Schönbohm case: In the BSI affair, Nancy Faeser has trouble explaining herself

DThe abrupt dismissal of Arne Schönbohm, President of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), threatens to become a problem for Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). Faeser had banned Schönbohm from carrying out official business on Tuesday due to “lack of trust”.

However, at a meeting of the Bundestag’s interior committee on the subject on Wednesday, according to information from WELT, the ministry left open a concrete justification for its actions. And Faeser is also entering unsafe waters in terms of civil service law. Because she can’t just fire the unwelcome official Schönbohm.

Faeser had distanced himself from Schönbohm at the beginning of October after a report by “ZDF Magazin Royale” accused the BSI President of a lack of distance to Russian secret service circles via the controversial association “Cyber ​​Security Council Germany”.

However, after Schönbohm did not promptly hand in the notice himself, not much happened for a good week – in particular, the BSI President has not yet been proven to have had any specific service violations. Now Schönbohm has put Faeser under pressure.

The Ministry of the Interior announced on Tuesday that it would ban Schönbohm from holding the office of President of the BSI with immediate effect.

At the committee meeting, it became known that Schönbohm himself had come before Faeser and had already applied for disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against himself by email on Monday. A civil servant has this option under Section 18 of the Disciplinary Act in order to relieve himself of the suspicion of a misdemeanor. So Schönbohm is not ready to simply take his hat off, he wants to defend himself against the allegations of close ties to Russia and a lack of service.

However, according to the ministry, his mail was not processed until Tuesday. At the same time, the ban on carrying out official business “for compelling official reasons” is then appropriate Paragraph 66 of the Federal Civil Servants Act been pronounced. The Ministry of the Interior carefully avoided the impression in the committee that Schönbohm’s mail had triggered the ban, but the Ministry representatives did not explain exactly what the compelling official reasons were.

The committee members were then clearly critical of Faeser’s actions: “Once again today, the Federal Ministry of the Interior was unable to justify the procedure, why Mr. Schönbohm was forbidden to continue his official business, but he remains President of the BSI,” said Alexander Throm , domestic policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, told WELT: “Many questions remain unanswered that the ministry doesn’t want to or can’t answer. This damages the reputation of the BSI as a cyber security authority enormously, especially in this tense threat situation.”

Manuel Höferlin, the domestic spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, made a similar statement in an interview with WELT: “The disciplinary proceedings requested by President Schönbohm must now be opened quickly in order to clarify whether and to what extent the allegations against him are valid – also about that BSI to protect its work and reputation. The issue is too important for us to accept delays here.”

Schönbohm is putting Faeser under pressure with his actions: Since the office of BSI President as a B8 position under the Federal Salary Act is not occupied by a political civil servant, the employer cannot simply put Schönbohm on temporary retirement by referring to political differences. And the ban on holding office also lasts a maximum of three months according to the law, after which Faeser Schönbohm would have to let her work again if she does not provide any evidence of a misdemeanor.

There were also some differences between the BSI President and the Ministry of the Interior before Faeser was in office: Schönbohm, who when he took office in 2016 was dismissed by many observers, especially from the IT security scene, as an industry lobbyist and “cyber clown”, had publicly strengthened the BSI during his tenure . At the same time, he had always taken over the positions of his official experts, even if they were uncomfortable for the BMI.

Schönbohm had opposed the Ministry of the Interior on factual issues

For example, Schönbohm spoke out against the exploitation of security gaps for secret service purposes and advocated strong encryption in communication – topics that the Ministry of the Interior sees quite differently.

But why the BMI is now striving for such a high-profile change at the top of the office is still unclear, even to insiders in the traffic light coalition. Because the allegations that Böhmermann took up in the magazine Royale were known for a long time.

More than two years ago, WELT reported on a possible connection between Russian secret service circles and the association “Cyber ​​Security Council Germany”. And the reports at the time also mentioned Schönbohm’s participation in the founding of the association.

The association had already been entered in the register of associations in Berlin in September 2012. Arne Schönbohm, then an entrepreneur, acted as president, Hans-Wilhelm Dünn was his deputy. When Schönbohm was appointed President of the BSI in 2016, both gave up their positions. It wasn’t until 2018 that Dünn took over the management of the club again. A little later, the club’s first questionable relations with Russia became public.

In April 2019, WELT wrote about a clandestine IT security conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria. Among the Russian organizers and participants were senior security officials and men with intelligence backgrounds. The organizing committee was chaired by a former employee of the Soviet intelligence service KGB, Vladislav Sherstjuk.

Thin was the only German on the agenda of this forum. At the time, he told WELT that in his two lectures he wanted to show “how important a trusting dialogue and common formats between countries, politics and business are for cyber security”. Ironically, with Russia and its secret services, which were already known at the time for hacker attacks on the German Bundestag, among other things?

Asked about Sherstyuk’s background, Dunn replied that he judged the framework of the forum to be “reasonable”. What’s more, according to “Zeit” and the ARD magazine “Kontraste”, he had signed a declaration of intent with Scherstyuk for mutual support during the conference for the association under the misleadingly official-sounding name “Council on Cyber ​​Security of Germany”. Maintaining contacts, including with official bodies in Russia, was part of his job, said Dünn.

To date, Faeser has not provided any proof of the assumptions

As the “ZDF Magazin Royale” now reported, there was another connection between the Berlin association and Russian secret service circles. The IT security company “Protelion”, which operated under the name “Infotecs” until March 2022, was a member of Dünn’s cyber security council. Infotecs was founded by a former KGB employee.

After the broadcast, the question arises to what extent Schönbohm also maintained Russian contacts. At the beginning of September 2022, Schönbohm held a keynote speech at the club’s tenth anniversary. “You fulfill an important function as a source of inspiration and an exchange platform for awareness and management attention to the topic of cyber security,” he tweeted.

Club boss Dünn had apparently long been in the sights of counterintelligence. As Der Spiegel reported, intelligence officers monitored him and thus also eavesdropped on conversations with Schönbohm.

So if the explosive connections were already known, why was Schönbohm released now of all times? It was heard from circles of the Interior Committee that the Ministry of the Interior indicated that the intelligence agency had only now presented findings that were intended to prove breaches of duty and a lack of political intuition on the part of the BSI President beyond former membership of the association. But Faeser has so far failed to provide any evidence that would stand up to disciplinary proceedings.

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