Just about every single major news network in Germany has a six-line story posted over the past five days over a 'spy' situation in Germany.
The basic facts? The guy in question is 50 years old, and is a German-Afghan. It's not clear if he arrived here in the past five years (during the open-door asylum period) or in the past twenty years. The guy holds two passports.....two citizenships. This has been a German national policy and generally accepted as 'legit'. Most felt that it was a way to help the immigrants stay in touch with their past life and social culture.
So this guy has been a employee of the German Army, as a translator. Remember, the Germans have troops in Afghanistan. In this process of employment, they apparently granted him a security clearance, and he apparently sat in classified presentations and read through classified traffic.
The accusation here (by a federal prosecutor) is that he passed info (not to Afghanistan, as you might suspect), to Iran. The same accusation says that he was key player in the Iranian intelligence system.
The type of info passed? Unknown.
Some suggestions by the news media (Spiegel says this)....is that the info passed on was about the German troop presence in Afghanistan. What he might have known? Troop numbers, deficiencies, politicians coming to visit, etc.
The negativity in this story? Well, it'll center on the dual-citizenship concept and whether it's wise or not. How many dual-citizens work within the German government, or hold security clearances? Unknown. It might be ten, a hundred, or perhaps even a thousand.
If the guy is prosecuted...is it a problem on prison time? Some bureaucrat will have to sit down and assemble a listing of what the guy knows and recommend to the judge when they reach the guilty point....how you hold the guy in confinement, and whether he can be trusted in the prison environment.
A big story? No. This is a page six type story, and you won't hear much about this....other than his court business in four to six months.
No comments:
Post a Comment