German foreign intelligence faces staff shortage – media

Hundreds of vacancies with Berlin’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) remain unfilled, Bild has reported

Germany’s foreign intelligence service is allegedly struggling to monitor threats supposedly posed by Russia, China, North Korea and Iran due to significant personnel shortages, Bild daily reported over the weekend, citing the agency’s data.

The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has been rocked by a series of scandals over the past years. In summer 2023, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck admitted that the agency had seriously misjudged the developments in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and failed to correctly assess the risk of a direct military confrontation breaking out between the two neighbors.

BND chief Bruno Kahl, who visited Kiev shortly before the outbreak of the conflict in February 2022, even failed to evacuate in time with other German diplomats and intelligence operatives, prompting the agency to send in a team of agents to pick up their boss.

Now, the tabloid reports that a severe lack of staff is to blame for the service’s poor performance. According to Bild, some 700 vacancies out of a total of 7,200 within the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) remain unfilled. Kahl also reportedly stated that his agency urgently needed new spies to fill in the gaps.

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According to the report, the shortage of personnel has forced the agency to introduce a rotation work principle that makes intelligence officers specializing in particular fields like Russia or North Korea take up administrative and other jobs on a temporary basis or work on the issues that do not fit their specialization profile.

The work strain has also allegedly caused the BND staff members to call in sick twice as much as German employees on average, according to Bild. More than 1,000 intelligence service staffers took over 30 days off due to sick leaves last year. The period of 30 days amounts to a threshold beyond which the employees are no longer entitled to get their full salary for the time they were absent from work.

The spy agency has launched a massive advertising campaign to fill in the gaps, according to Bild. The effort has reportedly resulted in more than 10,000 new applications. However, the development is still unlikely to ease the agency’s problems in the near future, the tabloid said. It takes the service some 13 months on average to process all the data on a new applicant and some 40% of the candidates fail background checks, according to the report.

In July 2023, the German media also reported that the BND had failed to promptly inform the government about the mutiny staged by the Wagner private military company in Russia at that time. Later the same year, the agency was hit by a particularly high-profile scandal when its former director of technical reconnaissance, Carsten Linke, was charged with espionage and high treason over allegedly handing over classified materials to Russia.