German Citizen Charged with Espionage
The German Parliament building’s blueprints may have been passed to Russian intelligence. (Oscar Am Freitag)
The German federal prosecutor’s office charged a German citizen identified only as Jens F. with espionage on February 25. Mr. F had obtained blueprints of the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and had passed them along to Russian intelligence services between June and September 2017.
Mr. F worked for a maintenance company that the government contracted to maintain electronic equipment in Germany’s parliamentary building. Mr. F., however, managed to obtain PDF files detailing the Bundestag’s floor plan.
“The accused decided on his own initiative to pass on the information about the properties of the German Bundestag to Russian intelligence services,” federal prosecutors asserted in a statement released Thursday. He accomplished the feat with the help of a contact at the Russian Embassy in Berlin who works full-time for the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency.
Germany has suffered prior infiltrations by Russia. In 2015, Russian hacker group Fancy Bear targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s emails. German prosecutors allege that Fancy Bear has ties to GRU.
In 2018, Germany once again suffered a Russian cyberattack, this time targeting the cybersecurity of the German government’s IT system.
“I can honestly say, it pains me. On the one hand, I strive daily for a better relationship with Russia, but then on the other we see that there is solid evidence showing that Russian forces are also involved in such activities,” Merkel testified to the Bundestag in 2020.
To complicate matters, German news magazine Der Spiegel claims that Jens F. is a former army officer with links to the Stasi dating to between 1984 and 1990. The Stasi was East Germany’s secret police and had a deep network of informants who imprisoned anyone that they considered a threat to either East Germany or the USSR.
The espionage charge comes amidst already strained relations between Germany and Russia. The poisoning and imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have caused outrage in German political spheres, especially because he had spent his months recovering in a German hospital.
Moscow has steadfastly denied any knowledge of or involvement with the cyberattacks or the poisoning. Nevertheless, the European Union announced sanctions on February 22 against senior Russian officials for the poisoning of Navalny. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke out against the decision, claiming that the West aims to “shackle” Russia.
The security breach has prompted concern for the upcoming German election. If a maintenance worker could obtain floor plans of the Bundestag, Germans worry that Russian hackers may well interfere with their democratic process.