August Hanning ran Germany’s foreign intelligence service for seven years, and prosecutors now say that as a private consultant he used classified material to “draft an analysis” for one foreign service while keeping up contact with another. Two services. They haven’t named either.

The detail I keep rereading is “analysis.” Not a stolen cache, not a dead drop. A memo. A man who spent a career knowing how Berlin thinks allegedly wrote down how Berlin thinks, for a client. That’s closer to consulting than to Le Carré, which is probably the point: the old spymaster’s real asset was his judgment, and judgment is easy to invoice. His alleged supplier, a former bureau chief who stayed inside the BND until this year, apparently passed along about 2,000 documents for money. So the leak ran through someone still on the inside, which is the part Germany’s current spooks will be losing sleep over.

Set it beside the rest of the week. Estonia blames Moscow for an arson at a drone-maker, Poland calls a Starlink station fire sabotage, Denmark says Russia could hit a NATO country within months, and now a bulgarian grain ship goes down 70 miles off Byala, crew missing, nobody claiming it. Europe keeps being told the threat comes from drones and flares and unmarked rail debris. Meanwhile the oldest vulnerability may be a retired official with a laptop and a friendly phone number.

Which two services, though? The silence is doing a lot of work. If it were Moscow, I suspect Berlin would be less coy.

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