needed a break from paranoia and brespredel.

Similar to why there's a significant fraction of pro-mainland China people in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Reasons include people who benefitted from the Soviet Union, often due to business and trade. Analogy would be Foxconn, a Taiwanese company which is dependent on manufacturing in China.

Nostalgia/rose-tinted glasses/rosy retrospection, Ostalgie in German.

Families that were ethnically from Russia, moved during the Soviet Union times and still have ties to Russia.

The former East Germany is way more pro-Russian than the former West Germany, showing the effects of these factors.

From what I see here it’s a mixture of anti-Americanism, „Ostslgie“ (the longing for the good old times of the DDR, a feeling often inherited from parents) and a crap ton of Russian propaganda that floods social media.

Combine this with a step economic decline and voila you got the perfect conditions for autocratic sympathies

Some part of the population was subject to 60 years of continuous propaganda. That's three generations. You might say people should be able to see beyond that, but the ones influencing them were professionals too.

> It's weird that so many Germans are sympathetic to Russia given that they were subjugated by Russia for decades.

Do you think that Germany might have done something right before this "subjugation"?

Maybe 25-40 million things?

If the Holocaust were that "successful", Israel wouldn't exist today. Perhaps you're confusing with Mao.

you do know that jews were not the only targets of the nazi killing machine?

If you're including all other targets, still nowhere near 25 million. 11-17 million.

The figure that is usually talked about for the eastern front is 27 million deaths for the Soviet Union.

Are you only counting civilians killed directly by the Nazis? The Soviets alone lost 9+ million military dead. Millions of civilians died of starvation not part of any specific extermination program.

Is this "nazi killing machine" in the room with us right now?

I would not say it's many but certainly there are some. I found it surprising that in recent sabotage or spy cases in Germany there were often Ukrainian or Latvian accomplices to the Russians. But then again it's obvious that not all Ukrainians have the same opinion about the war.

The Eastern Germans remember the old days fondly (you know, before "the West destroyed their industry" and whatnot) while the Western Germany had a national policy of "not provoking Russia" and "accepting its sphere of influence" for basically all of it's existence.

From personal experience I would also say that Germans and Russians are alike in quite a few ways - both are pretty chauvinist societies looking down at other nations, and both have very low empathy. Obviously, there are big cultural differences as well.

One of the things you eventually learn is how important it is to understand how the media reports on a story. Not only what they say and how they say it but also what they don't say.

In this case, the reporting I've seen on this doesn't mention the country that he was allegedly spying for. That means it was Israel. Because if it was any other country, particularly Russia, it would absolutely be blasted from the rooftops.

It's honestly depressing how captured institutions, the media and Western governments are by the Israeli lobby. My only hope is that history will correctly label all those involved as collaborators.

Let me give an example: Jonathon Pollard [1], who was responsible for one the largest national security breaches in American history and was tried and convicted for espionage. This was a sticking point where basically every Israeli PM would ask for his release. No president would do it until Trump on his first day of his second term [2].

Trump mega-donor Sheldon Adelson lent Pollard his private plane [3] for his return to Israel where he was given a hero's welcome [4]. He's since met with the Israeli PM and even invited into the US Embassy in Israel [5].

Beyond spies, even Israelis are aware that Israel has become a refuge for the worst kinds of criminals [6].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard

[2]: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-israel-jonathan-poll...

[3]: https://forward.com/fast-forward/461235/watch-flown-to-israe...

[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/world/middleeast/jonathan...

[5]: https://www.reuters.com/world/white-house-was-unaware-us-amb...

[6]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-03-22/ty-article/.p...

We also know it was Israel because they said it was Israel, as reported by other media from the few Western countries that don't like Israel: https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/10/06/former-ge...

That article doesn't say it was Israel.

> My only hope is that history will correctly label all those involved as collaborators.

Bad news, only nerds care about history.

The article says a possible connection to Azerbaijan is being investigated.

Agree with everything else you said though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com