German federal police arrested August Hanning, who ran the country’s foreign intelligence service for seven years, early on Tuesday, October 6, on suspicion of treason and of spying for foreign intelligence services, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe said. Officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) also arrested Manfred D., Hanning’s chief of staff at the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and later a senior aide to several of his successors. German privacy rules withhold his full surname.
The prosecutors’ statement, issued at about 10:24 a.m. Karlsruhe time (1:24 a.m. PT), says they strongly suspect Hanning of treasonous espionage, spying out state secrets, attempted treason, and espionage under sections 94, 96, and 99 of the German Criminal Code. They accuse Manfred D. of aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage. Neither man has stood trial, and no court has tested the allegations.
Hanning, 80, led the BND from December 1998 to the end of November 2005, then served as state secretary in the federal interior ministry until November 2009. Manfred D. ran his office at the BND and followed him to the interior ministry as an assistant. From March 2012 to March 2026, prosecutors say, Manfred D. once again served as chief of staff, this time for several later BND presidents, a post that gave him access to confidential information.
According to the arrest warrants as summarized by prosecutors, the two men agreed, probably in the spring of 2010, that Manfred D. would keep passing valuable BND intelligence to Hanning in exchange for payment, so that Hanning could cash in on it through the private consulting business he had built after leaving government. Current findings point to roughly 2,000 documents handed over through June 2022, prosecutors say, many of them classified and meant only for the BND’s internal use, especially for the regular intelligence briefings that bring senior officials of federal ministries and security agencies together at the Federal Chancellery.
“On one occasion, Hanning used classified intelligence provided by Manfred D. to draft an analysis for an officer of a foreign intelligence service,” the prosecutors’ English-language statement says. Investigators have not yet determined whether that analysis reached its intended recipient. Prosecutors also allege that Hanning stayed in close contact for several years with a representative of a second foreign intelligence service, “to whom he passed on political information, partially based on material provided by Manfred D.” The statement names neither country.
A joint investigation by the public broadcasters WDR and NDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, published on tagesschau.de, reports that the analysis case does not involve Russia. The same reporting says the documents included highly sensitive reports, for example on Iran’s nuclear program and on the Russian army, and, according to security sources, information from allied partner services. Among intelligence agencies, the broadcasters write, a leak of such material counts as a worst-case event, because friendly services could lose trust in the BND and cut it off from essential information.
The case grew out of a separate criminal investigation. Prosecutors say it began with material found when Hamburg prosecutors searched Hanning’s premises in September 2025 in their case against Christina Block, an heiress of the Block House steakhouse family, whom Hamburg prosecutors accuse of commissioning the abduction of her two youngest children from her ex-husband during a long custody fight. Investigators allege that Hanning took part in an earlier attempt to seize the children; he denies that, and Block denies the charges against her. Tagesschau reports that state police analysts came across an electronic storage device holding recent top-secret BND documents that a man who left the agency in 2005 should never have had. Federal prosecutors took over in early May 2026 and have worked with the BND and the BKA since then.
The accounts of where officers found each man differ. The prosecutors’ statement lists Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen county in Bavaria and Steinfurt county in North Rhine-Westphalia without matching names to places. WDR, NDR, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, followed by the BBC, the Guardian, and DW, report that BKA officers detained Hanning early in the morning at his home in Nordwalde near Münster, inside Steinfurt county, and Manfred D. in Bavaria. An Associated Press report carried by NPR places Hanning in Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen instead. This desk follows the German reporting. Investigators also searched premises in Berlin.
Prosecutors said they would bring both men before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice, who will read them the warrants and decide on pretrial detention. The Guardian and the BBC report a hearing for Manfred D. on Tuesday and for Hanning on Wednesday. Tagesschau says Hanning’s lawyers had not answered a short-notice request for comment, and the BND did not immediately respond to the AP. A government spokesperson told the German news agency dpa that the federal government would not comment because of the ongoing investigation.
Lawmakers reacted fast. Marc Henrichmann, who chairs the Bundestag panel that oversees the intelligence services, told AFP that Germany “will not tolerate the betrayal of secrets,” DW reports. Green lawmaker Konstantin von Notz, who also sits on that panel, told Der Spiegel: “We expect a swift and thorough investigation into the egregious allegations leveled against former BND chief Hanning.” Von Notz has long criticized lobbying by former top officials who held the highest security clearances, and he called for a ban on such private consulting after they leave office, the AP reports, citing Spiegel. DW chief political editor Michaela Küfner, reporting from a government press briefing, called the affair Germany’s “biggest espionage scandal of the century unfolding in real time.”
Tagesschau writes that no suspected treason case in the history of the Federal Republic has ever touched such a senior former official. Hanning spent decades at the center of German security policy: as security officer at West Germany’s mission in East Berlin, in posts at the Chancellery that included coordinator of the federal intelligence services, then as BND president and interior ministry state secretary. After 2009 he worked as a businessman and security consultant, and until last May he sat in the leadership of a Switzerland-based security group whose German subsidiary at times worked in the Block custody fight, the broadcasters report.
The arrests land on an agency already under strain. A former BND unit head, Carsten L., faces trial in Berlin on charges of spying for Russia in 2022, which he denies. Politico notes that foreign services have infiltrated the BND before, at times making Western partners reluctant to share sensitive information, and that the case comes as Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government moves to give the agency broad new powers, including sabotage and offensive cyber operations, to push back against Moscow. Politico also expects hard questions about how a breach on this scale could go undetected for more than a decade.
As of about 5 a.m. PT Tuesday, Hanning had made no public statement on the espionage allegations, prosecutors had not identified either foreign service, and no judge had yet ruled on detention. Under German law, both men count as innocent unless a court convicts them.
