Yahoo Finance Germany has sacked its spy chief but hasn’t said why
The head of the BND, the German equivalent of the American CIA, has been booted out of his job on the orders of chancellor Angela Merkel, two years before he was officially due to retire. No reason for the leadership change was disclosed.
Gerhard Schindler had avoided the chop last year after the German foreign intelligence agency was revealed to have spied on European allies, companies, and institutions on the request of the American NSA. The revelation that the BND had gone far beyond a 2002 intelligence-sharing agreement with the US, and used mass-surveillance software supplied by US spies, caused outrage in Germany.
It also was personally embarrassing for Merkel, who had reacted to the WikiLeaks revelations that the Americans had bugged her cell phone in 2013 by saying: “Spying on your friends—that’s really not on.”
The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported Tuesday (April 26) that the 63-year-old Schindler, who has headed up the BND since 2012, would be replaced by Bruno Kahl, a senior aide to finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble.
Chancellery head Peter Altmaier confirmed Schindler’s replacement (link in German) on Wednesday but gave no reasons for the change, simply saying that Schindler had given “long years of commendable service.”
There’s mass speculation as to whether the spy boss is being ousted for political reasons—he supports the Free Democratic Party while his replacement is aligned with Merkel’s Christian Democrats—or if he’s part of a cleanup of the scandal-ridden BND ahead of next year’s federal election.
Schindler has reportedly been suffering from health problems, brought on by the stress of the parliamentary enquiries into the spying affair. In December, the BND was publicly scolded by the government after it released a report describing Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in the Arab world as “impulsive” and “interventionist.”
His departure comes in the middle of a big reshuffle of the intelligence agency, which is the process of moving the majority of its 6,500 employees from Munich to the new headquarters in Berlin. It also comes as Germany is on high alert for terror attacks.
“It’s not enough to change the BND President. The Chancellery must finally take responsibility for a service out of control,” tweeted Left party MP Martina Renner.
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