When the Spy Becomes the Traitor, the State Trembles at Its Core

I begin with the bare facts as they are reported, for a physician must first look at the symptoms before pronouncing on the disease. A former head of the Federal Intelligence Service in Germany, who once directed that secret power from 1998 to 2005, has now been arrested. Prosecutors say he is strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage, allegedly passing political information, partly based on thousands of classified documents, to a representative of another foreign intelligence service over several years. In a separate matter, he is suspected of having accepted a private contract to abduct children in the midst of a family custody dispute, while serving as an executive of a security firm. If true, these are grave symptoms indeed.

Because I know only these reports, I must speak, first, under the hypothesis that the accusations are true, and, second, under the restraint that the accused may yet show them false. When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws with penalties only for the public good, I had chiefly in mind kings and parliaments; but the principle bites no less sharply upon those who wield the invisible instruments of intelligence. These officers are entrusted, not with ordinary civil interests only, but with the hidden knowledge on which the safety of lives, liberties, and estates may depend. Their power is tolerable to free men only because it is held on trust and directed to the common security.

If, therefore, an intelligence chief, or one who once bore that office, takes secrets gathered at great charge for the defense of his own people, and uses them to serve a foreign intelligence, he does not merely break an ordinary rule. He steps outside the authority that was ever entrusted to him and acts no longer as a magistrate, or even as a citizen acting amiss, but as a private man using force and fraud. This is usurpation in a particularly dangerous form, because it arms a stranger with knowledge that belongs, by the original trust, to the community that gathered and funded it. To betray that trust is, in effect, to help another put the lives and estates of one’s own compatriots into hazard.

The law of nature, which I once described as reason teaching that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions, is plainly at stake here. I do not need to know which foreign power sought to receive these secrets to see the danger. The very act of secretly diverting information meant “to be used exclusively by the Federal Intelligence Service for internal purposes” toward another master exposes one’s own people to an unknown hand. Even if, as prosecutors say, it has not yet been determined whether the material reached its intended recipient, the attempt itself offends the natural duty to preserve mankind, beginning with those to whom one is especially bound by office and oath.

The kidnapping allegations, if established, would reveal a yet more naked contempt for this natural law. Here there is not even the false dignity of reasons of state, but the crude sale of one’s skill in surveillance and coercion for a private quarrel. To take children from a parent through clandestine force, for money, in the midst of a custody dispute, is to make oneself judge in one’s own case, and paid judge at that, setting aside both the civil magistrate and the welfare of the innocent. It treats persons, who are the workmanship of one Maker, as mere objects in a contract. A society that tolerates its former high officers hiring out their arts for such ends dissolves the very distinction between public trust and private violence.

These accusations also illuminate the peculiar danger of concentrated discretion in intelligence services. Because their work is secret, their obedience to known standing laws and to an impartial judge must be more exact, not less. Otherwise the officer moves, by easy degrees, from rightful prerogative — acting swiftly for the public good where the law is silent — to arbitrary power that answers only to its own advantage. When prerogative entrenches itself, calling continued secrecy a necessity while serving no evident public good, it becomes tyranny in embryo. A former chief who turns that dark knowledge toward foreign clients or private employers does not merely sin; he teaches every serving officer that there is a market after office for trading the common safety.

Still, though the moral lines are clear, the facts here are not. I have only the prosecutor’s statement of “strong suspicion,” the report of thousands of documents, and the outline of the alleged kidnapping plot. Reason, which binds princes and people alike, also demands that belief be proportioned to the evidence. The same law of nature that condemns treason and abduction also forbids that any man’s life, liberty, or estate be taken away without a fair hearing under settled law. If these charges are proved, those who entrusted this power are justified in withdrawing all confidence, in punishing according to law, and in reforming their institutions so that no single hand again holds such secrets without strict account. If they are not proved, then the accusers must bear in turn the weight of having shaken the public trust in vain.

uncertainty_note: I do not know, and cannot from these reports alone determine, whether the alleged treason and kidnappings were in fact committed, and my judgment therefore rests on conditional reasoning rather than on full proof.