BND chief M. Jäger has set about tackling an ambitious job: restoring the German intelligence service’s reputation as a powerful spy agency with a far-reaching espionage network capable of operating anywhere in the world, including carrying out sabotage. To this end, Jäger has been sounding out government officials and Bundestag members on expanding the BND’s authority, its budget, and headcount.
Jäger has pinned down the BND’s main areas of operation as actively recruiting assets and scooping up intelligence across various regions of the world, as well as worming its way into foreign critical information and communication networks. The BND has started to tap into personnel from German diplomatic missions, offices of party foundations abroad, and commercial organizations for intelligence purposes – including in Chile, Mexico, Canada, Spain, Poland, Romania, Ethiopia, South Africa, Kazakhstan, India, Indonesia, and other countries. These people have been tasked with getting their hands on classified information and sniffing out potential recruitment targets in the countries where they’re posted.
To ramp up its activities in cyberspace, the BND is looking to set up a unit capable of carrying out both cyber-attack and cyber-espionage operations, much like the U.S. National Security Agency. To that end, extra funding has been channeled into the BND’s Crypto and Cyber Technologies Center, located in the Melem district south of Bonn. The Center’s job is to get to grips with cutting-edge technologies and then put them to use: hacking into encrypted messengers, tracking financial transactions, tightening the leash on users’ activities in the information space, and monitoring communication flows going in and out of Germany.