Chief spy: Martin Jäger becomes the new president of the BND

Martin Jäger saw the world. That is exactly what he always wanted. And from this Thursday he gets a completely new perspective on other countries.

Born in Ulm, he started after Abitur and military service as a photographer and freelance journalist, studied ethnology and started training for the foreign service in 1994. Since then he has worked as a diplomat for many years, represented as an ambassador or accompanied the Foreign Minister as a spokesman. Chancellor Friedrich Merz introduces him to his office as President of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) today.

Jäger, so far always in a serving position, is now the boss of around 6,500 employees. He is the successor to Bruno Kahl, who after nine years at the head of the foreign intelligence service at his own request as an ambassador at the Holy Stuhl to Rome. A diplomat becomes president, a president becomes a diplomat.

It fits Martin Jäger’s career that he puts the head of the foreign intelligence service at political crisis times: With ambassadoring posts in Kabul, Baghdad and Kiev, among others, the 61-year-old has already proven several times that he also trusts to be delicate jobs. As a BND president, he receives personal protection in his own country for the first time.

The quality of the BND as a intelligence service is controversial. The speed of the Taliban-Vormarsch, which led to the overturned deduction of the Bundeswehr in 2021, apparently underestimated the service. The previous President Bruno Kahl was surprised by the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 during a visit to Kiev, the bombing of the capital in the car had to escape towards Poland. And just a day before the Israeli army for the first time bombed Iranian nuclear layouts in summer, the BND is said to have deposited in the Chancellery that an attack was not to be expected for the time being.

One of the most important tasks in addition to dealing with Russian aggression, which is increasingly directed against Germany in cyber attacks, is likely to be for hunters to preserve contact with the friends CIA and Mossad, despite the currently not uncomplicated political relationships with the USA and Israel. Their information is extremely important for the BND, especially in the fight against terrorism. Individual attacks are said to have been prevented from these sources in recent years.

Thorsten Frei, as head of the Chancellery, also coordinator of the secret services, but knows that you have to have something to offer yourself if you want to further access the knowledge of other services. “The collaboration is better, the more surgical information is available and can be shared with other intelligence services,” said Frei shortly before Jäger’s work. Therefore, not only the technical possibilities of the BND should be improved, but the legal limits should also be checked. Critics complain that not least the Federal Constitutional Court has too limited the BND with several judgments.

Friedrich Merz and Martin Jäger have recently met: as an ambassador in Kiev, Jäger’s last diplomatic post, he initially received the opposition leader Merz at the Ukrainian capital station in December 2024. And Chancellor Merz for the first time in May of this year.

But the two should know each other for much longer. Jäger has been a CDU member since 1994, he worked between 2014 and 2016 as spokesman for the Federal Ministry of Finance for Wolfgang Schäuble, Merz’ Friend and political sponsor, later as State Secretary in the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of the Interior for Schäuble’s son-in-law Thomas Strobl. Jäger was assigned to a circle of confidants for Schäuble – which also included Jens Spahn – who struggled Angela Merkel’s refugee policy and would have had nothing against it if Schäuble Merkel had even replaced in the Chancellery. But at the end it remained loyal.

It is striking that hunters, an avowed conservative, have obviously succeeded in largely separating his personal political views from his official uses. At the time of the red-green government of Gerhard Schröder, Jäger worked for the then head of the Chancellery, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In the subsequent first grand coalition by Angela Merkel, he took him into the foreign office, where Jäger was not unassumed to stage the widely unknown Steinmeier so that the SPD set up it as a candidate for chancellor in 2009.

In 2013 it was FDP Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle who, after his return from a stopover as chief lobbyist of the car company Daimler, sent the ambassador to Afghanistan. Jäger later worked as a state secretary in the Ministry of Development under the CSU politician Gerd Müller.

As an ambassador in Kiev under the traffic light government of Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Jäger then personally campaigned for the German initiative to equip Ukraine with more air defense, especially patriot rockets.

Should hunters want to become an ambassador again after the BND, Prague would offer himself where he was already on a post. Jäger is married to a writer born in the then Czechoslovakia and has two sons.