Former BND chief August Hanning is held over a file of about 2,000 documents

Germany's federal prosecutor has August Hanning, the man who ran the foreign intelligence service from 1998 to 2005, in custody on suspicion of treasonous espionage. He is 80. A second man, named in filings only as Manfred D. under German privacy rules, was arrested the same morning. Prosecutors say the two agreed in the spring of 2010 that Manfred D. would keep sending Hanning material from inside the Bundesnachrichtendienst, and that the flow ran until June 2022.

The volume is the first hard number in the case. The Federal Public Prosecutor General says Manfred D. passed on nearly 2,000 documents, many of them classified. Ines Peterson, the office's spokesperson, put the end date at June 2022. That is twelve years after Hanning left the agency's presidency, and about four years before the arrests.

What the charge sheet actually says

Hanning is under what the prosecutor's statement calls strong suspicion of espionage constituting treason. The listed suspicions include obtaining state secrets, attempted treason, and activity for a foreign intelligence service. Manfred D. is accused of aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage. Neither man has been convicted. A remand court in Karlsruhe was due to see Hanning on Wednesday, after he was held overnight.

Peterson described two distinct uses of the material, and they are easy to blur. In one instance, she said, there is suspicion that Hanning used classified information to prepare an analysis for an employee of a foreign intelligence service. In another, he is alleged to have passed on information after a long exchange with an employee of a different service. The prosecutor has not named either service. A German intelligence official, speaking to Politico on condition of anonymity, said the recipients in the cases described so far were not Russian and not Chinese. That is a negative finding, not an identification.

Newspaper accounts go further than the prosecutor's text. Süddeutsche Zeitung, working with WDR and NDR, has reported that the cache included situation assessments, material from foreign partner services, and papers touching the Iranian nuclear file and the Russian military. Those descriptions come from the journalistic investigation, not from a published exhibit list. Until a court or the prosecutor confirms the contents, the safer reading is the narrower one: about 2,000 documents, many classified, used at least once to brief a foreign intelligence employee and shared across a multi-year exchange with another.

Where the raids landed

The location reports do not line up, and the mismatch matters because it shows how widely the searches ran. Associated Press placed Hanning's arrest in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district of southern Bavaria, and Manfred D.'s arrest in Steinfurt, in the west, near the Dutch border. Other accounts put the dawn raid on Hanning's house in Nordwalde, also in the Steinfurt area. Premises in Nordwalde were searched. The practical picture is two arrest sites and at least one house search, not a single address.

Manfred D. is not a minor clerk in the account given so far. Prosecutors and the partner broadcasters describe him as Hanning's former office manager, and as a man who stayed inside the BND and served later presidents. One report said he was still on the agency's books into spring 2026. If that holds, the alleged leak ran through a serving official for most of its life, and ended only in June 2022, four years before the arrest.

Why the file sat for so long

The investigation did not start as a spy hunt. AP reported that the trail opened from a child-abduction inquiry linked to events in January 2024, the case around Christina Block, and that formal proceedings were announced in autumn 2025. Hanning had already drawn notice as a private consultant and as an executive of a security firm. He appeared as a witness before the Bundestag's NSA inquiry committee, including sessions in October 2015. None of that is charged conduct. It is the public record of a former chief who stayed close to the security trade after leaving the building in Pullach, and later the new headquarters in Berlin.

The BND has been here before, in a different shape. In 2022 prosecutors arrested Carsten L., a former department head, on suspicion of spying for Russia. He denies the charges, and that case is still in court. The Hanning file is different in rank and in method. The allegation is not that a foreign service recruited a desk officer. It is that a former president kept a paid line into the agency through his old office manager, and then used what came down that line in dealings with foreign services the prosecutor will not yet name.

The timing sits next to a warning from the current BND president, Martin Jäger. A day before the arrests he told parliamentarians that Germany risks being drawn into a violent conflict with Russia, and he described a growing shadow war. The prosecutor's public account does not put Moscow on the Hanning file. The political effect does not depend on that. Partner services have long treated the BND as a service that has been penetrated before. A case built on 2,000 documents from the leadership briefing chain, the papers prepared for regular meetings at the chancellery, will be read in Washington, London and Paris as a question about what was in those folders, not only about who paid for them.

The open facts are narrower than the headlines. Two men are in custody. The alleged bargain dates to spring 2010. The documents stop, on the prosecutor's account, in June 2022. Two foreign intelligence employees appear in the suspicion, unnamed, and a German official has ruled Russia and China out of the instances described so far. The remand hearing is the next dated step. What the folders contained, and who received the analysis Hanning is accused of writing, is still outside the public charge sheet.