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Day: November 27, 2023
The Russian war against Ukraine “also means a turning point for internal security,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in June 2023, warning of a new wave of disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and espionage by foreign intelligence services.
At the beginning of August, there was another case in point: Thomas H.* was arrested Wednesday (August 9) in the western city of Koblenz, when the federal prosecutor’s office accused the Bundeswehr officer of having betrayed information about military details to Russian intelligence.
The Berlin daily Tagesspiegel reported that Thomas H. had already come to the attention of his colleagues because of his sympathy for the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD). Some parts of the party is considered far-right extremist and very critical of the NATO alliance’s attempts to help Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Carsten L.
At the end of 2022, a similar case made headlines. Carsten L., head of a unit of Germany’s foreign intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), where he was responsible for “personnel security,” was accused of working as a double agent for the Russian secret service FSB and of having betrayed state secrets.
According to media reports, the FSB is said to have been particularly interested in data on air defense positions supplied to Ukraine by Western states. However, it is unclear whether Carsten L. had access to this information. He was arrested on December 21, 2022, and is being tried for treason along with a suspected accomplice.
Mr & Mrs Anschlag
But it is not only since the Russian invasion of Ukraine that spies in Germany have been reporting to Moscow. Beginning sometime in the 1980s, two Russian agents led a middle-class life under the names of Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag, he posing as an engineer, she as a housewife.
They spied on NATO and the European Union first for the Soviet Union, then for the Russian secret service, receiving their orders via encrypted radio messages on shortwave, at a time when espionage was not yet a predominantly digital business. It was not until 2011 that their cover was blown — probably thanks to a tip-off from US intelligence services. In 2013, they were sentenced to several years in prison and eventually deported to Russia.
Gabriele Gast
The communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) referred to their agents as “scouts of peace.” An estimated 12,000 of them are believed to have been deployed by the East German secret service, the Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi, to West Germany during the Cold War.
Among them was Gabriele Gast, a West German who was recruited by a Stasi officer in 1968 while on a research trip to East Germany for her dissertation entitled: “The Political Role of Women in the GDR.” From then on, Gast reported to the intelligence service in East Germany — while also making a career for herself at the Western intelligence service BND under a false name. She was only exposed after the collapse of the GDR in 1989, shortly before the reunification of Germany. She is still considered to have been one of the GDR’s top spies in the West.
Gabriele Gast was one of the GDR’s most high profile spies (photo from 1995)Image: Michael Jung/dpa/picture alliance
Alfred Spuhler
Alfred Spuhler may have been a similarly good source for the Stasi. As a high-ranking BND official, he unmasked hundreds of Western agents working in the GDR. He was arrested in November 1989.
Heinz Felfe
Heinz Felfe, the longtime head of the BND’s “Counterintelligence Soviet Union” unit, was also a double agent. He was a member of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s police unit, Schutzstaffel (SS), then reported to the KGB in Moscow until 1961. Over the years, Felfe is believed to have worked for seven different intelligence services, including the British MI6.
Günter Guillaume
Probably the most sensational espionage case from the Cold War period in Germany is that of Günter Guillaume.
Posing as refugees from East Germany, he and his wife Christel came to West Germany in 1956. Their mission was to provide the Stasi with internal information about the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Guillaume worked his way up, eventually becoming personal advisor to Chancellor Willy Brandt when the SPD came to power.
When Guillaume’s cover was blown, Brandt was forced to resign as chancellor on May 6, 1974. Guillaume was sentenced to 13 years in prison and his wife to eight years. Both were released in 1981 in exchange for West German agents.
Günter Guillaume (r.) was the assistant of Chancellor Willy Brandt (l.)Image: picture-alliance / akg-images
Elli Barczatis and Karl Laurenz
A particularly large number of Stasi spies were exposed after the fall of the Wall. Not much is known about Western agents in the GDR, with the notable exception of Elli Barczatis and Karl Laurenz, who smuggled GDR documents to the West at the beginning of the Cold War in the early 1950s.
Barczatis worked as chief secretary to GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl. She obtained rather banal government papers that she passed to her lover Karl Laurenz, who handed them over to West German authorities. When this was discovered, both Barczatis and Laurenz were sentenced to death in East Germany and executed by guillotine in 1955.
This article was originally written in German.
*Editor’s note: DW follows the German press code, which stresses the importance of protecting the privacy of suspected criminals or victims and urges us to refrain from revealing full names in such cases.
While you’re here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
One of the most prevalent issues with coverage of the current war between Israel and Hamas is the spread of inaccurate reporting and misinformation.
As was seen with the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion and other similar instances, inaccurate reports help to fuel a narrative that whitewashes Hamas’ terrorist actions while simultaneously condemning Israel for acts that it did not commit. This false narrative then takes off on social media and quickly becomes an accepted fact for many people.
Two instances of seemingly inaccurate reporting that have spread in both the mainstream media and online are the reports that the IDF Spokesperson announced that Israeli strikes against Hamas would emphasize “damage and not accuracy,” and the claim that some of those killed at the Nova music festival were killed by an Israeli military helicopter and not by Hamas terrorists.
Both of these claims were initially reported in the Israeli daily, Haaretz.
“Damage and Not Accuracy”
On October 10, three days after the horrific Hamas terror attack in Israel’s south, the Haaretz daily blog reported a number of statements made that morning by the IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, in a briefing to military reporters. One of these statements attributed to the spokesperson was that, for the IDF, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
From an analysis of the text of Rear Admiral Hagari’s statement that morning, it appears that this is not an exact quote but a paraphrasing of his words.
The actual quote is “between accuracy and the scale of damage, right now we are busy with what generates maximum damage” (emphasis added). It was said in the context of the spokesperson’s remarks on Israel’s bombardment of Hamas targets in Gaza and the armaments that Israel had at its disposal to complete this task.
The statement was made during the initial stage of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas for its brutal slaughter on October 7 and was not a declaration of how Israel would conduct itself throughout the war.
Despite the nuanced context of the statement, the Haaretz paraphrasing was soon picked up by a variety of international media organizations and has been used to support incorrect observations about Israel’s conduct in this war.
On that same day, Haaretz’s English website featured a report that quoted the Gaza Health Ministry’s accusation that Israel was conducting indiscriminate bombing in Gaza. The report continued in the next paragraph, “On Tuesday morning, the IDF reported having dropped hundreds of tons of bombs in attacks on the Strip and said that ‘the emphasis is on damage, not precision.’”
This leaves the reader with the incorrect impression that the Hamas-run Ministry’s accusation is in line with the IDF’s stated method of warfare.
Also on October 10, The Guardian reported that “Speaking on Tuesday morning, IDF spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari made the startling admission that ‘hundreds of tons of bombs’ had already been dropped on the tiny strip, adding that ‘the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.’”
Here too, the underlying message appears to be that Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza in its fight against Hamas.
Israel military spokesman Daniel Hagari said that the army drops hundreds of tons of bombs in attacks in the Gaza Strip, and —— “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
— Haaretz
Via @MacaesBruno pic.twitter.com/YCGi0igHIb
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 10, 2023
One month later, in his column for The Washington Post, Ishaan Tharoor claimed that the IDF’s assertion that it tries to avoid civilian casualties and is only focused on military targets is at odds with Rear Admiral Hagari’s earlier statement “that the ’emphasis’ of the IDF’s reprisal was ‘on damage and not on accuracy.’”
Only by dissecting the original quote from its proper context could this assertion appear to have any validity.
This decontextualized paraphrasing of the IDF Spokesperson’s comments on October 10 has also been used by Vox and Al Jazeera to insinuate that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza might be tantamount to genocide (an absurd and dangerous allegation).
Aside from the mainstream media, this paraphrasing of the spokesperson’s original comment has also made its way onto social media, where it is used as a cudgel by opponents of Israel to delegitimize the Jewish state’s fight against Hamas.
Despite the fact that the IDF Spokesperson’s comments on the morning of October 10 were poorly paraphrased in the initial Haaretz report and Israeli officials have continually asserted that Israel does not target civilians, this modified quote has continuously appeared out of context in both the mainstream media and online as a means of questioning the morality of Israel’s military strategy and disqualifying its legitimate war against Hamas.
Related Reading: Israel, Hamas & International Law: A Guide
The Israeli Helicopter at the Nova Festival
On November 18, Haaretz published a piece by Josh Breiner on the ongoing investigation into the atrocities of October 7, including the massacre at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im.
As part of his report, Breiner wrote that “According to a police source, the investigation also indicates that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.”
This one sentence then became the basis for an article by Business Insider, which was subsequently promoted by Yahoo News.
.@BusinessInsider has responded to our complaint by adding an editor’s note that an Israel Police statement has been added to the story, which it attributes to @haaretzcom.
That’s not good enough. Bottom line: it’s still an inaccurate and damaging story. https://t.co/ZLzfEqSY3Y
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 21, 2023
The claim that some of the casualties at the Nova festival had been killed by Israel was also picked up by anti-Israel news outlets such as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Press TV, the Hamas-affiliated Quds News Network, and Electronic Intifada.
Then, this story was further blown out of proportion on social media by those seeking to absolve Hamas of its crimes by claiming that the deaths at the festival were largely the result of indiscriminate fire by the IDF and not Hamas terrorists.
This story even went so far that the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement blaming the IDF for the entire Nova massacre and a representative of Hamas claimed on Sky News Australia that “Israeli jets” killed “1,400 people” at the music festival.
Israel’s Haaretz reports that an Israeli official investigation concluded that an Israeli military helicopter killed revellers at the Nova rave on 7 October and that Hamas fighters did not know about the festival.#Israel started its offensive on #Gaza, killing over 11,000… pic.twitter.com/wDH7GFkhB0
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) November 18, 2023
In response to this false narrative, the Israel Police released a statement in response to the original Haaretz article wherein it clarified that “Contrary to the publication, the police investigation does not refer to the activity of the IDF forces, and therefore no indication was given of any harm to civilians caused by any aerial activity at the site.”
Despite the fact that the Israel Police has disavowed it, an unverified claim made by an anonymous source in a Haaretz article is enough for many to whitewash Hamas’ crimes while directly implicating Israel in a massacre of its own citizens.
Liked this article? Follow HonestReporting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to see even more posts and videos debunking news bias and smears, as well as other content explaining what’s really going on in Israel and the region.
Photo Credit: Chaim Goldberg via Flash90
The Palestinian Authority denied in an official statement on Sunday that Hamas terrorists carried out the massacre at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7. The statement, sent to foreign ministries worldwide and the UN, claimed that “Israeli helicopters” caused the deaths of at least 350 participants at the party. Hamas joined in a statement as well, saying that an “Israeli fighter jet” bombed the area near the Gaza border, leading to the deaths of hundreds.
Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas backed their claims through a “police investigation published in Israeli media,” After Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported that, according to a police source, the investigation into the incident allegedly indicated that an IDF helicopter fired at terrorists in the area and likely hit some of the Israelis who were there. However, contrary to the Palestinian claims, Haaretz did not state that all casualties were a result of an “Israeli bombing,” only a few individuals.
According to the Palestinian Foreign Ministry’s statement, “The Israel Police’s preliminary investigation proved that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli citizens who participated in the music festival on October 7, meaning that Israeli fighter jets caused extensive destruction in the area.”
“Following this event, the ‘Hannibal Protocol’ was activated, allowing the occupation’s police and military to kill everyone. Therefore, the ministry believes that the revelations of this investigation cast doubt on the Israeli reports regarding the destruction and killings that occurred in the area,” the statement added.
According to the police’s investigation into the massacre, the first Israeli helicopter reached the compound only at 11:12 a.m., hours after the massacre began. The police also addressed the publications in Haaretz and said: “The preliminary investigation focused on the bravery of the policemen who operated on the scene and the functioning of the Israeli police to stop the massacre carried out by Hamas.”
“Contrary to the publication, the police investigation does not refer to the activity of IDF forces and does not provide any indication of civilian casualties as a result of Israeli aerial operations in the area. At this time, we specifically call on the media to take responsibility in their reporting and rely only on official sources,” the statement added.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to Abbas’ words, saying, “Today, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah said something utterly preposterous. It denied that it was Hamas that carried out the horrible massacre at the nature festival near Gaza. It actually accused Israel of carrying out that massacre. This is a complete reversal of truth.”
Netanyahu added, “Abbas, who in the past has denied the existence of the Holocaust, today is denying the existence of the Hamas massacre and that’s unacceptable.”
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said that he “joins Prime Minister Netanyahu’s harsh condemnation of the Palestinian Foreign Ministry’s abhorrent and false statement. Anyone who denies the massacre makes himself an accomplice to the most terrible crime against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
The Palestinian Authority removed from its official website the false statement it published Sunday, which said that the massacre at the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7 was caused by “an Israeli helicopter attack.” However, the PA did not publish a public announcement correcting the false claims, which caused significant damage to Israeli propaganda around the world.
Although no public announcement was made on behalf of the Palestinians, the U.S. National Security Council spokesman said that the PA has since clarified that this is not its official position – and even removed the document in question from the PA’s official website.
Statement issued by the Palestinian Authority denying Hamas responsibility for massacre at Re’im music festival on October 7
This is a statement “that does not respect the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives in the horrific terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on October 7,” the spokesman said. He added that “we understand that the Palestinian Authority has removed the statement from its website, and we are happy that they have since clarified that this is not their official position.”
On Sunday, Hamas rushed to join the PA’s claim, and distributed the document in which it denied the massacre to various parties in the world, including foreign ministries and the United Nations. The PA Foreign Ministry’s announcement stated that: “The Israel Police’s preliminary investigation proved that Israeli helicopters bombed Israeli citizens who participated in the music festival on October 7, meaning that Israeli fighter jets caused extensive destruction in the area.
“Following this event, the ‘Hannibal Protocol’ was activated, allowing the occupation’s police and military to kill everyone. Therefore, the ministry believes that the revelations of this investigation cast doubt on the Israeli reports regarding the destruction and killings that occurred in the area,” the statement added.
The Palestinian Authority’s statement relied on the “police investigation published in the Hebrew media” after Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported that, according to a police source, the investigation into the incident allegedly indicated that an IDF helicopter fired at terrorists in the area and likely hit some of the Israelis who were there. However, contrary to the Palestinian claims, Haaretz did not state that all casualties were a result of an “Israeli bombing,” only a few individuals.
According to the police investigation , the first helicopter was launched into the compound only at 11:12 – many hours after the massacre began.
On November 21, Tether published a new blog post detailing how it has collaborated with the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) to assist in freezing tethers tied to alleged crimes.
The post also details how it has “recently onboarded the United States Secret Service into its platform and will be working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do the same.”
Paolo Ardoino, who is the chief executive officer at Tether, chief technology officer of Bitfinex, and chief strategy officer at Keet, stated that “Tether remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting law enforcement efforts and aiding victims in their recovery. We condemn the misuse of USDT or any cryptocurrency for illicit purposes and are fully committed to collaborating with global law enforcement agencies.”
Read more: Tether says it makes money but can’t ditch loans
Tether is just one of the firms the US law enforcement apparatus has peered into recently, with Binance agreeing to an independent monitor as part of its deal with the DoJ.
Additionally, despite Tether’s condemnation of the “misuse of USDT,” Sam Bankman-Fried, the former owner of one of Tether’s largest clients, Alameda Research, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering.
Protos has reached out to Tether to clarify what types of information will be shared with the Secret Service and the FBI as part of their onboarding to this platform and will update if we hear back.
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