Adequate control of secret services is not possible. But in democracy, it should be open to discussing maximum inadequate control, says Christian Bommarius. The fire can only be extinguished by water, but irrigation will not cool it. A triangle can be converted into a square, but not into a square triangle. This essentially says everything about the relationship between secret services and democracy.
Biotop service, their natural habitat, is darkness. Their work – discovering and covering secrets – is best done where no one can see it, in secret. This makes them not only deformed phenomena within the democratic system, but also the antithesis of democracy. Democracy is progressing on what would give the secret services a deadly blow – light, transparency and control.
The call for effective democratic control of secret services is therefore as realistic as the vision of a meat-eating vegetarian. Nothing is more obvious than the demand to shut down secret services for democratic hygiene reasons.
But even that requirement, although convincing, is hopeless. Intelligence agencies existed before states existed. To this day, regardless of the form of government, there is a tacit agreement that – in addition to state power, people and territory – the state intelligence service is considered an indispensable proof of sovereign statehood.
Secret services between light and darkness
On the one hand, there is a belief in the necessity of secret services, and on the other hand – the impossibility of their effective control. Since democracies do not want to give up spies and eavesdrops, nor their controls, their secret services naturally exist where light and darkness meet – in double light.
Equally natural and continuous is the attempt to remove them from that light. Just as parliamentarians, appointed to supervise the executive power, tirelessly try to examine the intelligence services as thoroughly as possible, so the services themselves – like their colleague Mole – tend to the known darkness. Regardless of which venture succeeds in one case or another, the end result is usually the most reliable companion of all secret services – a scandal.
Federal Intelligence (BND) has felt this, not in the least in recent years. At its 109th session yesterday, the Bundestag Investigative Committee tried to investigate the cooperation of the German foreign intelligence service with the US in the war in Iraq. The only thing that can be said with certainty about the question of whether BND agents – contrary to official instructions – transmitted ‘wartime relevant’ information, i.e. important goals for American bombers, is that this is likely to remain unsolved even after 109 more session.
This also refers to the question of what and how much the intelligence service and the German government knew about the operations of the US intelligence agency CIA against terrorism suspects – among them the German-Turkish Murat Kurnaz – who were deported from various countries to the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The discovery of BND’s 2005 journalist spying may therefore be considered a triumph of the Enlightenment. But not long after, the BND managed to prove the futility of the investigation. Although the report confirmed all the charges, and the agency subsequently banned its 6,000 employees tracking journalists, an email exchange from Spiegel’s journalist with the Afghan economy minister was spied.
Failed reforms and illusion of surveillance
Even more numerous than the BND scandal in recent years have been numerous attempts to finally improve parliamentary oversight. Although there is a committee for parliamentary oversight, made up of members of parliament who make fair but unsuccessful efforts to oversee German intelligence services, their struggle often seems like shadow boxing.
They swore to the strictest secrecy – they were not even allowed to inform the leaders of their parliamentary groups. If they want to know something, they depend on the information given to them by the federal government or the head of the secret service, or they simply have to read the newspaper to reveal the details of the next scandal.
Nothing would be more logical than improving surveillance by appointing an intelligence commissioner, equipped with qualified personnel, who would continuously monitor the work of the secret services. This idea has already been proposed by different parliamentary groups – the SPD back in 1996, the Greens in 2002, and the CDU in 2008. However, paradoxically, the SPD recently opposed that idea.
