Germany's Foreign Intelligence Service: Discretion in Theory

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service employs highly qualified people to obtain information others would rather keep to themselves. That its handling of its own secrets is now under investigation has a certain institutional elegance. It is like a fire brigade discovering that the station has had no smoke alarms for years.

Picture the internal meeting at which someone has to explain that confidential documents may not have been handled confidentially enough. Naturally, it will be followed by a strictly confidential report on who would have been responsible for the confidentiality. Classified, of course. Properly, this time.

German thoroughness does not stop just because it is the one being investigated. It simply opens a new folder.

Whether the allegations are true is for a court to decide, not this column. But one question can be asked now: if a suspicion went unnoticed inside the building for 16 years, how good is the intelligence the agency carries in its very name?