Modern Germany has never been at ease with spies.

The ghosts of two totalitarian regimes — Adolf Hitler’s Nazi state and East Germany — still hang over public debate and government deliberations about agents, surveillance and intelligence gathering.

The BND — the country’s intelligence agency and one of the biggest in Europe — has sometimes seemed so rule-bound that one former head compared his tenure to running a bureaucracy on the outer reaches of the German state.

Politicians and even BND staff have joked that the 6,500-employee agency is “vegetarian” compared with “meat-eating” counterparts such as the UK’s SIS, the US’s CIA and France’s DGSE.

And in 2022, the BND appeared so far behind the curve on Russia that when bombs began to fall on Kyiv, the agency’s then president was caught in the city and took two days to reach the Polish border. By contrast, the CIA and the SIS were warning of an attack.

Four years on, Germany is trying to make the BND a more modern, effective spy service to counter the threat from Russia at a time when Europe’s leaders have determined they can no longer depend so much on the US.

With Germany’s Bundeswehr re-arming apace after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the government believes it is time for the BND to be re-equipped, expanded and put on a war footing. Berlin is planning a Zeitenwende — a new era — for its spymasters, as well as for its soldiers. 

“Given the responsibility we bear in Europe, considering our size and economic strength, it is therefore our ambition that the BND operates at the highest level of intelligence,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in a speech last autumn.

The government has already increased the BND’s budget by about 25 per cent to €1.51bn this year and is expected to put forward a new law on the agency to Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, by the autumn.

Early leaked drafts suggest a sweeping set of reforms — the most significant in the BND’s 70-year history — which will grant the agency major new powers.

“We must and will be Germany’s first line of defence,” BND chief Martin Jäger, whom Merz appointed in 2025, told employees in a closed-door speech in April.

But a series of interviews with politicians, officials and past and present BND staff members indicates that the drive could still be hampered by the bureaucracy and legalism that afflict many parts of the German state — as well as the mindset of the agency itself.

The new law the government proposes will overturn the system of political and judicial scrutiny that the BND currently operates under and change the rules governing who can and cannot be surveilled.

In a country whose post-cold war constitution was crafted to protect the privacy of individuals following decades of state repression, the idea of loosening the rules makes many people deeply uncomfortable — even within the security establishment.

“Drafting a new law is a very German solution to a problem,” adds one German diplomat. “The deeper problem . . . [is] about political culture.”

Those with experience in the BND say change is not only necessary but urgent.

“The fact of the matter is that for much of the last two decades the BND’s [rules of engagement] have been growing tighter, even as the world has got more unstable and the threats to Germany have grown,” says one former BND official.

“We’ve reached this breaking point where we either do something radical or really suffer the consequences.”

A difficult history

The BND does not have a straightforward past.

Its predecessor agency was the Gehlen Organization, a US-backed network of former German military intelligence agents from the Nazi regime.

Reinhard Gehlen, who became the organisation’s first president in 1956, had served as the Wehrmacht’s spy chief on the eastern front during the second world war.

During the cold war the BND enjoyed notable successes. Warsaw-bloc intelligence agencies often cited it as their most capable adversary throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, it ran a vast covert network to smuggle Soviet military equipment out of the country.

And for decades, alongside the CIA, it was the secret owner of the world’s most commercially successful cryptography company, Switzerland-based Crypto AG. By the 1980s, an estimated 40 per cent of global diplomatic traffic was sent using Crypto AG machines. The CIA and BND could read the lot.

But, wary of how politically toxic the issue of surveillance was for many citizens, Germany’s political establishment rarely had anything positive to say about the agency.

In the decades since the cold war things have hardly improved. The documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 exposed mass surveillance activities by US intelligence agencies that were run hand in hand with the BND on German soil, deepening mistrust still further.

In response to those revelations, Germany tightened the BND Act, which regulates the agency, placing new restrictions.

But since the 2022 Ukraine invasion, the calculus has changed.

“People have now reached the point where they realise we need to protect this country better than we have been able to in recent years,” says Marc Henrichmann, chair of the powerful Bundestag committee that monitors the work of the BND.

“I don’t come across a single entrepreneur here anymore who doesn’t also realise how regularly cyber attacks occur. Everyone has seen drones at the airport. Everyone sees the shadow fleet tankers on the news or elsewhere.”

The notion that the BND can no longer rely on US intelligence agencies to feed it with information has resonated with many Germans. When Donald Trump’s administration briefly paused sharing intelligence with Ukraine in March 2025, one European intelligence official said it focused minds across the continent.

Merz’s government maintains that the new BND law will address the problem.

Although the details of the new legislation are still being hammered out, BND and chancellery officials say it will seek to cover four areas: signals intelligence, the use of AI and technology, new powers for the agency to “strike back” at adversaries and supervision of the BND.

When early drafts of the law leaked this year, Henrichmann says he assumed the public outcry would scupper the reform process or at least send it back to the drawing board.

Instead, he says, “reactions were muted . . . Most of the people who wrote to me said, ‘Finally something’s happening.’”

Judges and rules

In 2020, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court issued a landmark judgment in favour of a group of civil rights campaigners who had been challenging the BND over its surveillance practices since the Snowden revelations.

The devastating thrust of the court’s order — which created a council of judges to monitor and authorise the BND’s surveillance — was expressed in point one of its 332-point decision: “The protections afforded by . . . the German constitution as rights of defence against . . . surveillance also extend to foreign nationals abroad.”

The ruling put the unresolved tension between the modern German constitution — with its maximalist human rights protections — and the nature of espionage into the open.

Intelligence agencies are licensed lawbreaking organisations, and states use them to engage in moral grey areas that their official representatives cannot.

But, unlike its counterparts in other western democracies, the BND is now monitored by no fewer than four separate entities.

In addition to the council set up by the 2020 judgment, it is supervised by Henrichmann’s committee, which mostly meets in secret and, as is the case with the intelligence committees of the US Congress, has wide powers of oversight and control.

Then there is a 10-person commission of experts and former MPs, appointed by the committee, that retroactively monitors the BND’s surveillance activities. That commission in turn can refer issues of concern to the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, which has extensive enforcement powers.

This is the supervisory structure that enforces the regulations Germany’s spies say constrain them from protecting their country as much as they should — problems that are particularly stark in the area of signals intelligence.

A BND minute or a real minute?

From the DE-CIX internet exchange site in Frankfurt — one of the largest communications hubs in the world — the BND can siphon off about 1.2tn communications daily, and copy them to its technical headquarters in Pullach, near Munich.

This is a core task of the agency. Like France’s DGSE, it is responsible for the mass interception and analysis of digital data from telecoms networks, hacking and acquired datasets, work that in the US and UK is carried out by the NSA and GCHQ respectively.

But at present, strict rules limit how it uses this trove of information.

To filter the data, it must use a search term or set of terms that have been justified using a detailed set of legal requirements. It cannot access information from the data regarding German citizens or journalists — or anything that is sexually intimate or refers to a person’s religious beliefs.

So a suspected Russian spy employed as a journalist by one of the Kremlin’s tame media houses is protected from surveillance by the German constitution.

There are also tight restrictions on data retention. Sometimes the BND is forced to delete data sets after as little as two weeks, confounding analysts who need longer to explore leads.

Even when information is allowed to be kept, the layers of approvals and safeguards required by the 2020 constitutional judgment slow down the analysis process.

When the agency produces “up-to-the-minute intelligence” for Berlin or its allies, jokes one senior career officer, everyone receiving it first needs to ask if this is “a BND minute, or a real minute”?

The new law is intended to redress such issues. The government says it is not aiming to roll back supervision but make it more manageable — for example, by expanding the period for which specific data and metadata that have passed the agency’s filters can be retained far beyond the current six-month maximum.

The BND is also hoping to store the entire bulk of unfiltered online information it captures each day for far longer — data it currently keeps for only a matter of days.

This is important because at present Germany does not require commercial groups to retain data. Even if it has a warrant, the BND often fails to access valuable information from internet groups because they have deleted it. The UK, by comparison, can require telecoms and internet service providers to hold data for up to a year.

Giving the BND the legal power to hold on to the mass of data it hoovers up from its interception hubs for longer — as much as 15 months for metadata — is essential for what in BND jargon is known as the agency’s “cold start” capability.

When the unexpected happens, a stored “buffer” of data to comb back through — a snapshot of global internet traffic — can be vital for clues.

But in a century in which intelligence agencies such as the CIA have been involved in acts such as torture and extraordinary rendition, many commentators emphasise the importance of oversight and scrutiny.

“The argument that we here in Germany are so terribly constrained is often politicised and too impressionistic. It merits further factual comparison,” says Thorsten Wetzling, founder of the European Intelligence Oversight Network, a forum for oversight practitioners and academics.

“I would question those who consistently say we are on the losing end — that all the other European intelligence services can do so much more than us.”

The current law is a messy compromise, Wetzling says, and needs to be comprehensively reformed, but it also already accords the BND more leeway than is sometimes recognised.

Mr Dynamite

Germany once tried to have its own James Bond.

Bob Urban (Agent 18, not 007) was a womanising, gun-toting, Porsche-driving BND agent with a penchant for action over discretion. The 1967 film Mr Dynamite — Tomorrow Death Will Kiss You was, despite its secret backing by the real-life BND, a flop.

Now though, the German government hopes it can inject a little more of Agent 18’s spirit into the BND.

Politicians in Berlin speak of the difference between a Nachrichtendienst — the “ND” in the service’s acronym, meaning “information service” — and a true secret service.

The first category is what the BND was conceived as: a tool of secret information gathering and analysis that ends up on the desks of German policymakers, who then direct other arms of the state to take action.

Agencies such as the CIA and France’s DGSE fall into the second category: services that do not only collect information but also conduct aggressive operations — anything up to and including assassinations.

For the BND, the German government intends the change — for the time being — to primarily relate to activities in cyber space.

Germany’s spymasters should be able to “hack back” against targets, they say. One official at the agency asks why the BND should not be able to use malware to cause physical damage to Russian drone factories, for example.

The intention is also to foster a broader cultural shift, in which BND officials are encouraged to think about taking calculated risks and to become more proactive. Staffers give the impression that at present the agency’s operations are designed by its lawyers rather than its agents.

In a world of increasing hybrid warfare — waged particularly aggressively by Russia — this needs to change, they say.

“It’s going slowly, but it’s going in the right direction,” says the chief of one fellow European intelligence agency. “Cyber is still soft play . . . but it’s a good start.”

Changing the BND’s culture, however, might take more than a new law. One way or another, the agency has been constantly “under reform” to try to rectify its perceived weaknesses for much of its 70-year history.

The problem is less about the BND, says one former official, and more about the German state itself.

In the US, UK and France, foreign intelligence services are core components of presidential and prime ministerial authority and influence. In Germany, by contrast, the BND is often seen as a potential source of political liability by chancellors and their ministers.

Of the 12 permanent BND chiefs after Gehlen, the service’s founder, only three were career intelligence officers. Of those only one, Eberhard Blum, who ran the service from December 1982 to July 1985, was a career BND employee. The rest were bureaucrats, policemen and lawyers. 

BND reports — about 400 a month — are distributed throughout the government. The agency does not have a champion at the cabinet table. Its priorities are often lost or downplayed in departments led by ministers who are not primarily charged with national security.

The BND is also still expected to perform as a global intelligence service and to cover everything from economics to military hardware and doctrine.

By contrast, the UK’s SIS is far more narrowly focused on political intelligence, with much more clearly defined geographic areas of interest — Russia, for example.

Sleeping giant or lawyer hub?

In 2019, the BND opened a shining new headquarters in central Berlin, on the site of an old barracks and parade ground Marlene Dietrich once sang about in Lili Marleen.

The building, a complex of imposing grey buildings 36 football pitches in size, is the largest intelligence headquarters in the world, bigger even than the CIA’s base in Langley, Virginia.

It remains one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken by the modern German state.

“They need somewhere for all their lawyers,” quips one German diplomat.

But the hope staffers express is that the BND is the sleeping giant that the site evokes — one that can help deal with the threat from Russia at a time when Europe fears it may be abandoned by the US, its traditional intelligence benefactor.

Changing the law is a start, says a senior German official at the BND’s headquarters, but it really is only the beginning.