Germany announced yesterday that it is replacing the head of its foreign intelligence service, which has been rocked by revelations it helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) spy on European targets.
Gerhard Schindler, 63, will take early retirement from July 1, leaving the reins of the BND service to Bruno Kahl, a trained lawyer and currently high-ranking finance ministry official.
“The BND faces major challenges in coming years,” said Peter Altmaier, chief of staff of Angela Merkel’s chancellery, in a statement.
These “include the development of its profile given the changing security challenges” as well as the “organisational and legal consequences of the work of the NSA investigation committee”, he added.
Altmaier did not spell out the reasons for Schindler’s departure and government spokesman Steffen Seibert declined comment when asked at a regular press briefing.
But German media speculated that the change was down to a combination of factors that included the BND’s controversial co-operation with the NSA.
An investigation committee said in a report seen by AFP in October that the NSA had handed lists of European government offices as targets for espionage to the BND, with the request for the results be sent back to the United States.
Although the report found that the BND whittled down the list of thousands of NSA targets over the years, it still maintained co-operation with Washington.
Beyond the consequences of the NSA scandal, German media said that the change at the top of the BND was also partly motivated by the need for reform at the service to increasingly cover cyber-security, and to oversee a complex move of the headquarters from the western city of Pullach to Berlin.
Kahl is a trusted aide of Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, and has been leading a ministry division in charge of privatisations, investments and federal real estate.
Schindler has led the BND since 2012 and had been expected to continue for another two years overseeing an overhaul in the agency and its move into a gleaming new headquarters in central Berlin.
Senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested that Schindler, who was known for speaking openly and frankly, lacked the political sensitivity that Merkel and her top ministers value.
One said Merkel was keen to keep the issue of BND reform, which plays to the strengths of rival parties on the left, out of the 2017 election campaign and preferred to have someone at the top of the agency who could be counted on to co-operate.
“There are more questions than answers at the moment about this change,” Burkard Lischka, a lawmaker and spokesman on domestic security issues for the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), who rule in coalition with Merkel’s conservatives.
Stephan Mayer, who holds the same post for the conservatives in the Bundestag lower house, said: “I simply can’t understand this decision”. He described Schindler as a “very good BND president”.
Some lawmakers speculated that health issues might have been behind his exit.
Schindler missed several weeks recently with tinnitus, or ringing in the ears.
One pointed to recent revelations that Schindler’s sister is married to a spokesman for the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
But most of the dozen or so officials Reuters spoke to dismissed these as irrelevant factors, pointing instead to political considerations and an accumulation of BND problems, starting with the NSA revelations last year.
In early December, the BND incurred the wrath of the government by publishing a brief report in which it accused Saudi Arabia of a shift to “impulsive” policies under young Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
A year before, a BND employee was arrested for passing on secrets to the CIA and the Russians.
Guido Steinberg, an expert at the German Institute for Security and International Studies in Berlin, said that at the root of the problem was a “naive” view among German politicians about the role of an intelligence agency.
“At a time when developments in the Middle East can have a big impact domestically, Germany cannot afford a weak BND. But I don’t expect this to change,” he said.