Former German Intelligence Chief Arrested on Espionage and Treason Charges
When the Spy Becomes the Risk, Not the Shield
The arrest of a former intelligence chief on suspicion of treason exposes not only one man’s corruption but the naivety of institutions that forgot all men are bad when they have free field.
The spectacle is already damning: a man who once led a state’s intelligence service, later a private consultant, now arrested at home and “strongly suspected of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage.” I always begin from the effectual truth, not from homilies. The prosecutors say that for years he stayed in close contact with a representative of another foreign service, receiving some 2,000 internal BND documents from an associate and passing on political information based partly on this material. They do not yet know whether the secrets reached their intended recipient. But from a republican point of view, the damage begins the moment a guardian of the walls starts opening side doors.
When I wrote in The Prince that the first duty of a ruler is to maintain the state, I meant above all its security. Whoever commands intelligence commands the eyes and ears of a republic; he is custodian of its fears and its hopes. Such a man’s survival incentive is simple: keep the state safe, or see his own glory and safety perish with it. If, instead, he trades internal documents and political assessments for private advantage, he inverts this order and stakes the common safety on his own appetite. This is not merely moral failure. It is professional incompetence of the highest degree, because he gambles the very foundation on which his former power and present influence rest.
In the Discourses I argued, following all sound writers on republics, that founders must assume all men are bad and will show it whenever they have free field, and must design orders that bind even the worst to public ends. Here, the orders failed. An ex-chief and an associate can, over years, move around some 2,000 classified documents supposedly destined only for internal use. A private security firm becomes a stage where old officials play with new secrets. Either the internal controls of this service grew lax from habit and trust, or its leaders never believed my maxim that Time, the father of truth, always uncovers the hidden corruption of men. A state that lets its former guardians keep the keys after leaving office has confused courtesy with prudence.
Fortune, as I once compared her in The Prince, is like a raging river that floods where no dykes have been raised. Here she appears in two ways. First, in the unknown: prosecutors admit they do not yet know if the material reached its intended foreign recipient. Perhaps the channel broke; perhaps it flowed freely. Second, in the occasion that revealed the scheme at all, for this man came under scrutiny in a separate investigation, like a thief caught by stumbling over another crime. Virtù would have meant building systems that checked the use and movement of classified information so rigorously that no one man, however eminent his past title, could divert thousands of documents without alarm bells long before the river burst its banks.
The separate accusation concerning a contract to abduct children in a bitter custody dispute reveals the same root in another branch. Prosecutors say that he and a retired police official, both now security executives, are suspected of accepting, in 2022, a private contract to seize children from Denmark, and that the mother is accused of orchestrating such a kidnapping in 2023. Here we are no longer in the realm of reason of state but of private feud dressed in professional clothing. When men trained in public force rent out their skills for domestic abductions, they carry the state’s aura into private war. This is the corruption of a people: when those who once bore lawful arms for all become, in effect, refined mercenaries for one.
How should a free state answer? In The Prince I noted, as W.K. Marriott translated, that men offend more readily one who is loved than one who is feared, because fear rests on the dread of punishment which never fails. Treason in the intelligence sphere, if proven, is precisely the crime where severity well-used is necessary and mercy ill-used is ruinous. To treat such a case softly, out of sentiment for past services or social standing, is the middle course I most despise: you buy the hatred of the people, who see partiality for the great, yet fail to buy their fear, because every other insider concludes that betrayal only risks disgrace, not destruction. Where the walls are thin, the penalties must be thick.
Yet punishment alone is vanity if institutions do not return to first principles. A republic must ask: what arms defend us against our own guardians when they turn? In my Art of War I preferred citizen forces to hired arms, because men fight more faithfully for what they are than for what they are paid. The same rule holds for intelligence: when those who hold secrets define themselves as a caste above the laws, rather than as citizens under them, they become auxiliaries to their own ambition. The scandal harms not just security but reputation; most people judge by appearances, and the appearance now is of a service whose former head may sell its secrets and its skills. To restore trust, the state needs both visible justice and invisible reforms — new dykes and barriers built on the assumption that even its brightest servants, given free field, may choose to become its darkest risk.
From the works cited
- The Prince — The economy of violence and the feared/loved calculus: better feared than loved if one must choose, but never hated — fear rests on the prince's will, love on the fickle will of others.
- Discourses on Livy — Founding and radical reform must assume men bad and design accordingly; only a single lawgiver can found, but only the many can maintain.
- The Art of War — A citizen militia bound to the state beats hired arms, because soldiers fight for what they are, not what they are paid.