1960s During the first years of oversight by the State Secretary in the federal chancellery of
Konrad Adenauer of the operation in
Pullach,
Munich District,
Bavaria, the BND continued the ways of its forebear, the Gehlen Organization. The BND racked up its initial east–west cold war successes by concentrating on
East Germany. The BND's reach encompassed the highest political and military levels of the GDR regime. They knew the carrying capacity of every bridge, the bed count of every hospital, the length of every airfield, the width and level of maintenance of the roads that Soviet armor and infantry divisions would have to traverse in a potential attack on the West. Almost every sphere of eastern life was known to the BND. Unsung analysts at Pullach, with their contacts in the East, figuratively functioned as flies on the wall in ministries and military conferences. When the Soviet KGB suspected an East German army intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel and BND agent, of spying, the Soviets investigated and shadowed him. The BND was positioned and able to inject forged reports implying that the loose spy was actually the KGB investigator, who was then arrested by the Soviets and shipped off to Moscow. Not knowing how long the caper would stay under wraps, the real spy was told to be ready for recall; he made his move to the West at the appropriate time. The East German regime, however, fought back. With still unhindered flight to the west a possibility, infiltration started on a grand scale and a reversal of sorts took hold. During the early 1960s as many as 90% of the BND's lower-level informants in East Germany worked as
double agents for the East German security service, later known as
Stasi. Several informants in East Berlin reported in June and July 1961 of street closures, clearing of fields, accumulation of building materials and police and army deployments in specific parts of the eastern sector, as well as other measures that BND determined could lead to a division of the city. However, the agency was reluctant to report communist initiatives and had no knowledge of the scope and timing because of conflicting inputs. The erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 thus came as a surprise, and the BND's performance in the political field was thereafter often wrong and remained spotty and unimpressive. There was a great success for the Federal Intelligence Service during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1962, the BND was the first Western
intelligence service to have information about the stationing of
Soviet medium-range missiles on the
Caribbean island and passed it on to the
United States. Between 1959 and 1961,
Reinhard Gehlen called on
Washington several times in vain to "insert the dangerous
communist bastion, which at the same time represents an excellent starting point for the communist infiltration of
Latin America, into the [USA] sphere of power by rapid access." Gehlen's influence on the US government should not be underestimated, because the BND was able to regularly provide the
CIA with detailed information about Soviet arms deliveries through its very good sources in Cuba. There are indications that the secret service was also informed about military actions against Cuba. Ten days before the
Bay of Pigs invasion,
Gehlen reported to
Bonn: "Within a relatively short period of time, large-scale military operations to defeat
Fidel Castro will begin." In 1962, the BND also found out from its sources, the Cuban exiles living in Miami, that Cuba was also trying to get hold of weapons through German dealers. According to a BND report, Cuba was also able to recruit four former
Waffen-SS officers as instructors for the Cuban armed forces. However, the identity of the men was blacked out in the report. "This negative view of BND was certainly not justified during ... [1967 and] 1968." The BND's military work "had been outstanding", The BND offered a fair and reliable amount of intelligence on
Soviet and
Soviet-bloc forces in Eastern Europe, regarding the elaboration of a
NATO warning system against any Soviet operations against NATO territory, in close cooperation with the
Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces). One high point of BND intelligence work culminated in its early June 1967 forecast – almost to the hour – of the outbreak of the
Six-Day War in the Middle East on 5 June 1967. According to declassified transcripts of a
United States National Security Council meeting on 2 June 1967, CIA Director
Richard Helms interrupted Secretary of State
Dean Rusk with "reliable information" – contrary to Rusk's presentation – that the Israelis would attack on a certain day and time. Rusk shot back: "That is quite out of the question. Our ambassador in Tel Aviv assured me only yesterday that everything was normal." Helms replied: "I am sorry, but I adhere to my opinion. The Israelis will strike and their object will be to end the war in their favor with extreme rapidity." President Lyndon Johnson then asked Helms for the source of his information. Helms said: "Mr. President, I have it from an allied secret service. The report is absolutely reliable." Helms' information came from the BND. However, the slowly sinking efficiency of BND in the last years of Reinhard Gehlen became evident. By 1961, it was clear that the BND employed some men who were Soviet "moles"; they had come from the earlier Gehlen Organization. One mole,
Heinz Felfe, was convicted of treason in 1963. Others were not uncovered during Gehlen's term in office. Gehlen's refusal to correct reports with questionable content strained the organization's credibility, and dazzling achievements became an infrequent commodity. A veteran agent remarked at the time that the BND pond then contained some sardines, though a few years earlier the pond had been alive with sharks. The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German communist Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of the staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies. Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism (at one time Gehlen had 16 members of his extended family on the BND payroll). Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences. With political changes in the West German government and a reflection that BND was at a low level of efficiency, the service began to rebuild. Years later, Wessel's obituary in the
Los Angeles Times, reported that he "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists". Reinhard Gehlen's memoirs,
The Service, The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (English title), were published in 1977, (World Publishers, New York). A Review of the book published by the CIA makes this comment about Gehlen's achievements and management style: "Gehlen's descriptions of most of his so-called successes in the political intelligence field are, in my opinion, either wishful thinking or self-delusion. ... Gehlen was never a good clandestine operator, nor was he a particularly good administrator. And therein lay his failures. The Gehlen Organization/BND always had a good record in the collection of military and economic intelligence on East Germany and the Soviet forces there. But this information, for the most part, came from observation and not from clandestine penetration".
1970s The agency's second president, Gerhard Wessel, retired in 1978. According to his obituary in the
Los Angeles Times in August 2002, the "former intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler's anti-Soviet spy operations" ... "is credited with modernizing the BND by hiring academic analysts and electronics specialists".
Munich Olympic bombings The
kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the
1972 Olympics in Munich was a watershed event for the BND, following early warnings from other countries, because it led the agency to build counter-terrorism capabilities.
Acquisition of Crypto AG In 1970 the CIA and the BND bought
Crypto AG, a Swiss information and communication security firm, for $5.75 million. The BND had already tried in 1967, in cooperation with the French intelligence service, to buy the company from its founder Robert Hagelin. The deal though fell through due to Hagelin refusing, who was already cooperating with the CIA. The CIA at the time did not cooperate with the French. In 1969, after negotiations with the US, the BND approached Hagelin again and bought the company in secret, jointly with the US intelligence service. Crypto AG produced and sold radio, Ethernet, STM, GSM, phone and fax encryption systems worldwide. Its clients included Iran, Libya, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. The BND and the CIA rigged the company's devices so they could easily decipher the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.
1980s Libyan bombings in Germany In 1986, the BND deciphered the report of the
Libyan Embassy in East Berlin regarding the "successful" implementation of the
1986 Berlin discotheque bombing.
Infiltration into Stasi HQ According to an interview with Stasi defector Col. Rainer Wiegand, BND agents were assigned to use the anti-Stasi protests in East Germany in order to covertly obtain files from Building No. 2, which houses the counterespionage directorate. Wiegand assisted by providing the blueprints of the building and indicated which offices the agents should prioritize.
Operation Summer Rain Operation Summer Rain was a highly classified joint mission involving the Federal Intelligence Service and
special units of the
German Armed Forces during the
Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s. The primary objective of the operation was to gather intelligence on the weapons systems utilized by Soviet forces.
1990s Spying on journalists In 2005, a public scandal erupted (dubbed the , ) over revelations that the BND had placed a number of German
journalists under surveillance since the mid-1990s, in an attempt to discover the source of information leaks from the BND about its activities relating to the war in Iraq and the "war against terror". The Bundestag constituted an investigative committee () to investigate the allegations. The committee tasked the former Federal Appellate Court (Bundesgerichtshof) judge Dr. as special investigator, who published a report confirming illegal BND operations involving and targeting journalists between 1993 and 2005. As a consequence, the Chancellery issued an executive order banning BND operational measures against journalists with the aim to protect the service. The committee published a final report in 2009, which mostly confirmed the allegations, identifying the intent to protect the BND from disclosure of classified information and finding a lack of oversight within the senior leadership of the service but did not identify any responsible members from within the government.
Tiitinen list In 1990, BND gave the
Finnish Security Intelligence Service the so-called
Tiitinen list—which supposedly contains names of Finns who were believed to have links to
Stasi. The list was classified and locked in a safe after the Director of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service, Seppo Tiitinen, and the President of Finland,
Mauno Koivisto, determined that it was based on vague hints instead of hard evidence.
Unlicensed armament exports In the wake of the
German reunification in 1991, Israel requested access to GDR weapon systems. In March 1991 a parliamentary commission decided to not give the requested weapons to Israel. Six month later, under the supervision of BND-director Volker Foertsch, the service, in conjunction with elements within the
Federal Ministry of Defence, still without political clearance to do so, arranged several transfers of the requested GDR weapon systems (an
SA-6 system, a
ZSU-23/4 and other equipment) to Israel. The transfers were shipped using the ports and airports of Hamburg,
Wilhelmshaven,
Manching and
Alhorn. In late 1991, a shipment labeled "agricultural machinery" was unexpectedly inspected by the
Wasserschutzpolizei and weapons were discovered. A state’s attorney started an investigation and parliamentary designated BND-overseer
Willy Wimmer concluded, that control over the BND has been lost. An exasperated Chancellor
Helmut Kohl called the service "idiots". A few weeks later BND president
Konrad Porzner and minister of defence
Gerhard Stoltenberg rated the transfers as not to be problematic, since the equipment was only handed over for trials and was supposed to be returned afterwards.
2000s Promoting the invasion of Iraq On 5 February 2003,
Colin Powell made the case for a military attack on Iraq in front of the UN Security Council. Powell supported his case with information received from the BND, instead of Mr.
Hans Blix and the
IAEA. The BND had collected intelligence from an informant known as
Rafid al-Janabi alias CURVEBALL, who claimed Iraq would be in possession of
Weapons of Mass Destruction, apart from torturing and killing over 1,000 dissidents each year, for over 20 years. Rafid was employed before and after the 2003 incident which ultimately led to the
invasion of Iraq. The payments of 3,000 Euros monthly were made by a cover firm called Thiele und Friedrichs (Munich). As a result of the premature cancellation, al-Janabi filed a lawsuit at the Munich labour court and won the case. Several former senior BND officials publicly stated that the agency had repeatedly warned the CIA not to take the information shared by CURVEBALL as fact. Hanning, the BND president at the time, even formulated his concerns about that in a letter to then CIA Director
George Tenet. The CIA however ignored those warnings and presented the information as facts.
Israel vs. Lebanon Following the
2006 Lebanon War, the BND mediated secret negotiations between
Israel and
Hezbollah, eventually leading up to the
2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner exchange.
Fighting tax evasion In the beginning of 2008, it was revealed that the BND had managed to recruit excellent sources within
Liechtenstein banks and had been conducting espionage operations in the principality since the beginning of the 2000s. The BND mediated the German Finance Ministry's $7.3 million acquisition of a
CD from a former employee of the
LGT Group – a Liechtenstein bank owned by the country's ruling family. While the Finance Ministry defends the deal, saying it would result in several hundred millions of dollars in back tax payments, the sale remains controversial, as a government agency has paid for possibly
stolen data.
Kosovo In November 2008, three German BND agents were arrested in
Kosovo for allegedly throwing a bomb at the
European Union International Civilian Office, which oversees Kosovo's governance. Later the "Army of the Republic of Kosovo" had accepted responsibility for the bomb attack. Laboratory tests had shown no evidence of the BND agents' involvement. However, the Germans were released only 10 days after they were arrested. It was suspected that the arrest was a revenge by Kosovo authorities for the BND report about organized crime in Kosovo which accuses Kosovo Prime Minister
Hashim Thaçi, as well as the former Prime Minister
Ramush Haradinaj of far-reaching involvement in organized crime.
Austria According to reporting in
Der Standard and
profil, the BND engaged in espionage in Austria between 1999 and 2006, spying on targets including the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the
Austria Press Agency, embassies, and Austrian banks and government ministries. The government of Austria has called on Germany to clarify the allegations. He was suspected of handing over documents about the committee investigating the
NSA spying in Germany. In December 2016,
WikiLeaks published 2,420 documents from the BND and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV). The published materials had been submitted in 2015 as part of a German parliamentary inquiry into the surveillance activities of the BND and its cooperation with the US
National Security Agency. The BND has been reported to store 220 million sets of
metadata every day. That is, they record with whom, when, where and for how long someone communicates. This data is supposedly collected across the world, but the exact locations remains unclear to this date. The
Bundestag committee investigating the NSA spying scandal has uncovered that the German intelligence agency intercepts communications traveling via both
satellites and
Internet cables. It seems certain that the metadata only come from "foreign dialed traffic", that is, from telephone conversations and text messages that are held and sent via mobile phones and satellites. Of these 220 million data amassed every day, one percent is archived for 10 years "for long-term analysis". Apparently though, this long-term storage doesn't hold any Internet communications, data from social networks, or emails. In December 2022, a high-ranking employee of the BND was arrested on alleged treason. Carsten L. is said to have disclosed information from his professional activity to the Russian domestic secret service
FSB. The
Public Prosecutor General accuses him of treason () because it is said to have been state secrets. == New headquarters ==