BVT in Austria: How broken was the intelligence service?

Whoever has obtained their information about the so-called BVT affair from the Austrian media, "knows" the following shortly before the start of the BVT investigation committee in the National Council: The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism, has been doing impeccable work since its founding in 2002 and its current director, Peter Gridling, is a recognized professional in his field. However, it was stormed by the new authorities in the Ministry of the Interior, Minister Herbert Kickl, and his followers in order to "restructure" it, and was so greatly discredited by an illegal raid on February 28, 2018, that it has since been de facto excluded from communication with other Western intelligence services. ADDENDUM goes on a search for clues in the Austrian intelligence milieu.

The task of the Investigation Committee will be - as Austrian media consumers also "know" - to clarify these events and, if possible, to put a stop to the attempts by the blue party to take control of the Ministry of the Interior.

Hardly any part of this narrative withstands closer scrutiny. The BVT has had a problem since its inception, because it was fundamentally set up incorrectly by its creators. It is not just an intelligence service, but also primarily a police authority that must forward all information it receives for use by law enforcement agencies. Intelligence services collect information to recognize threat scenarios and prevent dangers, while police authorities investigate crimes.

It always makes sense to separate the two tasks, especially concerning source protection. The project to reorganize the BVT, which started shortly after the controversial raid, will probably have this result: Part of the BVT will move to the Federal Criminal Police Office, the other part will become an intelligence service, and technical solutions will be found to evaluate the collected information while preserving source protection to prevent crimes.

The effects of the fundamental flaw in the BVT were exacerbated by a personnel policy that strictly followed partisan guidelines. The Minister of the Interior at the time of its founding was Ernst Strasser, whose straightforwardness in executing partisan interests in personnel matters is well documented publicly. Employees from Strasser's cabinet have founded security companies after leaving the Ministry of the Interior, which still do business with the public sector and can rely on their old contacts in the executive branch when needed.

Strasser's style of personnel policy, enriched with the component of long-standing personal relationships, was continued for over a decade by Chief of Staff Michael Kloibmüller, under whom all successors of Strasser, up to Wolfgang Sobotka, served. This led to the fact that leadership positions in the BVT were filled with individuals who fit into Kloibmüller's concept and had his personal trust, but were unfit. Additionally, several BVT employees had contacts with dubious private agents like Christina "Nina" Wilkening, including illegal money flows.

The new authorities in the Ministry of the Interior were fairly well informed about the state of the BVT, not least because of the now famous 39-page document that circulated in Vienna in the summer of 2017 and contained both accurate descriptions of problems and exaggerations and blooming spy fantasies. It was probably written by frustrated members of the security community.

The attempt to "clean up" the BVT - and probably also to create the conditions for filling key positions with their own trusted individuals - went quite wrong. The raid on the office itself and four private homes was initially torn apart by the media and later by the Vienna Higher Regional Court: Apart from one, all objections of those affected against the raid were upheld. The claim that "illegal" raids were conducted, as was written thereafter, to emphasize how brutally the FPÖ is breaking the law to secure its power, is wrong, but it shows what the problem is: Many of the journalists who are reporting on the matter now were and are beneficiaries of the rather creative handling of confidentiality obligations by authorities.

The investigation committee will thus deal with the formation and execution of the raid on February 28, which is good: even unbiased observers of the events wonder why a prosecutor and a judge allowed such a serious measure without securing the suspicion through written evidence. On the other hand, the ruling of the Vienna Higher Regional Court that the relevant data should have been obtained through "assistance" poses a problem: Which BVT official would hand over material that they have illegally kept in the office in response to such a request?

Finally, the widely expressed concern in the media that the Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice was not involved in the processes is also interesting. As previously reported, this was related to the good relationships between Secretary General Christian Pilnacek and at least two of the accused.As a result of the Vienna Higher Regional Court's decision on the raids, the public prosecutors are now to be placed back under tighter control of the ministry and its Secretary General. It is somewhat ironic that this is welcomed by all those media outlets, who in the past distinguished themselves by criticizing the dependency of public prosecutors on instructions.

The BVT affair thus contains much of what characterizes Austria and its political-media daily operations: the indifference to the structural and the preference for the personal, the dominance of party politics, the rule of the informal in the relationship between politics, authorities, and media, the readiness for a selective perception of facts in the interest of an ideological narrative. It remains to be seen whether the investigation committee is able to expose these problems. 

Addendum Article Series BVT: 

The introduction on SPARTANAT: BVT - How broken was the intelligence service? 

Part 1: The BVT - a structural failure?

Part 2: Austrian Agent with an Agenda

Part 3: The "Chief Spy" who came from the party

Part 4: Agent Gridling - the other BVT affair

More to come …

This article was first published on ADDENDUM. Copyright Text & Image: ADDENDUM.

ADDENDUM on the Internet: www.addendum.org