The news that an employee of the German internal security services, the equivalent of Britain’s National Crime Agency, has partially confessed to involvement in a Jihad plot to attack the German internal security agency is appalling. It should worry not just the German people, who now know that those charged with monitoring jihadists in the country have been compromised, but should also be a matter of concern for those foreign intelligence agencies that share data with the Germans.

A Muslim employee of the internal security agency, a German who had secretly converted to Islam, was brought in to monitor jihadists but it seems it did not take him long before he was plotting against his own employers and the German nation. It makes me wonder just how many other similar jihadi sleeper cells might be operating in Germany’s police, military and intelligence communities?

Here’s an excerpt from a Brietbart article on this latest attempt to attack the German state by Islamists.

Brietbart said:

An officer in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has been arrested over fears he may have been involved in plotting a terrorist attack on the agency.

The arrest of the 51-year-old officer who works for the domestic security agency — equivalent to the FBI — comes after he made a “partial confession” to fellow agents that he was not just observing the radical Islamist scene in Germany, but had also become a part of it, Der Spiegel reports.

The revelation has stoked new fears that Islamists may have infiltrated the spy agency which German Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently said the German government would drastically expand in the coming year.

According to the confession, he was plotting to bomb the national headquarters of the agency which is located in Cologne.

A spokesman for the BfV said, “He is accused of making Islamist remarks online under a false name, and offering internal information during chats.”

The man had been at the agency for several months starting in April of this year, and was hired to monitor the radical Islamist scene but admitted he had joined the agency in order to infiltrate it and gather information.

Included in the logs of his chats were messages in which he talked to fellow radical Islamists, and tried to recruit them into the domestic spy agency to facilitate attacks against people they referred to as “non believers.”

A former bank clerk, the man was unknown to the agency until he joined, and even his wife was unaware that he had secretly converted to Islam.

His conversion was made via phone call and he pledged an oath to a Salafist Imam named Mohamed Mahmoud who previously preached in Berlin before travelling to Syria to fight for the Islamic state.

The BfV noted that he was “inconspicuous” during his application and all through his training. The agency did note the man’s attention to secrecy as they discovered multiple storage devices which outlined internal operations, assignments and deployments during the course of their investigation.

The spy was finally caught after trying to recruit who he thought was a fellow Islamist into the agency on the internet, but turned out to be a fellow agent at the BfV.

It’s a terrible failure of the vetting process to allow a staff member, who had only been with the agency for a short time access to sensitive information, especially to data about German national security. Because of the particular area he was recruited to work in, that of monitoring Islamic extremists, much more care should have been taken at both the hiring and the training stage. It may be that I’m just overly cautious and suspicious, but if I was in a position of authority, the noted attempt to remain inconspicuous all the way through training would have made me look a little closer at this person. I might have thought in this situation: ‘what is this man trying to hide’?

I don’t know much about the internal processes of vetting staff in Germany’s security services, but I do wonder whether it is as thorough as the UK’s ‘Developed Vetting’ (DV) system. This, as you can see from the example blank form here, is extremely tough and goes into an enormous amount of detail about the person being vetted, their families, their financial and medical situation and their personal contacts.

This breach of security will and should have serious consequences both internally and externally. Internally, the German government needs to beef up the process of checking and rechecking employees, especially new employees and maybe should restrict new staff to areas where they do not have access to sensitive data, until their reliability has been proven. Externally, this may well cause the security agencies of other Western nations to be more wary of sharing sensitive information with the German government at a time when sharing information between security agencies on the subject of Islamic terror is vital.

This individual, although he hasn’t carried out or been part of any plots that are at an advanced stage, has by his actions already damaged the image and reputation of the German internal security agency. He’s made the agency look suspect and incompetent in an area where trust, competence, reputation and confidence is highly important, Who now will trust the German government with their data? I know that if I was a senior employee of a security agency outside Germany, I would think twice about what would happen to any security data supplied to the German government.

It’s bad enough having the enemy inside our gates it’s even worse to have the enemy inside those security agencies that are tasked with protecting German citizens.

Link

Original Brietbart story on the terrible security breach in Germany’s

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/11/29/german-domestic-intelligence-officer-arrested-plotting-islamic-terror-attack/