At the height of the Cold War, it was Britain that appeared to be infested with Russian spies and moles. From the 1950s to the 1980s a series of security scandals, from the defections to Moscow of the Cambridge spies Burgess, Maclean and Philby, to the exposure of the Queen’s art advisor Anthony Blunt as a Soviet mole, made Britain in the eyes of her allies the weakest link in confronting Communist Russia.
Today, with a real war involving Russia raging in Ukraine, that dubious ‘honour’ belongs to Germany. The Daily Telegraph has named a man arrested in December on suspicion of supplying secrets to Moscow as Carsten Linke, a 52-year-old ex-soldier turned a top official in the BND, Germany’s equivalent of our foreign intelligence service MI6.
Linke’s technical expertise lay in signals intelligence or ‘sigint’ – and he is alleged to have had access to top secret data on the Ukraine conflict and passed on what he knew to his Russian handlers, meaning that information gleaned by the West on Putin’s invasion has been compromised.
Germany’s embarrassment at the scandal is compounded by the fact that Linke seemed to have been spotted not by Berlin’s own counter-intelligence spooks, but by its allies who realised from analysing data that there must have been a mole at work inside the BND and tipped them off accordingly.
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