German triple agent started spying for US and Russia because he felt ‘under-appreciated’
A former German intelligence employee has said he started spying for the US and Russia because he felt under-appreciated and not sufficiently challenged in his job.
Triple agent Markus Reichel, 32, was on Thursday sentenced to eight years in prison for passing on more than 200 secret documents to the CIA, as well as trying to hand over three documents to Russian intelligence.
Reichel had been employed in the administration department of Germany’s federal intelligence service (BND) in Pullach between 2008 and July 2014, where he had worked in the post room.
Reichel told a court in Munich: “No one trusted me with anything at the BND. At the CIA it was different. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t like that.”
Judge Reinhold Bayer questioned Reichel’s motivation, saying that the fact that he had been paid a total of €90,000 euros suggested a financial motive. Before gaining a job at the BND, he had been unemployed for several years.
Reichel copied sensitive documents at work, smuggled them home and then sent them to contacts at the CIA. Payments were handed over at face-to-face meetings with agents in Austria and via secret postboxes.
The CIA had shown a particular interest in the activities of the German parliamentary committee investigating the NSA spying scandal and the government’s view of the conflict in Syria.
The triple agent blew his cover in May 2014, when he offered his services to the Russian consulate in Munich via email, attaching three secret documents to prove his authenticity.
The scandal surfaced two months later, unsettling US-German relations already under strain from the revelation that America’s NSA had tapped the mobile phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Bayer said Reichel had “seriously disturbed the BND’s activity”, destabilising cooperation with another intelligence service in the Middle East and revealing Turkey as a German surveillance target.
