Echoes of Checkpoint Charlie as Moscow’s spies creep back into Berlin
It has the hallmarks of a thriller, but the arrest came just weeks after Germany’s security chief warned that real-life espionage is on the rise – and that Moscow’s intelligence agencies are as active as they were at the height of the Cold War.
Thomas Haldenwang, the head of the BFV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, said in June that Russia had “very complex intelligence interest in Germany in almost all policy areas” and was trying to infiltrate political decision-making circles. “We recognise that Russia has significantly increased its activity,” he said in comments published by Welt am Sonntag. “So far, we have only known the level we have achieved in the meantime from the Cold War era.”
Bruno Kahl, his counterpart at the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, told the same paper that certain countries had begun spending “additional funds” on espionage and had become “more ruthless” in pursuit of their goals.
The cobbled streets and lime trees of the German capital served as the backdrop to real and fictional espionage dramas throughout the Cold War. But the era of spy swaps at Checkpoint Charlie and desperate escapes over the wall came to an end more than 30 years ago.
These days it is Vienna, with its constellation of international organisations – the UN, the IAEA, Opec to name a few – that holds the reputation as central Europe’s spooks’ playground. But there are good reasons for Russia’s renewed activity. Germany is one of Russia’s most important trade partners and by a country mile its single most important political partnership inside the EU.
It is not an easy relationship. Angela Merkel backed EU sanctions against Russia over its annexation of Crimea. She has offered refuge to Kremlin critics. Alexei Navalny was treated in Germany after he was poisoned by a Kremlin hit squad last year.
And Berlin’s political elite takes the relationship with Moscow seriously, sometimes to the irritation and alarm of Western allies. Experts believe Russia’s security agencies have consequently stepped up intelligence gathering, influence peddling, and even assassinations as a result.
In 2015, Germany accused Russia of carrying out a massive cyber hack of the Bundestag, the German federal parliament. In 2019, an assassin linked to Russian intelligence murdered
Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, an ethnic Chechen Georgian citizen, in a Berlin park.
If this were a John le Carré novel, the arrested Briton would either be a pawn sacrificed by Moscow to polish the reputation of a high level mole in German or British intelligence, or he would be a British double agent sacrificed by his handlers in order to make him more credible to Moscow.
But what we know at this point suggests nothing so dramatic.
Germany’s Focus Online said the documents the man passed on related to counter-terrorism – not something likely to have the Kremlin salivating – and security sources have briefed that he did not have access to highly classified material. More likely, he was involved in common or garden espionage. Gathering information – any information – is exactly what intelligence agencies are meant to do. They all do it, including our own.