Former German spy chief arrested for espionage

August Hanning, the head of Germany’s bnd foreign intelligence agency from 1998 to 2005, was arrested today on suspicion of espionage and treason, along with his chief of staff Manfred D., who remained at the agency decades after Hanning. According to prosecutors, Manfred D. supplied Hanning with some 2,000 documents beginning around 2010, many of which contained classified information, that he planned to sell and use to “draft an analysis for an office of a foreign intelligence service.” Prosecutors say he was also “in close contact” with a foreign intelligence representative “to whom he passed on political information.”