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When a Secret Service chief is fired, honesty tends to fall by the wayside. Instead of stating clearly that the senior official or his agency have not discovered terrorist attacks or hunted down right-wing extremists, phrases are used. Rather than objective criticism or half-honest testimony, the victim prefers poisoned praise.
So it was on Thursday afternoon. It was a good hour since the news of the removal of Christof Gramm as president of the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) by Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, when his ministry sent out a press release. It said that Gramm had accomplished much in reforming the troubled military intelligence service. But now is the time to start over, everyone agrees on that.
Gramm himself was not surprised by his resignation. At the latest, when Kramp-Karrenbauer spontaneously invited himself to MAD’s headquarters in Cologne in the middle of the week, the Gramm, not naïve, suspected that his time as head of MAD was over. In recent months, he had often contemplated a withdrawal of his own free will. Now the boss made the decision for him.
There are many reasons for Gramm’s resignation, even if most of them have little to do with him. The MAD, the smallest of the three German secret services, simply couldn’t get out of the negative headlines in recent months. Generally speaking, the head of the ministry no longer trusted Gramm to properly configure the MAD for the efficient search for right-wing extremist soldiers in the Bundeswehr.
There were many scandals. Just two years after the Gramm started in 2015, far-right Lieutenant Franco A., who had acquired a second identity as a Syrian refugee during his military service, was discovered. For MAD the disclosure was a shock, because A. had never been noticed by the service before, no one had reported him and his colleagues. In fact, the MAD had no idea, the worst case for all intelligence chiefs.
Gramm cheated with his troop of agents to the end
The misery continued. Journalists often uncover details about right-wing extremist soldiers and their networks in the Bundeswehr faster than MAD. When, in the end, overly exaggerated reports surfaced about a supposed shadow army of Bundeswehr soldiers allegedly planning a violent overthrow of the government, the MAD, and with it Gramm, he finally went on the defensive.
Even under former Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, the service that included grams was more tied to the ministry because of the Franco A case. In von der Leyen, suspicion had grown that the many former MAD soldiers were too lenient with far-right comrades of the troops. Von der Leyen ordered the MAD to cooperate more closely with the civil protection of the Constitution, which should control the MAD.
MAD’s reputation has never been good. For years, the secret service, with its more than 1,000 employees, considered its most important task to be “avoiding bad news about the Bundeswehr rather than exposing far-right structures,” says a senior general mockingly. Gramm, the now-ousted president, also cheated to the end with his troop of agents, whom he could never really trust.
But this year it got worse. It emerged that, despite all their comments on cooperation, Gramm agents had not informed the constitutional civil protection of an upcoming raid on a right-wing extremist elite fighter from the Special Forces Command (KSK), during which was discovered a huge arsenal. Then DER SPIEGEL revealed that a high-ranking MAD investigator had transmitted secret investigative material to the main suspect’s comrades.
The focus is now on the minister
Gramm, a discreet officer out of a picture book, seemed overwhelmed. He regularly had to report to Secretary of State Gerd Hoofe and then to the secret service control committee. For a man like Gramm, who had worked legal matters at the Department of Defense for years, appearances were a horror. For a Secret Service chief, he probably lacked the toughness, but also the callousness that is needed in the tough service industry.
In recent months he has become increasingly lonely because of the grams. He himself thought about a voluntary retirement, as he noticed that both the secretary of state and the head of the ministry’s legal department were no longer behind him. Last week, he is said to have offered his retirement semi-officially for the first time. A few days later, the minister contacted Gramm and announced her spontaneous visit to Cologne.
For Kramp-Karrenbauer, castling on top of the MAD is risky, and the ministry is already talking about the minister’s first pawn sacrifice. Since taking office, Kramp-Karrenbauer has been energetic in the fight against right-wing extremists. However, after Gramm’s replacement, the focus is now more than ever on herself. Ads like the “iron broom” you want to sweep with sound good. But now it will be compared with specific results.
The first important question is who will you occupy the MAD position with. Almost none of the ministry officials want to go to the military intelligence service. MAD’s work has been considered a professional killer and an ousted seat not only since Gramm’s resignation. However, the minister must find a suitable person who is familiar with the issue of right-wing extremism and who he can trust one hundred percent. She doesn’t have much time for that.
