BERLIN – Every day, as he settles into his office, Erhard Grundl, a German lawmaker, looks out his office window at the embassy he knows may be spying on him.
“I walk into the office and, on a windy day, I see the Russian flag waving. It reminds me a bit of Psalm 23: ‘You set a table before me in the presence of my enemies,’” he chuckles.
“I’m not religious, but I always think about it.”
In the shadow of the glass dome of the Berlin Reichstag, past the sandstone columns of the Brandenburg gate, Germany’s parliamentary buildings sit side by side with Russia’s sprawling Stalinist-style diplomatic mission.
For years, the iconic Unter den Linden boulevard has been the scene of a silent spy fight.
The intelligence services warned deputies like Grundl that they had to protect themselves:
move computer screens away from windows, stop using wireless devices easier to hit and close the blinds during meetings.
It sounds almost comical for officials in one of Europe’s most powerful nations, where tensions over Russian espionage were something the German government seemed willing to ignore for a long time.
This has become increasingly difficult since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a Cold War-style chill settles on the continent and redefines relations with Russia.
Late last month, Russia unveiled what it described as a “mass expulsionof his diplomats in Germany when he announced the expulsion of more than 20 German diplomats from Moscow.
It was a rare sign of a moderate but growing counterintelligence effort that Berlin is belatedly embarking on, according to security analysts, after years of increasingly brazen Russian intelligence operations on German soil, security analysts said.
On at least two occasions, Russian groups suspected of having ties to the Kremlin have attacked German politicians and parliaments, most recently just months before the 2021 elections that ended 16 years of Angela Merkel at the head of the country and gave entrance to the chancellor Olaf Schoelz.
A few years earlier, a gunman accused of ties to Russian intelligence fatally shot a Georgian dissident in broad daylight in the leafy Kleiner Tiergarten park, less than a kilometer from Berlin’s government district.
In 2021, the police arrested a Security Guard from the nearby British embassy who had been spying for Russia.
And late last year, in perhaps the most disturbing case of all, a German intelligence operative was exposed as… neo which passed war surveillance from Ukraine to Moscow.
The German Foreign Office has been dumbfounded about the latest expulsions, refusing even to call them such.
But he acknowledged that the diplomats’ departure was linked to the “reduction of the Russian intelligence presence in Germany”.
Expulsions have long been a common German response to Russian operations, including the first parliamentary hack, in 2015, and the invasion of Ukraine, when 40 diplomats were sent back to Moscow.
But security experts see the current move as part of a larger effort to tighten security. counterintelligence and discreetly reduce what they have long warned they were at extremely large number of spies in the embassy.
However, analysts such as Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations say that years of neglect by counterintelligence will take a long time to repair.
When he worked with German spy agencies in 2000, he recalled, they didn’t have a single Russian on staff.
By contrast, the Russian president Vladimir Putin has long made Germany, Europe’s largest economy, a prime target for espionage.
“We are not where we should be, or where we should have been,” he said.
“The Russians are also learning. They have no limits, they devote a lot of resources to this hybrid warfare, information warfare. And we are always a few steps behind.”
“Eventually, these kids get kicked out,” he added.
“But why did it take them so long?”
Central to the debate over Germany’s handling of Russian espionage is the Russian embassy, a palace complex of tall stone towers etched with Soviet hammers and sickles.
It has long been the object of fascination, awe and intrigue.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including for years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the embassy was famous for its lavish parties which attracted top executives of the German auto industry, politicians, football stars and actors.
But it had a dark side:
Two of its inhabitants died mysteriously when they fell from the windows of the embassy.
In 2021, a diplomat was found on the sidewalk by German police, who believed him to be an undercover agent of the FSB, the Russian intelligence branch Western officials have linked to the Tiergarten killing.
It’s an open secret that most diplomatic missions host spies in their ranks, and for years, he said The New York Times former senior adviser to Merkel, she and her embassy-visiting aides speculated about how many worked there at the embassy, sometimes suggesting up to 600.
In a recent documentary for ARD, the country’s state broadcaster, pre-war embassy staff were said to number more than 500 people.
German officials assumed this at least a third of them were spies, according to Merkel’s former adviser.
Germany’s national intelligence agency told ARD it had found a possible spy team on the roof of the embassy, possibly spying on lawmakers across the street, such as Grundl or Frank Schwabe of Scholz’s Social Democrats.
“We are not sufficiently prepared,” said Schwabe, who works in the building opposite the embassy and works in human rights.
“Indeed, I would like to see a specific security strategy in Germany train to parliamentarians, to help them really arm themselves against this type of interception attempts.
For now, it offers visitors, such as Russian dissidents or civil society actors, the option of moving to another room or positioning themselves in such a way that they cannot read their own lips.
Security experts say these tips aren’t enough to help politicians, who appear to be a prime target, not just near the embassy but everywhere else, using vans with smaller devices capable of tapping phones and listening to conversations. .
Meister said lawmakers with sensitive wallets could be moved further away from the Russian embassy.
“Then again, what isn’t sentient now?
An internal policy or other issues, such as migration, could be used by the Russian side: at the moment there is hardly anything that is not sensitive.”
Indeed, Nico Lange, a former German Defense Ministry official who is now a senior member of the Munich Security Conference, said issues such as migration had been a key issue used by Russia to identify and recruit frustrated members and sympathizers of the right wing of the German army. security and defense forces – like the mole arrested last year, or the security guard who stole information from the British Embassy.
The country’s federal system complicates Germany’s efforts to effectively fight Russian intelligence:
Each German state has a different intelligence service.
Lange acknowledged that cooperation and data sharing between services is improving, but said the setup inevitably has gaps.
He also urged lawmakers to repeal laws that grant espionage targets, including abroad, the same constitutional rights as German citizens.
“Intelligence agencies are a tit-for-tat business,” he said.
“If you can’t gather information, your partners won’t trade with you.”
Lange’s current concern is that Russian spies are looking for information on the weapons or training of Ukrainian soldiers. Suspected Russian agents have already been found near military training centers in Germany.
Last month, Poland said it had uncovered a Russian spy ring it had hidden cameras on railway lines in the southeast of the country, one of the main transit routes for arms shipments to Ukraine.
But some German lawmakers wonder if concern about Russian spies has strayed too far from a domestic matter:
Party members of extreme right Alternative for Germany, whose leaders have been frequent guests of the Russian embassy, hold seats in some of the most important parliamentary commissions, from Foreign Affairs to Defence.
Grundl was concerned that, just last week, these far-right colleagues sat on a parliamentary committee while a secret issue was being debated.
“They’re sitting there and have the best connections with Moscow,” he muttered.
“This is the biggest headache for me: the enemy within.”
c.2023 The New York Times Society
Source: Clarin
Mary Ortiz is a seasoned journalist with a passion for world events. As a writer for News Rebeat, she brings a fresh perspective to the latest global happenings and provides in-depth coverage that offers a deeper understanding of the world around us.