Germany opens massive, new intelligence complex

BERLIN — In the heart of Berlin, where memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi remain and distrust of secretservice agencies still runs high, Germany has opened what is being called the world’s largest intelligence service headquarters.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was on hand Friday to inaugurate the $1.23 billion complex, which stands on about 64 acres, but in keeping with the secret mission of the place, dignitaries and members of the news media were not allowed deep into the building.

In extolling the building, whose interior is a state secret, Merkel was apparently hoping to seal the post-cold War transition of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service — or BND — and to cast it as a necessary defense in an increasingly complicated and dangerous world.

“The Federal Intelligence Service has successfully accepted the change in its mission since the end of the Cold War,” she said. “Today, it observes events worldwide for the government.”

For most of its sixdecade history, the intelligence service was focused on Cold War enemies, especially the East German state. It handles intelligence beyond German borders and is one of two major nonmilitary intelligence services in Germany.

In 2013, revelations in the Edward Snowden case that the Federal Intelligence Service had worked closely with U.S. intelligence operations caused a public uproar. More recent reports that the service had spied on European Union allies and foreign journalists have sullied its image. Last year, it fought off a lawsuit brought by a Berlin newspaper, with a panel of judges ruling the service was not legally obliged to answer requests from journalists.

Since its founding in 1956, the service had been based in Pullach, a Munich suburb, where its predecessor was housed on part of a Nazi estate. Links to the Nazi regime were not confined to the physical space: The first president of the service was Reinhard Gehlen, who had been a Wehrmacht general responsible for military intelligence in the Third Reich. After the war, he helped U.S. forces coordinate intelligence activities aimed at the Soviet Union.

In the service’s first years, many other low-ranking officers were former Nazis or Wehrmacht officers, too.

The headquarters’ move is the final step in its decadelong push to modernize, and it offers a chance to make a symbolic move back to a unified modern Germany, away from old Nazi ties.