Out of Control?

The year 2006 could rightly be called the German secret service's annus horribilis. In the last 12 months, Germany's Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) has been investigated for its alleged roles in the Iraq war, extraordinary rendition and torture of terrorist suspects, and the spying on and employment of German journalists at home and abroad.

Now, one of the secret services overseers, Wolfgang Neskovic, has issued a warning that the German intelligence apparatus is out of control and that the Parliamentary Control Committee (PKG), the government body which supervises the BND, has no idea what is going on.

Neskovic said in an interview published by Der Spiegel magazine on Monday that the PKG, in its present form, should be abolished and that the nine members of the Bundestag committee do not have the faintest idea what 6,000 secret service employees actually do.

Inadequate training for PKG members

The former high court judge -- and himself one of the nine members of the committee -- told Der Spiegel that the fact that the German parliament had put the PKG in charge of controlling the intelligence services was "a joke" and "absurd." The training the committee members had in terms of learning about the secret services before taking up their posts amounted to a week-long visit to the BND headquarters in Pullach.

Neskovic was among the committee members who visited Pullach. "Since taking part in the training period, I am even more sure that we should immediately abolish the controlling committee in its current form," he said.

He also called the promotion of the PKG as a body set up to manage and moderate the secret services a "public deception…a placebo."

Neskovic demanded that specialist analysts and experienced secret service experts be assigned to assist the committee members and that the committee be given special powers to adapt into an investigating body should a scandal arise. At the moment, the committee has limited investigative authority and needs permission to publicly announce any findings.

Inquiries into Iraq, rendition involvement

The PKG has been investigating the BND as well as members of the former Social Democratic-Green party coalition government after it was revealed that German agents were involved in the early stages of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

It has since been involved in an inquiry into the abduction of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin, who claims to have been arrested as a suspected terrorist while in Macedonia in December 2003, handed over to the CIA and flown to Afghanistan where he was imprisoned, interrogated and tortured.

A similar case involving German-resident Murat Kurnaz, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, is also being investigated after Kurnaz claimed that he was tortured by German special forces in Afghanistan before being flown to Cuba.

The BND has also been linked to a media scandal since last year. It admitted recruiting journalists in high-profile news magazines, such as Focus and Der Spiegel, to spy on their colleagues so it could identify the sources of leaks, and then was accused of paying 20 overseas journalists to spy on its behalf.