Main office for surveys

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The main office for questioning (HBW) was a department assigned to the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and was often disguised as the “internal control facility of the Federal Office for Foreigners' Issues”. Around 40 employees openly and covertly questioned refugees who applied for asylum in Germany . However, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union , other groups of immigrants such as repatriates and ethnic repatriates were also the target of such surveys.

history

The questioning system was initially subordinate to the Western Allies . As a German agency, the main agency for surveys was established on July 1, 1957. It was assigned to the Federal Intelligence Service , which was founded in 1956 . The HBW had many hundreds of employees during the Cold War and was mainly busy with the skimming of refugees from the Eastern Bloc .

The main office for questioning (HBW) was directly subordinate to the Chancellery. The federal government did not provide any precise information about its structure, even when it came to parliamentary questions.

After a written answer from the Federal Government to a question from the Bundestag member Jan Korte on November 28, 2013, the HBW should be reduced in terms of staff as a result of an efficiency control, with the aim of organizational dissolution. After Zeit Online reported that the agency was to dissolve on June 30, 2014, this was confirmed a few days before the dissolution.

Structure and locations

The main office for questioning / central office for questioning was active in around 13 of the central border transit camps in the Federal Republic. In 2012, 52 people were employed at the main office for surveys. The following locations are known:

Survey practice

The HBW asked refugees and asylum seekers as well as repatriates and other immigrants about the circumstances in their home countries, and occasionally recruited them as sources ( spies ). Some of the German employees disguised themselves as “interns” during the regular surveys on asylum applications. Information about people from the terrorist milieu, cell phone numbers, organizational structures of political and terrorist organizations and other personal information were requested.

A prominent example from interview practice was the case of the Iraqi engineer Rafid Ahmed Alwan . He arrived at Franz Josef Strauss Airport in November 1999 on a tourist visa . He applied for political asylum because, according to his own statements, he had misused Iraqi state funds and was therefore threatened. He came to the Zirndorf Central Reception Center and was skimmed off there by HBW employees. He stated that he was an “expert” in chemical warfare agents and the director of a plant for their production in Djerf al Nadaf. He also reported on mobile plants for the production of chemical warfare agents.

After the questioning by employees of the agency, the BND classified him as "blue", which means that no employees of friendly services are allowed to question him. Alwan himself also refused to talk to American intelligence services. The information from the Iraqi, known as the "curveball", was passed on to a local Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) team, which sent it to its headquarters for further analysis. The reports then went to the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It was there that the computer graphics models of the alleged chemical weapons production facilities were created. Alwan's statements about the alleged weapons of mass destruction were used by the Bush administration to justify the war, and Colin Powell cited his statements before the UN Security Council as evidence of Baghdad's illegal weapons programs. There was no official warning from his side that the information might not be correct.

According to official information from 2013, the HBW conducted 500 to 1000 preliminary discussions with refugees every year and then interviewed 50 to 100 of them intensively. A focus of the surveys in 2013 was on refugees from Somalia ( civil war in Somalia ), Afghanistan ( war in Afghanistan since 2001 ) and Syria ( civil war in Syria ). In 2013, in response to a request from the Left to take in Syrians, the Federal Ministry of the Interior announced that the HBW was currently "contacting" around ten refugees every month.

According to interpreters and lawyers who look after asylum seekers, the agency was primarily interested in refugees who could provide information about suspected Islamist terrorist groups. Those who cooperated with the main office were allegedly often rewarded with quick recognition as asylum seekers and allowed to stay in the Federal Republic.

The federal government ( Merkel II cabinet ) denied that such rewards existed. She emphasized that the surveys were voluntary.

Cooperations and information transfer

In some cases, employees of American and British services also took part in the surveys of asylum seekers . The information obtained from the interviews was also passed on to “friendly” services.

According to research by the NDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in November 2013, it can be assumed that the information gathered by the US secret services was also used for the use of combat drones, for example in the Afghanistan mission. According to a former high-ranking Pentagon employee opposite the Süddeutsche, the interview findings flowed into the "target acquisition system" of the US services. Even apparently irrelevant information might be enough "to confirm a target - and perhaps also to trigger an order to kill".

According to media research, some refugees from foreign services were interviewed without German colleagues. In an international trade journal, an insider reported that the main office was part of a joint survey program from Germany, Great Britain and the USA.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Federal Government : Question Time on November 28, 2013. November 28, 2013, accessed on December 4, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Sandra Dassler: Occupation of the Iraqi Embassy: Are there backers? August 22, 2002, accessed November 22, 2013 .
  3. ↑ Ronny Heidenreich: The GDR espionage of the BND. From the beginnings to the construction of the Wall (= publications of the Independent Commission of Historians for Research into the History of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 Volume 11). Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-96289-024-7 , p. 342 (see also the sub-chapter The main office for surveys , p. 342–347).
  4. ↑ a b c Answer of the Federal Government to the small question of the BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN parliamentary group, "Activities of the main office for questioning of the Federal Intelligence Service", printed matter 17/11597, November 21, 2012, p. 2. (PDF; 101 kB)
  5. ↑ Zeit Online : Main Office for Surveys: Controversial BND unit is dissolved. March 19, 2014, accessed March 19, 2014 .
  6. ↑ BND dissolves authority to investigate asylum seekers. July 2, 2014, accessed July 3, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Christoph von Gallera: Good neighbors: RP and BND in Giessen under one roof? Answers from the federal government in the future according to your mood? In: Mittelhessenblog. February 19, 2013, accessed January 7, 2014 .
  8. ↑ Stefan Buchen, Niklas Schenck: Espionage with pencil and eraser. In: Panorama (magazine) . November 19, 2013. Retrieved November 29, 2013 .
  9. ↑ July 10th, 1967: A mysterious house The "interview point" in Wielandstrasse poses a riddle - July 10th, 2017
  10. ↑ a b Jack Dawson: The BND's Headquarters for Surveying and its British Partner . In: Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies ( ISSN  1994-4101 ). Vol. 4, No. 1, 2010, pp. 140-144.
  11. ↑ Peter Carstens: Weapon of mass disinformation: The storyteller "Curveball" and the way to the Iraq war. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 22, 2008. Retrieved August 29, 2011 .
  12. ↑ Draggan Mihailovich: Faulty Intel Source "Curve Ball" Revealed . In: CBS News . February 11, 2009
  13. ^ Jason Vest: Big Lies, Blind Spies, and Vanity Fair . In: The Village Voice . April 5, 2005
  14. ^ ARD : The Lies from the Service: The BND and the Iraq War. (No longer available online.) December 2, 2010, archived from the original on September 5, 2011 ; Retrieved August 29, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ardmediathek.de
  15. ↑ John Goetz, Hans Leyendecker: Main office for questioning hears out asylum seekers. November 19, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013 .