Who is August Hanning, suspect in the most important espionage case in Germany since the Cold War

BarcelonaGermany's Supreme Court ordered this Wednesday the pre-trial detention of the former head of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), August Hanning, who was arrested yesterday accused of spying for a foreign country. According to the Prosecutor General's investigation, he is suspected of espionage, disclosure of state secrets, and attempted treason against the homeland. Hanning, eighty years old, faces a prison sentence of between six months and ten years if he ends up being convicted.

According to the prosecution, Hanning allegedly obtained thousands of documents over the years, some confidential, through a supposed collaborator, identified as Manfred D., also arrested, who worked as his chief of staff and who maintained the position with his successors. It is suspected that Hanning paid Manfred D. for the information, which he later used in the framework of his private consulting work.

Among other things, the Prosecutor's Office suspects that he used assessments made by the intelligence service "to prepare an analysis for an employee of a foreign intelligence apparatus". According to the German media Bild and Der Spiegel, the alleged client was an Azerbaijani intelligence officer. Der Spiegel asserts that it is "indisputable" that Hanning maintained contacts with representatives of Azerbaijan, as the former head of the BND was a member of the board of directors of the German-Azerbaijani Forum, close to the Azerbaijani government. Azerbaijan has considered these reports written "without citations to official sources" to be "inadmissible" and a "manipulation of information".

Hanning, through his lawyer, has denied the accusations. "My client is being unfairly persecuted", stated his defender, Leon Kruse, in statements to Der Spiegel, although he has admitted that "it is true that he was in possession of confidential documents". However, he said that "the accusation that he transmitted the information to the detriment of Germany, let alone in exchange for remuneration, is incorrect".

August Hanning directed the BND from December 1998 to November 2005, under the social-democratic government of Gerhard Schröder, and later was Secretary of State at the Ministry of the Interior (2005-2009), with Angela Merkel's executive. Once his career in the public sector ended, he created a security and business consultancy. It is considered that he had good connections with the governments and business sectors of Russia and China, and also had contacts with top-level intelligence authorities in Israel.

Since 1981, he had worked for the German government, first at the Federal Chancellery, and five years later, as head of division at the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to the then German Democratic Republic (GDR) in East Berlin. During this time, at the end of the Cold War, he was responsible for diplomatic relations between the two sides.

Afterwards he returned to the Chancellery, where he held various positions and became a close collaborator of Bernd Schmidbauer, in charge of coordinating the three German intelligence services during the government of Helmut Kohl. According to the Efe agency, the man known as "agent 008" launched Hanning's career by entrusting him with delicate missions, such as mediation attempts between Hezbollah and Israel.

9/11 and the war in Iraq

Hanning became the head of the German intelligence agency in 1998. His presidency coincided with the September 11 attacks in New York, led by Mohamed Atta, who had lived and studied in Hamburg. With him at the head of the BND, the Curveball case occurred: it was the code name of an Iraqi engineer who arrived in Germany seeking asylum in 1999 and who provided the agency with detailed information about the alleged biological weapons laboratories that the United States used as a pretext to launch the war in Iraq.

When the then-US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made his presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, during which he argued that Iraq posed a threat to world security, his comments on Saddam Hussein's alleged biological weapons program were largely based on information provided by the BND, according to Der Spiegel.

Once retired from public life, he founded the consultancy Hanning Consult with his wife, which gave him options to profit from his experience and international connections. According to the German investigative media outlet Correctiv, he had clients from Kazakhstan and his business also extended to Russia and China.

According to the same media outlet, in 2018, Hanning also became chairman of the board of directors of Pluteos AG, based in Lucerne (Switzerland). His clients included companies, private organizations, and government agencies from around the world, to whom he offered everything from "exclusively obtained legitimate information" in the economic sector to cybersecurity solutions and "geopolitical situation reports." At the same time, he joined the British consultancy G3, first as a "senior advisor" and later as regional director for Russia and the former Soviet republics.

According to Efe, in 2019 he was ruined by the insolvency of a Latvian bank with Russian ties, of which Hanning was a member of the supervisory board, and the justice system went so far as to confiscate part of his assets to meet compensation claims. That year, the former head of the BND transferred almost all of his shares in the family business to his wife and his three daughters, and kept only 0.5%. Nevertheless, he continued to act on behalf of the company before federal authorities. The latest available annual financial statement, from 2024, showed a net worth of just under 3 million euros.

Investigated by chance

The espionage investigation began by chance. According to the public prosecutor's office, Hanning's alleged possession of intelligence documents came to light during inquiries into a case involving the businesswoman Christina Block, who is accused of attempting to kidnap two of her children, whom her ex-husband had taken to Denmark during a custody dispute.

Hanning and a retired official from the Hamburg Criminal Police Office are suspected of having accepted a contract from the businesswoman in 2022 to kidnap her children while they were working as executives for a security firm, the public prosecutor's office announced in the autumn of 2025, according to the German news agency DPA.