August Hanning is accused of working with a foreign intelligence agency, and all the evidence points one way
It took a bungled kidnapping for Germany’s former spymaster to be charged with espionage and treason, but August Hanning’s ties to Israeli spies and criminals should have set alarm bells ringing in Berlin long ago.
Hanning, who led Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) from 1998 to 2005, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with espionage, the disclosure of state secrets, and treason.
Prosecutors have alleged that Hanning bought state secrets from his former BND aide – identified as ‘Manfred D’, who remained in the agency after Hanning’s departure and served several of his successors. They claim Hanning acquired nearly 2,000 BND documents between 2010 and 2022, which he then leveraged in his work as a private security consultant at-large to the rich and powerful.
Hanning, part of the woodwork on the security conference circuit, used this material to prepare a report for an employee of a foreign intelligence service, and maintained “close contact with a representative of another foreign intelligence service,” to whom he passed information obtained by Manfred D “for several years.”
Prosecutors haven’t identified which foreign services Hanning collaborated with, though media reporting suggests one is believed to be the Foreign Intelligence Service of Azerbaijan, a country Hanning has openly lobbied for since the mid-2010s. As for the other, Hanning’s involvement in a bizarre kidnapping plot suggests one obvious culprit.
The Israeli kidnapping plot
German investigators picked up Hanning’s trail last September, when Hamburg police searched his apartment as part of an investigation involving multi-millionaire Christina Block, whose father built Germany’s most popular steakhouse chain, as well as a burger franchise, boutique hotels and gastro-resorts.
Ms. Block has been in a custody dispute with her ex-husband, Danish banker Stefan Hansel, since 2021. She is currently on trial for ordering the kidnapping of her two youngest children from their father’s care in Denmark. According to prosecutors, Block hired Hanning’s consulting firm, System 360, to carry out the abduction in 2022, but Danish police intervened before the System 360 team could snatch the children.
Hanning apparently gave up on the direct approach and decided to outsource the job to his contacts from the world of intelligence. These contacts were Yaakov Perry, the former chief of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, and Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad.
Block’s trial is ongoing and details are murky, but the allegations are as follows: Hanning hired Perry and his private intelligence firm, CGI Group, to assemble an eight-man team to kidnap the children; the German spymaster requested that Yatom be involved; Perry brought in David Barkay, a former member of the IDF’s Unit 504 intelligence wing and alleged Mossad agent; Barkay led the team that carried out the kidnapping on New Year’s Eve, 2023.
Barkay’s team assaulted Hansel and dragged the children – a ten-year-old boy and 13-year-old girl – across the German border on foot, taping their mouths shut and threatening to kill them if they screamed for help.
Hanning denies any role in the kidnapping, as does Yaakov. Barkay has confessed to orchestrating and carrying out the operation, but has not implicated Hanning or Yaakov. Yatom has told Israeli media that he has “no connection to this case,” and furthermore, that his relationship with Hanning was a strictly professional one dating back to the late 1980s.
However, Yatom invited Hanning to join the board of his private cybersecurity company, World Health Energy Holdings (WHEN), in 2021. Speaking to the Jerusalem Post at the time, Hanning said that his “contacts with states, law enforcement and intelligence agencies” would be valuable to WHEN, a company that markets spyware to businesses seeking to monitor their employees.
Hanning added that he maintained “very close working relationships, even friendships” with Yatom and other Mossad officials long after he left the BND. Both men are still listed as board members on WHEN’s website.
The gray man
During his tenure at the BND, Hanning was the consummate ‘gray man’ of intelligence: a gaunt and bespectacled bureaucrat in the mould of John le Carre’s ‘George Smiley’. Le Carre met Hanning several times, and described the German spymaster as “courtesy itself.”
Yet his “career was clouded by speculation about his loyalties, with persistent whispers of too-close-for-comfort ties to Israel and Russia,” according to a recent Irish Times report. Prosecutors have ruled out any suspicion that Hanning colluded with Russian agents, according to German media, leaving only one possibility.
Hanning once remarked that “a good agent is one who doesn’t draw attention to himself.” In the murky world of Israel’s ‘private’ intelligence sector, however, Hanning could hardly have chosen a more conspicuous duo to work with than Yatom and Perry.
The Congo debacle
Perry’s private intelligence firm, CGI Group, is an outfit that will sound familiar to readers of our ‘Wired for War’ series. Founded by former Israeli spies and specializing in illegal or quasi-legal private spycraft, the company boasts that it hires “senior personnel from elite IDF units, the General Security Services and the Mossad.” Among them are:
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Yaakov Perry, president, Shin Bet Director from 1988 to 1995
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Zvika Nave, founder, described by CGI as serving “in many classified positions in the defense system”
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Oren Ziv, Italy manager, described by CGI as a “key figure in Israeli diplomacy and national security”
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Alon Pinkas, consultant, former foreign policy adviser to Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres, former Israeli Consul General in New York
Before its alleged involvement in the Block kidnapping, CGI Group became infamous when it attempted to steal $60 million from the Bulgarian government in 2019. Some 30 years earlier, Israeli businessman Gad Zeevi attempted to buy a stake in Bulgaria’s national airline, but the deal fell apart and Zeevi claimed that he was owed $10 million in compensation from Sofia. International arbitrators agreed, but Bulgaria refused to comply with the judgment, and the Israeli government refused to chase the Bulgarians down for the money.
Zeevi reached out to Perry and Nave, who came up with a long-shot scheme to collect the debt. CGI Group would ask the government of the Congo to order $60 million worth of weapons from Bulgaria, with Yatom acting as a go-between. Once the Bulgarians had sent the arms and the Congolese government transferred the money to his account, Yatom would hand it to Zeevi, minus a generous cut for him and his co-conspirators in CGI Group.
It was never clear how CGI would convince the Congolese to order weapons that would never be paid for, and the plan never came to fruition. Zeevi and CGI Group threatened to sue each other for damages, but the case never made it to court.
Yatom and CGI Group refused to comment, giving similar answers as they did when questioned about the Block kidnapping. “I don’t want to talk about my business activities,” Yatom told Israel’s Globes news outlet in 2022. “We don’t talk to the media,” Nave said.
Red flags ignored
Despite the fact that Yatom and the CGI spies colluded to defraud a NATO and EU member state in 2019, German investigators didn’t ask questions when Hanning joined Yatom’s company two years later. No investigation was opened when he spoke to the Israeli media of his “close friendship” with the former Mossad chief behind the swindle. Hanning’s ties to the Israeli intelligence underworld, apparently the subject of “persistent whispers” in the corridors of the BND, were evidently brushed aside or ignored.
None of this is to say that Shin Bet or Mossad is, without a doubt, the “foreign intelligence service” that Hanning passed secrets to. However, his contacts with Perry and Yatom certainly point that way, as does his work to advance Israeli foreign policy goals.
Hanning aided Israeli efforts to push the US into war with Iraq in late 2002, when he told then-CIA Director George Tenet that the BND had “plausible and convincing” evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing chemical and biological weapons. Hanning’s source, an Iraqi defector codenamed ‘Curveball’, later admitted to fabricating the claims.
Hanning now sits on the board of ‘United Against Nuclear Iran’, a Washington-based think tank funded by pro-Israel megadonors Miriam Adelson and Thomas Kaplan, which has explicitly advocated for military strikes on Iran since 2008. Adelson and Kaplan supply around three quarters of the group’s funding, with the remainder coming from smaller Jewish organizations and individual donors.
Europe’s wilful ignorance
Anyone following our ‘Wired for War’ series will recognize the pattern here. Over and over again, the actions of private Israeli spy firms are ignored by European governments, even when the Israeli state itself is involved in the skulduggery. The British government has refused to investigate Israeli meddling in Scottish elections, in order to “avoid giving offense” to the perpetrators. The EU has stayed silent on Israeli interference in elections in Cyprus and Slovenia, and on the proliferation of Israeli spyware throughout the union.
Meanwhile, governments at the EU and national level continue to sound the alarm about Russia’s invisible and unprovable “hybrid war” against the West. Fires, false drone sightings, and even natural disasters are all presented as examples of this shadow war, while the most blatant malfeasance from other foreign powers is ignored.
One day before Hanning’s arrest, his successor at the helm of the BND, Martin Jaeger, warned German MPs that Russia is “waging a shadow war,” and that “no other country currently poses such a direct, comprehensive, and concrete threat to Germany.” Had he looked at the company August Hanning kept, he might have reassessed his position.
