The Memoir the Chancellery Would Not Allow: “Wer hat Angst vorm BND?” by Gerhard Schindler

In German. Worth knowing about even if you do not read the language — the argument is unusually relevant to anyone operating between the UK, the US and Germany.

Gerhard Schindler ran Germany's foreign intelligence service from January 2012 until June 2016, when the federal government removed him from the post. He then wrote a memoir of those years.

According to reporting by WDR, NDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in February 2020, the Federal Chancellery declined to clear it for publication in its planned form.

What was published instead, in October 2020, is this — not the account of what happened, but an argument about what the service has become. It is subtitled Eine Streitschrift: a polemic. And the constraint that produced it is the most revealing thing about it.

What the book actually covers

Schindler's central charge is contained in a single formulation: that layer upon layer of administrative regulation has turned an intelligence service into an administrative authority. Not reformed, not constrained — converted into something structurally different, whose instinct is procedural compliance rather than operational judgment.

He argues that this happened as the political answer to a question Germany has never properly debated in public: how much freedom, and how much security, does the country actually want? Rather than deciding, successive governments issued rules. The rules accumulated. The capability adapted downward to fit them.

From there he sets out what he thinks should change — the structure of counter-terrorism coordination, the federal division of responsibility, and the competences the service would need to address the threats he describes: conflict, terrorism, cyber attack, and a security environment deteriorating faster than the institutions responding to it.

The German critical reception was broadly receptive to the reform arguments while noting the obvious tension: Schindler defends the service and simultaneously demands its overhaul. One reviewer wished for more perspective beyond German borders, observing that the American security architecture offers comparisons Schindler does not draw.

Why it matters for your risk posture

Read it for the institutional reality of German security. Organizations operating in Germany frequently hold expectations formed by Anglo-American practice — about what intelligence and security bodies do, how they relate to private business, and what is realistically available in a crisis. Schindler is explaining, from the inside, why those expectations frequently do not survive contact with the German framework.

Read it for the compliance-over-capability argument, which generalizes well beyond intelligence. Any function that accumulates procedural rules faster than it revisits its purpose will eventually optimize for defensibility rather than effectiveness. Schindler is describing that pathology in a national service. Most large organizations have a smaller version of it somewhere.

And read it as a document about disclosure constraints. The book exists in this form because a former service head could not publish what he actually witnessed. That tells you something concrete about the German framework governing what former officials may say — worth understanding before commissioning work in that jurisdiction.

Key takeaways

• Procedural accumulation degrades capability quietly. Schindler's charge is that nobody decided to weaken the service; rules simply accumulated until the function changed shape.
• The unresolved policy question produces bureaucracy. Where a society will not debate the freedom-versus-security trade-off openly, rules substitute for a decision.
• German institutional practice is genuinely different. Assumptions carried over from US or UK experience will mislead you about what is available and what is permitted.
• The constraint is part of the evidence. A former intelligence chief prevented from publishing his account is itself a finding about the system he is describing.

About the author

Gerhard Schindler is a fully qualified lawyer who spent his career in German federal security. He worked for the Bundesgrenzschutz, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) — the domestic intelligence service — before becoming Ministerialdirektor responsible for public security at the Interior Ministry.

He took office as President of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany's foreign intelligence service, in January 2012. In April 2016 the federal government announced that it would replace him; he left office at the end of June 2016 and was succeeded by Bruno Kahl. The decision to replace him was the government's, taken during the parliamentary inquiry into the BND's cooperation with the NSA.

Wer hat Angst vorm BND? Warum wir mehr Mut beim Kampf gegen die Bedrohungen unseres Landes brauchen. Eine Streitschrift was published by Econ (Ullstein Buchverlage) on 12 October 2020, running to 256 pages.

Beyond the Book

Gerhard Schindler — President of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, 2012–2016

• He continued to argue the case in public. After leaving office Schindler contributed to German media and conference debate on intelligence, security architecture and threat policy — this book being the fullest statement of that argument. In November 2016 he also joined the consultancy friedrich30 (Berlin and Mainz) as a senior adviser, advising companies on security matters — a commercial position worth weighing against the book's argument for expanded intelligence powers and resources.
• The book that does not exist. His memoir of the BND years was reportedly not cleared for publication in its planned form. Anyone genuinely interested in this subject should know a fuller account was written but did not appear.
• The German-language security debate is a separate literature. For a firm advising across the UK, the US and Germany, the German-language institutional discussion is not a translation of the Anglo-American one — it proceeds from different constitutional assumptions and reaches different conclusions.
• Read alongside: the Gaycken Cyberwar volumes, covered here, for the technical and industrial side of the same German security picture — and The American Black Chamber by Herbert Yardley, for the mirror case: an intelligence official who published what his government did not want published, and the legislation that followed.