Constitutional Concerns
German Intelligence Under Fire For Spying on Parliamentarians
Gregor Gysi, parliamentary group leader of the Left Party. He is on a list of 27 members of parliament for the Left Party who are under observation by the domestic intelligence agency.
Based on the Leipzig ruling, all parliamentary representatives can be held accountible for any nonsense spouted by any splinter group affiliated with the party.
But just what actually amounts to unconstitutional troublemaking remains a matter of opinion. Laws concerning the protection of the constitution at both the federal and state level do not provide any basis for a rational, legally-based decision on what precisely should be considered "aims" that justify observation. Big words uttered by a few provincial radicals, is that grounds enough for spying on a party? Or should it be actively planning a revolution before the intelligence services get involved?
Last week, the BfV stuck to its assertion that parliamentarians were only observed and not, for example, wiretapped or targeted by informants. But just a few days later came the sheepish admission that "intelligence service methods" were indeed used at some regional departments of the agency, and that those findings might in fact end up in files kept by the federal-level BfV.
The agency's file on Gregor Gysi, parliamentary group leader for the Left Party, for example, weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages and clearly amounts to more than a harmless set of press clippings. The Federal Interior Ministry issued a 41-page statement justifying the decision not to allow Gysi himself to read the entirety of this tome. "Pages 18 to 24 concern documents obtained through intelligence service methods and submitted to the BfV," the statement reads. The omission of pages 12 to 14 of the Gysi file, meanwhile, is justified with the rationale, "The need to protect sources and the assurances of confidentiality made to informants require nondisclosure." Nearly 130 pages of the file are missing on such grounds, while a further 500 pages are partially censored and approximately 200 more have been replaced.
Mundane Bits and Pieces
Why such caution, if only public sources were analyzed? The BfV justifies its censoring of passages and pages with the explanation, among others, that text underlined by its agents and comments made in the margins might make it possible for a reader to infer the "operational methods and aims of the observation."
Those parts of the files that have been released are newspaper clippings, party flyers and the like, mundane bits and pieces that look like no more than busywork invented to keep agents occupied. In the file on parliamentarian and former German Communist Party member Wolfgang Gehrcke, not even his birth date is correct.
The Left Party is accustomed to having informants in its ranks and is no stranger to intrigues. But in the past, informants were usually believed to be working on behalf of various feuding groups within the party. Now, mistrust is on the rise.
Ramelow, for example, the Left Party's parliamentary group leader for the state parliament in Thuringia, reports that an acquaintance admitted to being an informant. Michael Leutert, a Bundestag member from the state of Saxony who is likewise in the BfV's sights, says the agency tried to recruit him back in his school days. Bernd Riexinger, Left Party spokesman in the state of Baden-Württemberg, says he knows of three separate cases of people being offered money in exchange for information.
One particularly delicate case is the observation of Steffen Bockhahn, Left Party chair for the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. A leading representative of the party's pragmatic wing, Bockhahn is also a member of the parliamentary committee that audits the German intelligence agencies' budgets.
Convoluted Line of Reasoning
That he of all people would be on the BfV's list "stuns" Bockhahn, who says he is now reassessing "certain past events." In 2007, opponents of the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm convened at Bockhahn's party office in Rostock to prepare demonstrations and each time they met, they saw a white Audi drive slowly past the office several times. During one meeting, Bockhahn's cell phone rang and the screen showed the name of a fellow G-8 summit opponent -- who was at that precise moment sitting next to Bockhahn and definitely not on the phone. "The spies don't seem to have their technology under control," they joked at the time. Now, it turns out several pages are missing from the copy of Bockhahn's BfV file released, pages that cover precisely the time period when the anti-G-8 summit meetings took place at his office.
The Federal Interior Ministry has responded with a convoluted line of reasoning. If the secret list of names of people under observation had in fact been kept a secret, then Bockhahn wouldn't have known he was under observation and consequently, the ministry says, the mutual trust between the BfV and the parliamentarian charged with monitoring it would not have been disturbed.
A look at various regional states in Germany shows there's no clear policy on how to handle Bockhahn and his fellow party members. In the eastern state of Brandenburg, for example, where the Left Party is part of the governing coalition but also dogged by repeated scandals concerning party members with ties to the former East German secret police, or Stasi, there is no BfV observation of Left Party members. In Baden-Württemberg, meanwhile, where the Left Party is not represented in the state parliament and in general hardly has a public presence, the agency seems to consider the use of intelligence service methods necessary.
Bavaria's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, meanwhile, has a penchant for waiting until just prior to elections before publishing its findings on Left Party members, who see this as a tactic employed by the state's ruling parties.
The body most likely to provide a solution is the Federal Constitutional Court, whose judges are now charged with reexamining the problematic Federal Administrative Court ruling and deliberating on complaints filed by the Left Party.
All involved are desperately hoping for a clear answer to emerge from the confusion. The Federal Constitutional Court judges have promised to reach a decision this year. It is high time they did.
Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein
