Former BND President August Hanning Held on Suspicion of Attempted Treason
Karlsruhe, 6 October 2026
Key points
- Federal Criminal Police officers arrested August Hanning, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst from December 1998 to November 2005, on 6 October on warrants from the Federal Court of Justice; the federal prosecutor general suspects him of treasonous espionage, gathering state secrets, attempted treason and agent activity for a foreign intelligence service
- Manfred D., his former office head, who ran the office of several later BND presidents from March 2012 to March 2026, is suspected of aiding the attempted treason and the espionage; both warrants were put into effect on 6 and 7 October
- According to the warrants, the two agreed around spring 2010 that D. would supply Hanning, for payment, with BND intelligence for his private consultancy; by June 2022, as the investigation stands, D. had passed him "nearly two thousand documents", many of them classified, prepared for the intelligence situation meeting held at the Chancellery
- Hanning's lawyer says his client held confidential documents but denies passing on information from them to Germany's detriment, "let alone for payment"; the prosecutor names no foreign state
A former head of Germany's foreign intelligence service is in custody on suspicion of attempted treason, and the prosecutor's statement names neither the foreign service involved nor a completed handover of a state secret.
Once, Hanning is alleged to have used classified material to write an analysis for an employee of "a foreign intelligence security apparatus"; whether it reached that employee "has not yet been established". Over several years he is said to have been in "intensive exchange" with a member of another state intelligence service, supplying political information, partly based on D.'s material. The case grew out of a search by Hamburg prosecutors in an unrelated investigation in September 2025 and reached the federal prosecutor in May 2026.
Der Spiegel reported that investigators are examining contact with an Azerbaijani intelligence officer. No official has confirmed it. The deputy government spokesman said on 7 October that the government did not know which country was involved and, asked about Azerbaijan and Israel: "I can and will rule out nothing whatsoever." Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the Bundestag's intelligence oversight panel, said that "even we do not yet know the full picture".
Charged only as an attempt, the treason count means the prosecutor does not, as yet, allege a completed betrayal of a state secret. What the statement does describe fits the agent offence: Section 99 of the criminal code covers supplying facts or knowledge to the intelligence service of any foreign power, allied or not, in activity directed against Germany, and needs neither a state secret nor proof that a document arrived. Which of the two leads an indictment will decide whether the case is tried as betrayal of state secrets or as intelligence work for a foreign service. The document count stops at June 2022, while D., as Signal No. 161 noted, kept the president's office until March 2026 — through the cabinet's reform of the intelligence-services law and the BND president's public hearing before the same panel. An indictment that runs past 2022 would put the alleged supply inside the tenure of the BND's recent presidents.
Related · The BND and its oversight
