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Maaßen profile: The curious case of the spy who gave too much away

For a spymaster, Hans-Georg Maaßen seemed unusually receptive to the media - while secret agents typically work in the shadows, the head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency gave more interviews than any of this predecessors.

Published: 19 September 2018 08:39 CEST

Hans-Georg Maaßen leaving the Bundestag following a meeting on September 12th. Photo: DPA

As it turned out, it was an interview with Germany's best-selling daily Bild that cost the 55-year-old his job.

But the saga doesn't end there, as Maaßen will now take up a position as state secretary in the Interior Ministry – effectively a promotion as Zeit reports that he will earn €2,580 more per month in the new job.

After anti-migrant protests rocked the eastern city of Chemnitz in late August, Merkel firmly condemned a “hunt against foreigners” backed by videos circulating on social media, but Maaßen challenged the authenticity of at least one of the videos.

For critics, Maaßen's claim played into the hands of the far-right, such as the AfD party, which immediately seized on the spy chief's assessment to blast Merkel and mainstream media for maligning it and other like-minded protesters.

As pressure mounted on him to prove the video was a fake, Maaßen denied questioning its authenticity and said his quarrel was with how the original post on Twitter had oversold it as a “hunt against people” which he thought was intended to inflame tensions.

But the uproar raised questions over Maaßen 's neutrality, particularly as he has made no secret of his opposition to Merkel's liberal refugee policy that has allowed in more than a million asylum seekers since 2015.

It also made him a hero of right-wing extremists claiming Maaßen was a maverick with the courage to criticize Merkel, now in her 13th year as chancellor.

Legal expertise

Married to a linguist from Japan, Maaßen was born in Mönchengladbach, in North Rhine-Westphalia, close to the Dutch border.

The man with the round gold-rim glasses who favours three-piece suits is a trained lawyer who wrote a thesis on “the legal status of the asylum seeker in international law”.

He was heading the interior ministry's counter-terrorism team when the US was ready to free Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and German resident, from Guantanamo Bay after finding that accusations against him were groundless.

Berlin was reluctant to take Kurnaz back, and Maaßen at the time found the legal justification to bolster Germany's case as he argued successfully that the Turkish man had lost his residency rights because he had been away for more than six months from Germany – although this was due to Kurnaz's imprisonment.

Maaßen took over in 2012 as chief of Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BvF) in the aftermath of a devastating neo-Nazi cell scandal.

The agency's reputation was in tatters after it was revealed it shredded files related to suspects in the NSU (National Socialist Underground) cell that carried out a series of racist murders.

Maaßen said he felt like the “city building director of Cologne after World War II” as he took the helm.

Over the last six years, Maaßen turned the agency back into a respectable intelligence institution that politicians and the media turn to for assessments on risks for Germany.

With an eye on the Islamist threat, he viewed skeptically Merkel's decision in 2015 to keep Germany's borders open to asylum seekers.

He had warned as early as September 2015 that Islamists may recruit asylum seekers under the cover of providing humanitarian assistance.

But he came under intense pressure following a terror attack at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016 when Tunisian failed asylum applicant Anis Amri rammed a truck into crowds.

According to media reports, Maaßen wrongly claimed his service had no agent in Amri's circles, even though it had a source at a mosque the Tunisian frequented.

Contacts with the AfD

But it is his handling of the far-right AfD party that has proved most controversial.

Despite repeated calls for the BfV to formally place the AfD under surveillance, Maaßen has refused to do so.

A former AfD member has also accused him of having met repeatedly with the party's leaders to give advice on how to avoid being placed under surveillance – an allegation Maaßen and the far-right group have denied.

AfD leader Alexander Gauland told journalists this week he had three conversations with Maaßen about “overall security evaluations”. Maaßen did not give him advice, he added.

On Thursday,an AfD MP revealed that Maaßen gave him unpublished official data. The BfV rejected the claim.

For critics, the allegations made Maaßen 's position untenable.

Heribert Prantl of the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung noted that “among the worst things that can happen to a top domestic intelligence officer is for him to be accused of sympathy for a far-right party”.

New position

Despite the controversy, Maaßen has in fact landed on his feet. In a statement released late on Tuesday, the German government wrote: “The Office of the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution will be re-filled.

“In future Mr. Maaßen will become a state secretary in the Interior Ministry. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has high regard for Mr. Maaßen's abilities on questions of domestic security, but he will not be responsible for the BfV within the ministry.”

There has already been some criticizm over the move by commentators who have questioned how Maaßen has been given this job despite the reservations over his behaviour.

However, it remains to be seen if Maaßen will continue to face intense scrutiny – and who will fill his shoes as top spy.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.