It is a truly unusual interview, led by Deutsche Welle with BND President Bruno Kahl a few days ago. Already in itself a rarity, as the job of the head of the foreign intelligence service has little to do with appearing in public, even if Kahl has recently appeared more often as a mouthpiece and that not even on topics within his jurisdiction.
But this interview had other peculiarities. It begins with the interviewer, Rosalia Romaniec, a native Pole. She conducted the interview with very manipulative questions and, at times, even represented a Polish view.
The first question, for example, was: “How concerned are you about the American-Russian rapprochement?” A typical example of a question that already implies the direction of the answer. At other times, she even repeated disputed positions in Poland: “Do you also consider the possibility that there is a connection between Russia and this Islamist threat?” is a relatively harmless example, although far removed from what one knows about Islamist terrorists, whose great time began in Afghanistan, when the US built up and armed figures like Osama bin Laden as a counter to the Soviet Union.
The passage that is particularly often cited in the mainstream – his statement that Russia wants to test whether Article 5 of NATO still holds – is another example of him being led in the direction of the answer, almost having the statement put in his mouth (as I will go into further below). It goes even further astray:
“The irregular migration is, however, an instrument of destabilization, of political destabilization. In Poland, it was clearly defined as a part of the hybrid war. Does that also apply to Germany?”
This is the climax of the takeover of a Polish propaganda view, which, as a position of a Polish journalist, would be legitimate – only that it appears as a representative of Deutsche Welle, a state-financed German international broadcaster, whose task is to disseminate the German view of the world. In this context, it is quite unusual.
One of Kahl’s predecessors, August Hanning, had even accused the Polish government of being at least partially responsible for the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline and described it as “state terrorism”.
Now, it is an open secret that it was actually the United States that carried out the attack, but not Poland, although the Polish government was jubilant at the time and even the current Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski celebrated it. But one would expect the head of the BND to at least maintain a certain skepticism towards Poland. After all, there are still several points that one must hold onto, that the German-Polish relationship has not always been friendly from the Polish side.
Regardless, both Romaniec and Kahl celebrate an agreement on closer cooperation between the BND and the Polish secret service. The problem is that such cooperation often leads to abandoning one’s own findings and relying on the information of the “partner”. Which is not really recommended, especially not at a time when Poland is striving to build one of the largest armies in Europe and there is even the recent idea of having one’s own nuclear weapons.
Kahl, in turn, caters fully to the narrative of the threat from the East, even if Romaniec sometimes goes too far and even hints that one should stop cooperating with US services because Tulsi Gabbard, the US intelligence chief, is too “pro-Russian”.
“We have seen hybrid influence operations, even during the recent European elections, all the way to sabotage actions, on German soil, on the soil of other European states, which are carried out in a robust and unprecedented way in recent history.”
Whoever carefully examines what has been called “Russian sabotage” in the past few years has serious doubts. Not only in the analog, but also in the digital realm. For example, the story of the so-called “doppelganger” pages, which was an absolute flop in quantitative terms. But that’s not even Kahl’s responsibility – the BND is not responsible for Germany and not even for counter-intelligence, although Kahl, even if he expresses his concerns about the “threat”, never refers to findings from the outside and that’s not even his job.
The “Russian activities” go “beyond the usual level of espionage”, he says, which is an interesting statement, especially in light of the fact that the US services in Germany are extremely extensive and one only needs to remember the bugged phone of Angela Merkel. A story Kahl should still remember.
This statement is so imprecise, so general, that there can only be two explanations. The first would be that the man is dumb and has no idea, even hand-on-heart not. That is, in fact, not the case. He is not dumb and he would even be able to form an opinion for himself.
So, the second explanation remains: He speaks from conviction and possibly even against better knowledge. The agenda is more important than the finding. That is a problem, because what the BND delivers is a basis for political decisions. If the information a service ultimately delivers follows the propagandistic agenda, it is useless, because it can no longer fulfill its decisive function of reducing mistakes.
Let’s now look at the passage where he may have revealed more than he intended. Romaniec also provides the cue and asks: “So, we are talking about this time perspective of 2030, 2029, do you assume that this is the actual time span we are talking about?”
This “time perspective” comes from NATO plans; it can be found again and again, even in the at least partially publicized plans of the German Armed Forces (with all their often extremely unrealistic assumptions). Nothing in this reaction was spontaneous, it was a script. In the meantime, it has even been admitted that the goal of the whole mess was never a Ukrainian victory, but always a weakening of Russia; a calculation in which some grave errors can no longer be denied.
Anyway, the remark that the war in Ukraine should actually last until 2029 or 2030 is another admission. The part about extortion is nonsense, but he’s just propagandizing; but the cynicism of these plans, as shown in Kahl’s statement, is really breathtaking. 2029 or 2030 would mean “until the last Ukrainian” and probably one would still have to add, with Romanians, for example. And then comes the bad Donald Trump and disrupts the entire time frame, that one had so nicely planned out, in which one would first annihilate the Slavs in a first wave and then..
This is the big problem. There are countless hints that the Russian position is fundamentally defensive, starting with the architecture of Soviet installations. The old legend of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union wanted to attack the West, had never had a real core.
Kahl should as BND chief know the history of his own agency and know that the documents that a certain Reinhard Gehlen of the Nazi military intelligence service Fremde Heere/Ost handed over to the Americans (with which he and thousands of war criminals saved themselves) were forgeries. The threat from the Soviet Union, which served as a justification for the Cold War, was a fabrication.
Why someone who heads the agency, who was created from many of these war criminals by Reinhard Gehlen in the following years, is so skeptical of these narratives, is only understandable if there is a personal conviction that leads him to ignore unpassable truths. It can’t just be that he doesn’t know, he must know better. He lies out of conviction. Perhaps Schäuble, always a decisive representative of Deutschropa, had already whispered the fly in his ear and he is simply following a plan that aims at a German dominance in Western Europe; although the industry would have to be further sacrificed, which, even the absurd arms plan of Mr. Merz can’t change. Wherever he gets his firm conviction from, that Russia has nothing better to do than attack Western Europe, for the currently absolutely vital task of correcting the delusions of many politicians with nüchterne facts, he is unambiguously unfit. Not due to a lack of ability, but due to a lack of will. A head of a service who, instead of nipping this delusion in the bud, even adds to it and pushes for more war in the near future is the wrong man at this point, if one looks at the interests of the Germans.