Germany needs to remember loose lips sink ships

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a columnist at POLITICO Europe. 

“Careless talk costs lives,” was a key message in Britain’s 1940s public service campaign. They had it right.

The wartime posters were plastered all around, warning the public to be circumspect. One of the posters featured two women chatting away on the upper deck of a London bus, with an eavesdropping Himmler and Göring sitting behind. “You never know who’s listening!” it read. America launched its own campaign too, raising public awareness about the risk of giving away significant information through casual conversation.

Of course, one wouldn’t think top military officers would need to be reminded to maintain their guard. However, as Russia unsurprisingly revels in its massive propaganda coup, fully exploiting the extraordinary interception of what was meant to be a secret talk between Germany’s air force chief and three subordinates this week — apparently, they do.

Maybe it’s time Germany considered running a campaign similar to those from World War II, with easy-to-understand posters displayed across the barracks and command posts of Germany’s military — albeit one without the chauvinistic assumption that women are the weak link.

Maybe it’s time to be reminded that loose lips do, indeed, sink ships.

During the now infamous 38-minute call, the military quartet were caught discussing how to convince reluctant German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to agree to provide long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine. The four also spoke of whether Taurus missiles could wreck the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea — a high-value target — as well as how the British and French transport and target the long-range missiles they supply Kyiv.

“When it comes to mission planning, I know how the English do it,” Lieutenant General Ingo Gerhartz, head of Germany’s Luftwaffe air force, told the others. The British “also have a few people on the ground, they do that, the French don’t.” Scholz frets that giving Ukraine Taurus missiles would involve German soldiers participating in “target control” — just a week ago he said he couldn’t accept such an arrangement because it would risk turning Berlin into a “participant in the war.”

Russia didn’t hesitate to post the recording on social media, of course. And high-profile Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan — editor-in-chief of the RT television network — gleefully got the ball rolling to the discomfit of Germany and infuriated NATO allies, triggering yet another unhelpful squabble between Western powers.

It still remains unclear how exactly Russia accomplished the intercept. However, it does seem rather casual, to say the very least, for top military officials to use standard commercial video conference software for a secret call as opposed to a secure military system — in their case a WebEx software, owned by U.S.-based Cisco Systems. 

According to German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius, it’s possible that an opening may have been created because one of the participants dialed in from Singapore using an unsecure line, thus allowing Russian hackers entry. “Our communication systems were not compromised,” he insisted Tuesday, adding that the security breach was just a one-off incident.

And maybe so. But there have been well-publicized problems with WebEx before. Back in 2020, three vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to gain access as a “ghost,” and even maintain an audio feed if expelled from a virtual meeting were discovered . Then, in January this year, there were other warnings of major Webex vulnerabilities too.

German officers were caught discussing how to convince reluctant German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to agree to provide long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine | Leonhard Simon/Getty Images

But this casualness regarding security seems to be the order of the day in Germany. On February 26, Scholz himself enraged the British with what they described as a “flagrant abuse of intelligence,” revealing that British soldiers were in Ukraine helping to target the U.K.’s Storm Shadow missiles. And between this reckless disclosure, the Lutwaffe scandal and last year’s unmasking of ex-soldier turned top German intelligence official Carsten Linke as a Russian spy, it all adds up to a sorry picture — one reminiscent of the Cold War when West Germany was seen by allied intelligence services as a sieve.

“They are neither secure nor reliable,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s former defense minister, fumed this week.

Until recently, however, it seemed as though Russia’s vaunted intelligence agencies had the exclusive rights to sheer operational buffoonery and incompetence.

Cast your minds back to 2018 and the thrilling spectacle of Bellingcat — the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group — revealing the real identities of GRU assassins sent to England with orders to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy.

By using open-source information and acquiring phone records with geolocation data, passenger manifests and residential data from black data marketeers for just a few hundred euros, Bellingcat traced Russian intelligence service skullduggery, identified the hapless hit squad thugs and followed the movements of intelligence (GRU) and federal security service (FSB) spies across Russia and abroad.

The online sleuths then repeated this exercise, exposing the near-fatal FSB nerve-agent poisoning of Alexei Navalny. The whole ordeal then culminated in the group tricking one of the operatives to inadvertently confess to his role and detail the whole operation in an astonishing phone conversation with Navalny himself, who had posed as a high-ranking Russian official asking why the assassination bid had failed.

This bungling amateurishness and poor tradecraft opened Russia’s security services to widespread ridicule. And while the Germans now appear to be slipping, the Russians seem to be learning from their past missteps and trying to guard their secrets, shield the identities of their operatives and improve their capabilities.

According to a report by Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds for the Royal United Services Institute, Russian “tradecraft and operational security are often poor,” but there are now strenuous efforts underway to reform. The GRU is restructuring how it manages recruitment and training, and it appears to be addressing “the exposure of its personnel and their vulnerability to identification through modern analytical techniques” — including mobile phone use.

Meanwhile, at the GRU’s Center161, the headquarters for special units bringing human intelligence and special forces personnel together, no one is allowed to bring in personal or service mobile phones anymore. And “training exercises are no longer primarily conducted at the facility but are instead organised in a series of safe houses.”

Germany now needs to take a leaf out of Russia’s new intelligence playbook and lock up tight. You never know who’s listening or watching.