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[infowar.de] The New Yorker: Germany's troubled war on terrorism
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
-------------------------------------------------------------
Ein sehr amerikanischer Artikel =FCber "Unzul=E4nglichkeiten" in Deutschla=
nd im "war on
terror" inklusive Beschwerde =FCber den deutschen Datenschutz.
MH
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020211fa_FACT
{PRIVATE "TYPE=3DPICT;ALT=3D"}
PRIVATE LIVES
by JANE KRAMER
Germany's troubled war on terrorism.
Issue of 2002-02-11
Posted 2002-02-04
"Terror" isn't a simple word in Germany, and this winter, when I started t=
rying
to make sense of the arguments I'd heard in Berlin nearly every day since
September 11th=94arguments about whether it was racist to let policemen
question Arab students or immoral to send support troops to Afghanistan=94=
I
was often referred to a large and, by the looks of it, abandoned construct=
ion
site on Niederkirchnerstrasse, in Kreuzberg, the neighborhood where more
than half of the capital's two hundred thousand Muslims live. All you can
really see there are a couple of concrete stair and elevator cores that we=
nt up
in 1998, just before work stopped on Topography of Terror, an archive and
exhibition center planned for the site (and a building so dauntingly minim=
alist
in design that no contractor could promise to bring it in on budget and, a=
t the
same time, guarantee that it would not fall down), and a row of stalls tha=
t have
served as a temporary exhibit of that topography for the past four years. =
The
exhibit is small, but there is nothing small about the curator's project, =
which is
to recast the accepted "history of the perpetrators"=94the history of the
F=FChrers=94to include the ordinary men and women who went to the office
every day on Niederkirchnerstrasse, back when the street was called Prinz-
Albrecht-Strasse and the empty site was part of a vast complex that was
headquarters to the Gestapo, the S.S., and the state-security police.
A few old Berliners still refer to the area as 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, t=
he
official address and, you could say, reception hall of Nazi state surveill=
ance,
and, of course, tourists know it by the name of the exhibit there now. But=
if
you ask a Berlin cop or, for that matter, an intelligence agent trying to =
come to
terms with the evidence that Al Qaeda terrorists are still "sleeping"
comfortably in German cities, including possibly his own, he will call it =
"the
reason," and sometimes even "the good reason," those sleepers are around,
because it holds the memory of a scrutiny so chilling that today's Germans=
go
to great lengths to protect themselves from the policemen and "intelligenc=
e
connections" (the official euphemism for spies) they hire to protect them =
from
one another. In western Germany, where some eighty per cent of the
population lives, the right to nearly absolute civil and personal privacy
amounts to a state theology, part of the canon of the Good German, along w=
ith
the "right" not to fight, even in a just cause, and the "right" not to
acknowledge that by September 11th the "lessons of German history" had
become a trope that could be put to shrewd political uses.
Within a few days of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentago=
n,
most Germans knew that at least three of the nineteen terrorists suspected=
of
having hijacked the planes had been living in Hamburg=94including the
Egyptian student Mohamed Atta, who is said to have masterminded the
attacks. Within a few weeks, they knew that Osama bin Laden's German
network had probably included as many as seventy other sleepers spread
across most of the big cities of western Germany, and that one hijacker ha=
d
even been traced to a town in eastern Germany, a part of the country not
known for extending hospitality or, for that matter, much in the way of sa=
fety
to strangers. Within a few months, they learned that, in the fall of 2000,=
their
national intelligence service had asked the agents at Hamburg's state serv=
ice to
put a watch on the apartment where Atta and another man on the suicide
mission lived. The request had been either ignored or refused. But what no=
one knows, even now, is the extent to which the gaps in German
security=94which were no greater than our own, merely different, as custom=
and law were different=94were a matter of indifference or turf or sloppy
intelligence or a weakness in the law or, simply, a reluctance of spies an=
d
policemen to be seen behaving like spies and policemen, and a reluctance o=
f
politicians to be accused of Gestapo tactics or Stasi tactics or (if they =
were
from eastern Germany and had been Stasi) of American or "Zionist" tactics.=
Power in Germany is still so cautiously divided that you would have to put=
most of the country's police and domestic-intelligence services together t=
o
arrive at anything analogous in its Draconian scope to the F.B.I., and on
September 11th none of those services had much access to the other's data,=
or
even to the warnings about a new generation of Islamic terrorists that Ger=
man
field agents claim to have been sending home from the Middle East for at
least ten years.
Since the Second World War, the most revered word in western Germany has
been "transparency," and it is used today to mean that the workings of the=
unified, democratic German state are going to be as transparent as the new=
glass dome that lets daylight into the Reichstag's parliamentary chamber. =
The
kinds of deals that politicians in other countries negotiate with the door=
s
closed are public here. This was something that rattled the Americans who
began to arrive in Berlin in mid-September to work out what both countries=
called the "details of our co=F6peration"=94co=F6peration meaning some agr=
eement
as to what Chancellor Gerhard Schr=F6der's "unconditional support" for
America's war on terror really meant when it came to extraditing suspects =
or
accessing bank accounts or trading state secrets. If the Germans found the=
Americans' demands insufferably high-handed, and many Germans did, the
Americans who came to "co=F6perate" learned in very short order that
Germany's famous transparency had produced a rhetoric that was insufferabl=
y
high-minded. And it wasn't just the Americans who got impatient. Europeans=
who came to discuss some sort of consistent and enforceable European Union=
counterterrorism policy were fascinated, exasperated, and occasionally eve=
n
moved by the earnest discussions of right and wrong, good and evil, that
seemed to pass for German crisis management. It was a nearly impossible
project anyway, given the wildly varying definitions of civil liberty in
Europe=94not to mention the antagonisms between Europol, Interpol, and the=
intelligence services of fifteen different countries whose responses to
September 11th have run a gamut from Britain's going to war to Belgium's
refusing to release evidence to the F.B.I. But it's safe to say that most =
of those
Europeans flew home grateful for their own closed doors.
By mid-November, when the government here nearly fell, over the morality
(or immorality) of sending soldiers to Afghanistan, the French government
had managed to avoid the war, and no one seemed to have noticed. Germany's=
police were still under attack because of the three Hamburg sleepers, but =
the
British had long since buried the news that eleven September 11th terroris=
ts
had entered America from their country, where the only thing known about
most of them was how effectively they had been able to disappear.
In a way, Germany's problem was simply a more "transparent" version of
every other country's problem: how to respond to extraordinary times.
Germany has a huge body of data-protection laws=94by far the strictest of =
any
E.U. country=94and a network of dataprotection agencies whose job it is to=
insure that, however transparent the state is to its citizens, the private=
lives of
those citizens remain opaque. And in ordinary times they do, because data
protection is part of the postwar political culture, as much a legacy of 8=
Prinz-
Albrecht-Strasse as the fact that hate speech is illegal, or, you could sa=
y, that
freedom of speech is limited. (The tapes and literature that are the stock=
-in-
trade of Germany's neo-Nazi skinheads come, inevitably, from America,
proving the obvious point that one man's democracy can be another man's
nightmare.) But the result has been that cells like Mohamed
Atta's=94collections of legal residents, sometime students, and visiting
"businessmen," whose rights to privacy are the same as the rights of Germa=
n
citizens=94in no way constituted the kinds of groups that, on September 11=
th,
could legally be infiltrated, investigated, and shut down. Everyone involv=
ed in
the Al Qaeda investigation has had, in some way, to accept this. August
Hanning, the head of Germany's foreign-intelligence agency=94 it's called =
the
Bundesnachrichtendienst, or the B.N.D.=94joked about the situation to me b=
y
saying that there were a lot more clauses in the agency's bylaws about the=
information you had to protect than there were about the information you
could use.
In late September, Otto Schily=94the Interior Minister, and as such the ma=
n
directly responsible for the government's domestic-intelligence service, t=
he
Bundesamt f=FCr Verfassungsschutz, and its criminal police, the
Bundeskriminalamt, or the B.K.A.=94issued proposals for the first of two n=
ew
packages of laws that would ostensibly cover the eccentric exigencies of
German security in an Al Qaeda world. The proposals were culled from what
one reporter called the "wishing wells" of police chiefs and spymasters st=
ung
by the fact that so many people seemed to be blaming them for what had
happened to New York. But they were actually fairly tame when you
compared them with the security laws already on the books in much of
Western Europe, and certainly with the laws that John Ashcroft was
contemplating for the United States. In the event, the three months of deb=
ate
that followed were hardly tame. No one doubted that Germany had to find a
way to identify and prosecute terrorists, but some people=94most notably
among the Greens in Schr=F6der's "red-green" coalition=94argued as if the =
choice
for Germany had come down to Osama bin Laden or Heinrich Himmler. It
was nearly Christmas before the Bundestag finally passed the second of the=
new security packages, and by then they were considerably milder than they=
'd
been in the original drafts. The government called them "balanced," and in=
a
way they were, since the concessions granted to the Interior Ministry (say=
, the
right to include some sort of biometric data in passports and identity car=
ds)
had been pretty much countered by the demands of the Justice Ministry (non=
e
of that data would be entered into a central data bank).
Schily told me over a drink the night the first package passed that, to hi=
s mind,
the problem was never the details=94fingerprinting, screening visas, redef=
ining
the "reasonable" in reasonable suspicion, expanding data banks for
policemen=94so much as it was getting Germans to accept that "we are not t=
he
same place we were at the beginning of the First World War." His critics (=
who
referred to the new laws as the Otto Catalogue, after Germany's thickest m=
ail-
order catalogue) prefer to say that it was Schily himself who was moving
backward, because Schily had begun his career as a left-wing civil-rights
lawyer. Thirty years ago, he was famous as the leading defense counsel at =
the
first of the Baader-Meinhof trials. He eventually entered Parliament as a
Green deputy, and his old friends feel doubly betrayed now that he is a So=
cial
Democratic Interior Minister, running the country's criminal police and
drafting anti-terrorist laws that touch on their liberties as citizens.
But the truth is that some of the most important politicians in Germany to=
day
share something of Schily's history, and Germans expect them to. A radical=
youth is part of the bildungsroman of a liberal German political life, and=
the
list of men and women who enjoyed one is long, starting with the Chancello=
r,
who cut his political teeth as a student protester, and then as a lawyer
representing, among others, a convicted terrorist who wanted to get out of=
prison, and to keep his own license to practice law when he did. (The terr=
orist
has since been born again as the =E9minence grise of the National Democrat=
ic
Party, or the N.P.D., a barely disguised neo-Nazi party that Schr=F6der's
government is working hard to ban.) Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister
and arguably the country's reigning statesman, is so popular because of hi=
s
radical past that last year, when old photographs of him punching a cop at=
a
squatters' riot surfaced, no one outside the far right even suggested that=
he'd
suffer in the polls. In fact, it was probably more damaging to Fischer's
reputation that he started arguing last fall for the wisdom of a German mi=
litary
"contribution" to the American war on terror. The feeling among many of hi=
s
admirers was either that Germany shouldn't have an army at all or that its=
Army could lend "support" but should actually enter Afghanistan only for
"peacekeeping," leaving the war, and the blood, on American and British
hands.
The reality is that there was never a question of Germans being sent to fi=
ght.
The Americans didn't ask, and Germany didn't have the fighter planes or mu=
ch
in the way of specialized troops to offer, since, with a few exceptions,
Germany has what Heiner Wegesin, who runs the Verfassungsschutz in
Brandenburg, described to me as a "state-of-the-art nineteen-sixties army.=
"
Never mind that the Bundestag finally got in line behind Schr=F6der and hi=
s
Foreign Minister and voted to contribute thirty-nine hundred
troops=94including a hundred special forces, a medical corps, and a naval =
task
force=94some air transport, and a small fleet of chemical-sniffing Fuchs t=
anks
to the Afghan war. No ground troops left Germany until the new government
had been installed in Kabul and the U.N. peacekeeping force established, a=
nd
no one had really expected that they would.
In a way, all the arguments about sending troops and passing security laws=
were simply Germany doing what it does best, having an identity crisis. Bu=
t
September 11th was different from the other crises of the past ten
years=94which involved committing peacekeeping troops to Bosnia, East
Timor, Kosovo, and, most recently, Macedonia, in what were the first
deployments of German soldiers since the Second World War=94because it
represented not just keeping the peace but acknowledging the option of
fighting to make peace, even if it wasn't a question of Germans fighting.
Sometimes, after a day of talking to politicians, I'd decide that the only=
accurate description of Germany's particular war on terror was the French
poster hanging on the wall of the Paris Bar, the place to which fashionabl=
e
Berlin politicians, including Schily, often repair after the same kind of =
day. It's
a poster of a blonde in a gas mask, perched on a toilet with her red panti=
es
down around her ankles, and it reads, "Dans la temp=EAte du d=E9sert, la p=
rudence
s'impose partout" ("In a desert storm, you have to be careful everywhere")=
.
The intelligence business in late-twentieth-century Germany began as an
owned-and-operated superpower Cold War business that, for all the obvious
reasons, happened to be based here, and it didn't really inconvenience the=
Germans, since whatever was illegal within the borders of West
Germany=94wiretapping, for one thing, wasn't permitted in homes and privat=
e
offices until the late nineties=94the Allies were happy to supply. West
Germany's job was to watch East Germany, and, once the two Germanys
united, the Verfassungsschutz was left with a very limited mandate to
"observe," but not to police or pursue, publicly identified terrorist grou=
ps, a
job it did largely by doing what anyone who had a mind to could do: readin=
g
the German papers and infiltrating skinhead concerts and counting heads at=
meetings of right-wing parties on the edge of legality, like the N.P.D. No=
body
thought much about reading Muslim papers or going to Muslim meetings,
though Germany had nearly as big a Muslim population as France and more
than twice Britain's. Three and a half million was the accepted count, and=
that
didn't include illegal immigrants, or the thousands of people who arrived
yearly from all over the Islamic world, applying for refugee status under =
what
is certainly the world's most welcoming political-asylum policy. (More tha=
n
twenty-five thousand Afghans have entered Germany in the five years since
the Taliban seized power; about a thousand have entered France.)
More than three-quarters of Germany's Muslim residents were Turks, the
children and grandchildren of Turkish Gastarbeiter who were recruited in t=
he
sixties and seventies to provide the unskilled labor for West Germany's
"economic miracle," and stayed. They were not citizens by birth, had almos=
t
no hope of becoming citizens, and, in the main, kept out of the kinds of
trouble that could get them sent "home" to villages few of them had ever s=
een.
In fact, the Turks were regarded as a comically conservative
population=94good people, calm people, hardworking law-and-order people
who were grateful to be in Germany. And they were certainly not extremists=
,
unless you counted, say, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which ran protectio=
n
rackets focussed mainly on other Turkish Kurds; or the "Caliph of Cologne,=
" a
self-styled Islamic nationalist and convicted criminal named Metin Kaplan,=
who declared a Muslim state in what most people think of as the Rhineland;=
or the large and publicly respectable Islamic Federation, which provided c=
over
for a fanatical fundamentalist group called Milli G=F6r=FCs, and is now su=
pplying
the teachers who, by a court decision in Berlin last year, are permitted t=
o teach
the Koran in the public schools of Germany's restored capital.
On September 11th, it was still illegal for the police to shut down the
"religious charities" or mosque societies that were not doing anything
dangerous in Germany but were publicly raising money for terrorist groups
abroad=94including, in the middle of Berlin, a Hamas charity with at least=
fifty
members and a Hezbollah charity with more than a hundred and fifty.
Germans have been understandably proud of their tolerance of foreigners (i=
f
not of the citizenship laws that effectively kept those foreigners "foreig=
n"),
and it was considered bad politics to suggest that Germany was buying the
enviable safety within its borders by providing a safe haven for the kind =
of
fanatics who don't think twice about the safety of other people, even,
demonstrably, other Muslims. By now, the list of North African and Middle
Eastern extremist groups in Germany is so long that when a friend at the
B.N.D. ran through it for me I lost count somewhere around fourteen.
The fact is that Germany's best laws, like any democracy's best laws, prot=
ect
its worst people, and one reason Germans do not have foreign terrorism in
their cities is that the terrorists passing through on their student visas=
and
business visas have not been willing to risk that protection by blowing up=
something here. There has been an illusion of safety in Germany=94safety f=
or
sleepers, safety for policemen, safety for the politicians=94and September=
shattered that illusion. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is Schr=F6der's chie=
f of
chancellery and, by all accounts, one of the most powerful people in his
Cabinet, told me that in the past the B.N.D. had had no official assignmen=
t to
investigate militant Islam, and maybe as a result no one had really known =
how
militant Islam in Germany was. He said, dryly, "Perhaps it is a special fe=
ature
of German 'transparency' that there is no real, open relation with our Mus=
lim
communities, especially in Berlin. The fact is that there is integration o=
nly to a
small extent."
This was, if anything, an understatement. Most Berliners I know refer to
Afghans as Arabs. In East Berlin, where twelve years ago the only immigran=
ts
in evidence were a couple of thousand North Vietnamese workers housed in
freezing, dilapidated barracks, there is no integration at all, or, you co=
uld say,
no immigrants. Even today, the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berli=
n,
has more skinheads with police records than it has Muslim asylum seekers=94=
six hundred skins, four hundred asylum seekers. And one of the reasons tha=
t
Imams from the Islamic Federation won the right to teach the Koran in the
city's public schools may be that so few accredited German-speaking teache=
rs
could. Robert von Rimscha, who runs the national political desk at the
Tagesspiegel, thinks that the wall of silence between Germany's Christian =
and
Muslim worlds dates from November 9, 1989, the day the real Wall fell,
because that was when Germany stopped taking a lot of serious things
seriously. Not just militant fundamentalism but things connected to milita=
nt
fundamentalism, like the proliferation of nuclear or biological weapons in=
the
Muslim world. "Germany felt peaceful and secure," he told me. "It was the
end of history. We didn't feel the obligation to monitor. We didn't have
embassy bombings. We didn't have the U.S.S. Cole. Why turn ourselves into =
a
target?"
Transparency does not necessarily make citizens smarter or politicians mor=
e
sensitive. People at the B.N.D. complain that for years there was no inter=
est at
home in the kind of intelligence they were gathering about the connections=
between criminal networks and terrorist networks, or, more precisely, betw=
een
the practical clandestine life of one terrorist and the traffic in weapons=
,
technology, drugs, illegal immigrants, laundered money, and protection on
which his life depends. It has been four years now since a Paris magistrat=
e
named Jean-Louis Brugi=E8re ended an eight-year trek through the muck of h=
is
own country's diplomatic courtesies and the French learned that one
Samsonite suitcase containing one bomb, smuggled onto a plane carrying
nearly two hundred passengers, could easily involve the handiwork of terro=
r
specialists in half a dozen countries. But four years have not done much t=
o
persuade anyone's secret services to pool their information. On the eve of=
the
euro, with hundreds of Al Qaeda suspects in Western Europe and almost no
solid evidence on which to arrest most of them, Germany's spies were
grumbling less about the data-protection laws than about protecting the da=
ta
they had=94from everybody else's spies, from their own police. And the tru=
th is
that some cops here were so unequipped for the job at hand that it passed =
for
normal when, as the Wall Street Journal reported, a B.K.A. policeman,
staking out the Hamburg apartment of a Syrian "import-export" man assumed
to have been bin Laden's local banker, had to ask a reporter waiting on th=
e
street if he knew how to get hold of the Syrian's cell-phone number. (He w=
as,
in fact, startled to learn that the reporter already had it.)
The B.N.D. was especially worried about leaks. One agent told me, "Some of=
our best sources were compromised the minute they became 'visible' to the
police." This, of course, left a pool of informers exposed, and confirmed =
the
agent's opinion that the criminal police were a leaky outfit, that they di=
dn't
have the discipline of good spies and couldn't be trusted with the kind of=
intelligence that might be traced to an operative working deep cover in th=
e
Middle East. On the other hand, he allowed that not many sleepers were lik=
ely
to be caught in Germany until the police and the secret services got more
access to each other's data, and the legal means to compare it. The proble=
m, he
said, wasn't so much the legacy of 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. (The B.K.A. h=
as
no authority to gather intelligence or run undercover cops or mount a stin=
g, or
even to initiate an investigation, without a court order, but no one I tal=
ked to
suggested giving the police more power, including most of the policemen.) =
As
he saw it, the problem was the reluctance of cops and spies to test what a=
ccess
they already had by picking up the phone and asking for something. He told=
me, by way of an explanation, about the courts rejecting a B.K.A. request =
to
investigate one suspected terrorist on the ground that its evidence had be=
en
obtained illegally, through a source in the B.N.D. This had happened a yea=
r
ago, but he hadn't forgotten. The real legacy may be that, by now, no one =
in
Germany is as anxious about breaking laws as the men and women who are
supposed to enforce them.
Spies obviously have much broader powers than policemen; they have the
special license that comes with clandestinity=94which is to say, with not =
being
accountable. But Germany's spies have been hamstrung since the Wall fell,
not so much by transparency as by neglect. Their budget was cut, and then,=
with Schr=F6der's election, in 1998, they lost their recruiting office and=
found
themselves left with a lot of fancy technology but no real money to hire a=
nd
train agents in the languages and complicated cultures of the Middle East.=
The
result was that Germany came to depend on its allies for field
intelligence=94on Britain and America and, most of all, Israel, which argu=
ably
fields more agents and informers in the Muslim world than any other countr=
y
and has the advantage, in the Mossad, of a dependably "leakproof" secret
service. There were, of course, thousands of East German spies available a=
fter
1989=94more than ninety thousand unemployed Stasi, not to mention the thre=
e
hundred thousand informers responsible for filling some eighty-eight milli=
on
pages of microfilmed reports. But East Germans were never really an option=
.
The decision was made early on to avoid what one agent described to me as
"the secret-service mind-set of the East," by which he meant that you coul=
dn't
be sure whose interests a spy from the East, dropped into a Muslim country=
,
would be pursuing, and you certainly couldn't be sure that he'd pursue the=
m
with anything like reliability or discretion or enthusiasm for Germany's
foreign policy, especially when it had to do with supporting America. Even=
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, at the Chancellery, mentioned that the "remnants =
of
resentment" in Germany's eastern states were strong. He said that if I loo=
ked
to East Germany for the kind of co=F6peration that came from "gratitude to=
the
United States, the perception of responsibility toward the United States,"=
I was
going to be disappointed.
When we talked, the old East German Communist Party=94the Party of
Democratic Socialism now=94had just won nearly fifty per cent of the votes=
in
the east of Berlin in the local elections, making the Communists the third=
-
largest party in Germany's new capital and, as it turns out, a partner in =
the
coalition that could easily be in power for the next five years. No one ha=
d
expected this to happen. Berliners in the west had taken it on faith that =
the
Party was dying. But, once it did happen, everyone knew why: it wasn't the=
unemployment in East Berlin, or the hard times, or even the endemic
corruption of the Christian Democrats who had run Berlin before; it was
Gerhard Schr=F6der, who had promised George W. Bush his "unconditional
support."
Hansj=F6rg Geiger, the West German jurist who oversaw the opening of the
Stasi archives and went on to head the Verfassungsschutz and the B.N.D., i=
s
now the state secretary running the Justice Ministry and, since September
11th, has been its liaison to Schr=F6der's anti-terrorism task force. He t=
hinks that
the "problem of political culture" was also a West German problem, given t=
he
awkwardness, for Germany's leaders, of having had to respond to terrorism
alerts coming in from agents in countries with which German industry was
doing a vigorous business in products most kindly described as "dual-use
chemicals." It's been reported that eighty, or even ninety, per cent of th=
e
technology and the ingredients for Iraq's chemical-weapons industry came
from West Germany and that, even after the Gulf War, sales continued to th=
e
Middle East. People at the B.N.D. told me that, if September 11th has had =
any
lasting effect in Germany, it was to persuade a political class still cele=
brating
the demise of the old enemy that it had new enemies, some of whom it had
helped maintain, and that it might even be dangerous=94dangerous to
Germans=94to keep welcoming those enemies into Germany's tolerant cities
with the same indifferent hypocrisy it had shown when they ordered
Germany's pesticides and fertilizers.
In a country still so nervous about displays of power that it is considere=
d
unseemly even to talk about turning Berlin's Philharmonic into a national
orchestra, it isn't surprising that most of the people charged with identi=
fying,
investigating, arresting, and prosecuting terrorists don't usually get any=
where
near the capital, or even anywhere near one another. Germany has as many
spies and cops as the next country. Eight thousand people are attached to =
the
Verfassungsschutz and the B.N.D., five thousand to the B.K.A. But the old
Allied imperative of 1949=94power in Germany must never again be
centralized=94still holds. The Verfassungsschutz is headquartered in Colog=
ne;
the B.N.D. in Pullach, about half an hour from Munich; the Federal
Prosecutor in Karlsruhe; the B.K.A. in Wiesbaden; and the state security
offices of the B.K.A. in a town called Meckenheim, in North Rhine-
Westphalia, which most Germans have yet to locate on a map.
Some of the men and women who run those agencies claim never to have met
before the attacks last year. After September 11th, they were meeting dail=
y,
along with the chief of military intelligence; Schily's state secretary an=
d his
counterpart, Hansj=F6rg Geiger; Frank-Walter Steinmeier (who as chief of
chancellery oversees the B.N.D.); and a former head of the Hamburg
Verfassungsschutz named Ernst Uhrlau, who is Schr=F6der's federal-security=
co=F6rdinator. Now they are down to once a week at the Chancellery, and th=
e
logistics of these meetings have, you could say, "centralized" intelligenc=
e in
Gerhard Schr=F6der's office, an irony not lost on the various chiefs of se=
rvice
who make the trip and often complain that in a "normal" country, with fede=
ral
agencies situated in the capital, they would be having lunch or sharing a =
late-
night drink and even sharing some of the useful information that is not li=
kely
to get passed along in a phone call or an interoffice E-mail. They say the=
y
might all profit from a little informal co=F6peration, if for no other rea=
son than
that so much of what a spy or a policeman does is not necessarily convenie=
nt
for a German Chancellor to hear.
It all depends on what you mean by transparency. Steinmeier, who seems lik=
e
a man of steely platitudes until you type your notes and realize how much =
he's
said, saw me after one of those weekly meetings. According to his press
secretary (a young Protestant theologian with whom I had an agreeable
argument on the nature of evil), our interview was part of an effort to ma=
ke
Germany's support for America transparent, though Steinmeier himself
allowed that America was not really very transparent to him. He had recent=
ly
had a meeting with Daniel Coats, the new, and ardently Christian, United
States Ambassador, and came away feeling that, while the Ambassador was
very nice, it was remarkable that "we are of such a different mentality." =
At the
time, it was rumored that the one real sticking point between the police a=
nd
the intelligence services of the two countries was banking. Germany can
freeze assets=94it has frozen more than two hundred accounts since
September=94but the law makes it nearly impossible to document, let alone
trace, the kinds of banking transactions that might open a paper trail thr=
ough
the terror network. In fact, there is no central data base in which the na=
mes
and numbers of private or corporate accounts in Germany are registered,
though this has less to do with the data-protection laws than with the
reluctance of Germany's big businessmen (and political patrons) to apply a=
little transparency to their own banking practices, or to have their asset=
s traced
to Switzerland, next door.
The F.B.I. agents who arrived in September are still digging, and they are=
reportedly still complaining more about banking secrecy than about any of =
the
other obstacles to what is publicly described as a dandy relationship with=
their
German counterparts=94who are now convinced that, because of this, the F.B=
.I.
is keeping information from them. "The Germans are getting little intellig=
ence
from the Americans for one reason=94because they are giving little" is how=
a
reporter I know put it. But, in fact, the German banking system is so arch=
aic
that no one besides the bankers has that intelligence to give. Banking was=
only
minimally covered in Schily's anti-terrorism packages, and foreign police =
are
astounded to learn that a German policeman or intelligence agent trying to=
trace money or identify a suspect's accounts still has to submit a request=
to
every one of the country's three thousand banks=94a procedure that is unli=
kely
to inspire much efficiency, let alone much interest, in your average
investigator. A lawyer who covers money-laundering issues for the
Association of German Banks told me that, with four hundred million bank
accounts in the country, there was simply no available technology for
constructing a central computerized data base, but his argument=94which is=
the
argument of most German bankers=94seems a little ingenuous in a world wher=
e
computers are tracking the universe and describing the human genome.
On the other hand, the police point out that the kind of banking that terr=
orists
are likely to do is more in the spirit of "underground banking," or, as it=
's
sometimes called, "corner-store banking": the guy with the corner store in=
Jidda or Oran gets the money from someone there and then calls his cousin
with the corner store in Hamburg or Frankfurt, who advances the money to t=
he
terrorist and eventually gets it back, in one way or another, from the guy=
at
home. It's a system based on family and clan and mosque connections, and i=
t
proves, if nothing else, that the cell phone and the Internet caf=E9 will =
take a
terrorist only so far in the global village=94because the real global vill=
age is the
village that, in the end, will hold you, or your cousin, accountable if yo=
ur
debt's not paid.
And it's certainly not a system that lends itself to the kind of computer
profiling known to Germans as Rasterfahndung, which was resurrected last
fall, some twenty-five years after it was used in a not very effective att=
empt to
profile left-wing German terrorists, was contested by German liberals, and=
inspired the data-protection legislation that effectively banned it. Schil=
y, who
at the time was a furious critic of data profiling, says he has since deci=
ded that
"if there's a dead man on the sidewalk, and witnesses say that the murdere=
r
was very tall, with blue eyes, dark hair, and a big nose, you expect the p=
olice
to look for a person with blue eyes, dark hair, and a big nose," and you d=
on't
think Germans are demonizing tall, dark, blue-eyed people with big noses.
But a lot of Germans do think it. The Raster profile of a likely Al Qaeda
sleeper is a Muslim male between eighteen and forty. He carries a passport=
from one of the Arab states, enters the country on a student visa, enrolls=
in a
college, probably a technical college, and does well, though not well enou=
gh
to risk being singled out. At one time or another, he finds a job at an ai=
rport or
a utility company=94someplace "useful." He crosses on green and pays his b=
ills
in cash and his taxes on time=94even his yearly radio and television tax, =
which
no self-respecting German student would ever think of paying=94and he alwa=
ys
pitches in when the neighbors hold a block party or need someone to knock =
on
doors collecting money, the way they are doing now for the families of
Germans who died in New York in September.
Peter-Michael Haeberer, who runs the Berlin police, has been testing that
profile against a narrowing list of suspects. I was told that he'd started=
with
two hundred and ninety possible Berlin sleepers, but he was certainly almo=
st
through it when the city=94under pressure because of a complaint filed by =
three
Muslim students=94called a halt to Raster profiling late last month. He ha=
s also
been trying to get some sense of what, to his mind, are the city's most li=
kely
targets. He suspects that they aren't its buildings. "There's nothing as d=
ramatic
or symbolic as the World Trade Center in Berlin" is Haeberer's view. In fa=
ct,
he has come to believe that the likeliest targets are places like the wate=
rworks,
which filter water to the city center through a complicated system of open=
canals, or the electricity board, which turns out to be the only source of=
power
for the entire eastern half of the city, or any other utility that might i=
nterest a
young man with a working knowledge of airports or waterworks or electricit=
y
boards, and the freedom that comes from living in a country that, on
September 11th, was still coming to terms with the topography of its own
terror. {PRIVATE "TYPE=3DPICT;ALT=3D"}
--
Marcus Heitmann
European Institute for IT-Security (EURUBITS)
Ruhr-University Bochum
IC 4/44
Universitaetsstrasse 150
44780 Bochum
Germany
Tel +49 (0)234 - 32 - 261 82
Fax +49 (0)234 - 32 -143 89
Mob +49 (0)175 - 520 605 9
PGP-Key http://www.eurubits.de/keys
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