A drone loaded with explosives came down near a Ukrainian Antonov An-124 cargo plane at Leipzig/Halle Airport this month. It fired nothing and killed no one. But for a country whose intelligence services were built, deliberately, to watch and warn rather than to strike back, it exposed exactly the gap Berlin is now racing to close.
Germany Faces New Threats
The German cabinet approved draft legislation on August 12 giving the foreign intelligence service, the BND, and the domestic security agency, the BfV, wider powers to collect data, use artificial intelligence, access communications and disrupt hostile operations. Reuters reported that Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the measures would “revolutionise Germany’s security architecture” and turn the agencies into “genuine secret services.” DW reported that Dobrindt called the Leipzig/Halle drone incident “a professional hybrid threat scenario” and “a new level of danger.”
The phrase “genuine secret services” matters in a country where intelligence agencies have spent eighty years defined by restraint. Since the Second World War, German law, political culture and institutional memory have kept coercive action tightly separated from intelligence work. Agencies were meant to observe, assess and warn. Sabotage, cyberattacks, espionage and drone incidents that officials and Western services increasingly link to Russia have exposed how much can slip through the space between police authority, intelligence warning and military expertise. Germany has also been moving to expand drone-defence powers for police. This bill addresses the next layer: hostile networks, cyber systems and supply chains before an attack ever reaches German soil.
From Watching to Acting
The statutory mechanisms are the clearest sign of how far the shift goes. The reform would allow the services, under legal thresholds, to interfere with attackers’ infrastructure, hack into hostile IT systems, copy or delete operational data, and disable tools used in foreign-state cyber campaigns. The Guardian reported that the draft also includes options such as altering weapons-production instructions or rendering arms harmless during manufacture, which amounts to covert action against an adversary’s supply chain rather than counterintelligence after the fact.
The powers stop well short of a German CIA paramilitary branch or a license for unrestrained force abroad. They are narrower and legally bounded: digital and technical disruption meant to break attack chains before drones, cyber tools or sabotage teams reach their targets. Reuters reported that Nina Warken, Federal Minister for Special Affairs and head of the Chancellery, warned Germany faces a “real, very acute” danger from hybrid attacks and can no longer simply rely on allied services for its own security. The logic is straightforward: Berlin wants to depend less on partners and be able to impose costs itself.
Lessons From Kyiv
The choice of who leads the BND says as much as the law does. Martin Jäger, now the agency’s president, served as Germany’s ambassador in Kyiv through Russia’s full-scale invasion. The German federal government confirmed that Jäger took up the post on September 15, 2025, following prior postings that included Afghanistan and Iraq.
That posting shaped how he sees the threat. Russia’s FSB, heir to the KGB’s decades of institutional experience in sabotage, disinformation and deniable operations, has shown Germany the operational face of modern conflict: sabotage, drones, cyber operations, assassinations, disinformation and agents working below the threshold of open war with NATO.
Ukraine’s own services offer Berlin a different kind of lesson, one European agencies are finding harder to ignore. L’Express surveyed sixty intelligence professionals across 25 countries in July 2026 and ranked Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU, and the military intelligence directorate, the GUR, fourth in Europe, ahead of Germany’s BND. One European intelligence officer quoted in the ranking compared the Ukrainian services to Mossad, citing the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, the long-range drone strikes on Russian strategic bombers known as Operation Spiderweb, and the assassinations of senior Russian officers. Ukrainian responsibility for the Nord Stream attack has never been established in court, though journalist Bojan Pancevski’s book on the pipeline sabotage argues Kyiv’s services carried it out, and L’Express noted the same reporting traces part of Ukrainian intelligence culture to institutional habits inherited from the Soviet period.
Germany is not copying the GUR’s model directly, nor could its legal culture allow a simple imitation of a wartime service that continues to strike refineries deep inside Russia and run a maritime shadow campaign built on domestically produced weapons rather than NATO supply lines. But the lesson has landed. The Guardian quoted Jäger saying Germany must show adversaries “that we’re in a position to do similar things so the other side also feels the pain” – unusually blunt language for a German intelligence chief, and a direct descendant of Olaf Scholz’s 2022 Zeitenwende speech, when Berlin first accepted that Russia’s invasion had forced a turning point in European security policy. Scholz named that rupture. Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU–SPD government is now writing it into law.
Guarding Against Overreach
The bill still has to clear parliament, and its domestic-side provisions will face real scrutiny. That scrutiny is not a flaw in the process, it is the process. In Germany, intelligence power without legal control is not treated as a technical oversight, it is treated as a constitutional fear.
At the centre of the debate sits the Trennungsgebot, the postwar principle separating intelligence collection from police enforcement. Giving the BfV wider powers to access devices, collect data and conduct active disruption tests that boundary directly, and invites scrutiny under Federal Constitutional Court jurisprudence on surveillance and proportionality. The draft answers by centralising oversight under the Independent Control Council, the Unabhängiger Kontrollrat, which already supervises parts of BND signals intelligence; Reuters reported the new law would create more detailed legal bases for cyber investigations and expand that body’s supervision. Green politician Konstantin von Notz has backed stronger BND powers while warning that expanded domestic powers raise rule-of-law concerns, a position civil-liberties groups are likely to echo through the parliamentary debate.
Germany is trying to build services that can act before a drone reaches a runway, before a factory line is sabotaged, before a cyberattack cascades through a power grid, without becoming the kind of state its postwar constitution was written to prevent. That balance is the whole of the wager. Eighty years after choosing restraint as its answer to catastrophe, Germany is now betting that restraint alone is no longer enough to keep its people safe.
