> 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?
Well that clears that up.
Is anyone else shocked that the head spy was a spy, or that Germany was being blackmailed by Mossad?
The connection to the current case may actually be a more direct one, via the Israeli spies.
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.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/08/secondworldwar...
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.
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.
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.
For one behind-the-scenes look, read "Mike Frost"'s "Spyworld", about Canada's CSE. I never noticed it when I read it but a Canadian friend who'd read it pointed out that in the author's entire career at the CSE they had only one single success, which was intercepting the conversation of a US senator during trade talks with the US which got them a better trade deal.
A bigger argument though is that if they've had all these amazing successes why have they never told anyone? Why are all, or at least a lot, of their failures over the decades public but none of their successes?
Because it could expose people, secrets, or methods that are still relevant. The vast majority of former spies are still bound by various legislation about not exposing what they did - most of them have to have their books signed off by their former employers. It's why you should take everything a former spook says (especially people like John Kiriakou) with large grain of salt.
In extreme cases, it can also involve quasi-legal methods or cause diplomatic scandals. "All or a lot" of their failures aren't necessarily public, but only the ones that unravel in a way that gets leaked or exposed to the general public. I can guarantee you that the fuckups of every intelligence agency we've been exposed to is only the tip of the iceberg; even where there is exposure, we very rarely have the full story. Even for WW2 intelligence stuff, we're still getting drips of what "really" happened in many cases.
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.
Is the sky in your world green?