Former German intelligence chief August Hanning has been arrested on charges of espionage and treason, amid accusations that he recruited the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency to carry out a child kidnapping.
Hanning, who headed the BND from 1998 to 2005, was arrested on Tuesday along with his former aide within the agency, identified by prosecutors as ‘Manfred D’. Hanning is accused of buying state secrets from Manfred D, who remained in the BND after Hanning’s departure and served several of his successors.
Hanning acquired nearly 2,000 BND documents between 2010 and 2022, which he leveraged in his work as a private security consultant, prosecutors said.
In one case, Hanning allegedly used BND material to prepare an analytical report for an employee of a foreign intelligence service. He is also accused of maintaining “close contact with a representative of another foreign intelligence service,” to whom he passed information obtained by Manfred D “for several years,” according to the prosecutors’ statement.
Neither intelligence service was named in the statement, but law enforcement sources told German media that they do not suspect any links to Russia.
The Mossad connection
The espionage case was reportedly built on evidence found at Hanning’s residence in Hamburg, which was searched by local police in September 2025 as part of a separate investigation involving businesswoman Christina Block.
Block, an heiress to her family’s Block House restaurant group, is at the center of a high-profile custody dispute and is currently on trial for kidnapping. Prosecutors allege that she hired Hanning’s private security firm, System 360, and former state criminal police officer Thorsten Mehles to abduct her two youngest children from their father’s home in Denmark and return them to Germany.
After a foiled attempt by System360 and Mehles, Hanning allegedly contracted the job out to Yaakov Perry, the former chief of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet. Perry, who now runs a private intelligence company called CGI Group, assembled a team that assaulted Block’s ex-husband and kidnapped the children. The ex-husband, Stefan Hansel, claims that Hanning also recruited former Mossad chief Danny Yatom to take part in the operation.
Questioned about these claims by Israeli media, Yatom said that he knew Hanning in the late 1980s, but had “no connection to this case.” However, speaking to Israeli media in 2021, Hanning said that he maintained “very close working relationships, even friendships” with Yatom and other Mossad officials long after he left the BND.