BERLIN — Germany is moving to fortify its foreign intelligence agency with sweeping new powers in preparation for a potential divorce from the United States.
The plan comes as German and other European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt the American intelligence sharing Europe largely relies on — or exploit that dependence for leverage.
Just as European countries must radically bolster their militaries to gain more autonomy, officials in Berlin argue, so too must Germany’s intelligence apparatus grow far more capable.
“We want to continue working closely with the Americans,” Marc Henrichmann, the chairman of a special committee in Germany’s Bundestag that oversees the country’s intelligence services, told POLITICO. “But if a [U.S.] president, whoever that may be, decides in the future to go it alone without the Europeans … then we must be able to stand on our own two feet.”
German leaders believe the need is especially urgent in their country, where the foreign intelligence service, or BND, is far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints stem from intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy apparatus.
But those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering, and this is now seen as a potential danger.
“The intelligence business is one where the question always arises: What do you offer me, what do I offer you?” Henrichmann said. “And of course, if Germany is only a taker, the risk is simply too great.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now wants to boost and unfetter his country’s foreign intelligence service, giving it much broader authority to perpetrate acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and more aggressively carry out espionage.
Thorsten Frei, the chancellery official overseeing the intelligence reform, this week likened the plans to the Zeitenwende, or “historic turning point,” Germany’s former Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time, Berlin announced major investments to bolster its long-neglected armed forces.
A similar shift, Frei said, “must now also be applied to our intelligence services.”
Nazi legacy
Germany’s BND was founded in 1956 with legal limitations intended to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi Gestapo and SS — though, at the time, many of its agents were former Nazis.
To strictly divide the BND from the police and prevent interference with domestic affairs, the agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism. Its powers were limited to collecting and analyzing intelligence. Agents were not given the legal capacity to intervene to foil perceived threats.
Such restrictions persist until this day. German spies, for example, could through surveillance become aware of plans of an impending cyberattack, but are virtually powerless to stop it on their own. They can bug a conversation with strict legal oversight, but are unable to carry out acts of sabotage to undermine a discovered threat.
Germany’s stringent data protection laws — which are also largely a reaction to the legacy of the East German secret police, or Stasi — restrict the BND further. The agency must, for instance, redact personal information in documents before passing them on to other intelligence services.
Such restrictions are no longer justified especially in light of the rising threat of Russian sabotage, say German officials.
“If there are attacks on Germany, then in my view it is not enough for us to simply watch, we must also be able to defend ourselves,” said Frei, the chancellery official in charge of the BND reform. “All other countries in the world that have corresponding services of a corresponding size do this.”
As a consequence of Germany’s intelligence weakness, the country has heavily relied on U.S. clandestine activities to stop planned attacks. The U.S., for instance, provided warnings about a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetall and a plot by a Chechen national to attack the Israeli embassy in Berlin. Only about 2 percent of terrorist threat warnings come from the BND itself, according to a report in Germany’s Bild that cited a confidential agency document.
This heavy reliance on the U.S. has led some German leaders to warn that the alliance with Washington must be preserved to the extent possible even as Berlin gradually moves to become less dependent on it.
Without U.S. intelligence sharing, “we are defenseless,” Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in a radio interview this week. “That is the pure reality, which I cannot spare anyone from.”
‘Game without rules’
German officials were shaken when Washington temporarily halted its intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March last year to pressure Kyiv during peace negotiations with Russia, a move that effectively blinded the Ukrainian military in the middle of the war. The episode showed that the Trump administration is willing to use American dominance in intelligence gathering to exert leverage over allies.
Several months later, Merz vowed to significantly increase the BND’s capabilities.
“Old certainties have been devalued, tried-and-tested rules no longer apply,” Merz said in a speech to agency officials. “Given the responsibility we bear in Europe in view of our size and economic strength, it is therefore our aspiration that the BND should operate at the very highest level in terms of intelligence.”
Merz’s government has increased the BND budget by about 26 percent to €1.51 billion this year. The chancellor is also moving to relax the data protection regulations to which the BND is subject, allowing use of AI and facial recognition.
The chancellery hopes to bring a full package of proposed reforms to a vote in parliament by the fall.
Still, considerable restrictions on the BND are likely to remain in place. The agency’s expanded powers will be contingent on the chancellery’s national security council declaring a “special intelligence situation” that is also subject to the approval of two-thirds of lawmakers in the parliamentary committee overseeing the BND, according to German media outlets citing a draft of the chancellery’s proposal.
But many lawmakers belonging to Germany’s coalition government still believe the proposed changes will put the country in a far better position to defend itself.
“Those who are working against us — Russian state actors, Russian cyber factories — are working in the same way as the Nazi intelligence services did back then,” Henrichmann, the conservative lawmaker who heads the parliamentary committee, said. “In a game without rules, we cannot stand by and impose artificial restrictions on ourselves.”
Germany plans to give spies vast new powers in rollback of postwar restraints
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