Bureaucracy at work

"Only 10 percent of all information procured from confidential informants is really stunning," said a former employee with the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's internal security agency, who worked for many years at the middle-management level. He asked that he not be named. Even after his time in active service, he is bound to secrecy surrounding his work.

But in light of recent public criticism that has labeled the agency a "troop of idiots" that naively trusted right-wing radical sources, many government agents want to speak their minds and vent their frustrations. Interviews with several former and current employees reveal alarming details.

Politics put on the pressure

After the right-wing extremist actions such as the arson attacks against foreigners in several German cities at the start of the 1990s, the agency was required to monitor right-wing extremism.

"The hunger for confidential informants was so great that we were on the verge of just looking people up in the phonebook," said one former security agent who was responsible for finding informants in the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), as well as independent right-wing radicals.

Back then, and later as well, the agency wasn't paying much attention to the quality of the informants, he said, because the pressure to recruit was too great. Even today, right-wing radicals are relatively easy to find. In comparison to left-wing radicals, they were less intelligent and closer to the state, and thus not entirely "set in their ways," the agent said. Since many right-wing radicals were involved in small-time criminal acts, they could easily be pressured to cooperate with security agents in exchange for lighter prosecution. At times, a third of the NPD leadership was cooperating with the agency.

Lack of high-level informants

In order to obtain actionable intelligence in advance of right-wing radical crimes, staff require plenty of experience in dealing with informants, said all sources interviewed for this story. Yet they all agreed that the security agency no longer has enough staff with the adequate practical experience. There had been a wave of retirements and positions had been left unfilled.

In addition digitalization had not necessarily made things more efficient.

"Before, they used to take out a folder from the drawers and they could quickly compare intelligence from informants with other statements from a variety of sources," said one security agent. Today, he said, after all the passwords and complicated data linking, one needs five times as long to do the same thing, and intelligence reviews and cross-checks often never happen.

The effectiveness of intelligence analysis had also suffered from several reorganizations and the resulting "overblown policy department." In this policy department, administrative lawyers often had the final say when assigning tasks to the various other departments.

"They hide cautiously behind their policies and end up being more burdensome than useful," one retired agent said.

The situation in the secret service agencies of other European countries is different. There are often more police specialists and psychologists employed, and they are not constantly changing positions because of promotions.

"The efficiency of the work with confidential informants in recent years has gone down a good 70 percent," said one former security agent.

Lack of cooperation

A lot of good intelligence from informants falls between the cracks between police and security agents. Under German law, the two authorities must remain separate in order to avoid the formation of a central investigating agency like the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. This is why the work of the federal security agency and the activities of the police were split and spread across Germany's 16 federal states. The security agency only observes radical activities and may not intervene, whereas the police investigate after crimes have taken place and bring the culprits to punishment.

Inadequate cooperation between the security agencies and the police is the central problem, inside sources said. That is why many dismissed the consolidation of state security offices that is now being discussed in Berlin as pointless politicking. Security agencies point to successes in Denmark, where the police and security agencies are under the same roof. France, too, has no such separation between security agencies and police.

Informants are still vital

Critics of the security agency argue that, if all of these problems make work with informants so difficult, and 90 percent of the gathered intelligence is ultimately useless, one could completely abandon working with informants all together. Indeed, no intelligence from informants was involved in the recent discovery of the string of neo-Nazi murders.

However the security agents interviewed argued that the informants could not simply be abandoned. Informal extremist organizations such as the so-called "Freie Kameradschaften" or "Free comradeships groups" and their sympathizers is becoming increasingly important, they said.

"You can only get at them through informants," one agent said.

In the end, not all intelligence is useless. In the case of left-wing radicalism, it was only informants who betrayed the last generation of activists in the "Red Army Faction," and ultimately put an end to the movement.

In addition, paid informants are much cheaper than months-long telephone eavesdropping operations, which can quickly reach six figures in cost. The sums paid out to informants, rumored to reach several hundred thousand euros, are categorically denied by security agents. "That is all absolute nonsense," one said.

An average payment to an informant would be between 300 and 500 euros, they said. And many informants give their tips for nothing because they are so keen to get out of the structures.

What security agency staff have to say will become increasingly important as politicians begin to deal in the coming weeks with the potential ban on the far-right NPD.

Author: Wolfgang Dick / acb
Editor: Michael Lawton