Bremen undercover agent affair: Leftists want to know what the secret service knows

Bremen's Interior Senator Eva Högl (SPD) will be presented with a mountain of work next Thursday - or one of her employees. This involves around 500 requests for information to the Bremen Office for the Protection of the Constitution, whose employer is Högl. That means: 500 people want to know what information the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has collected and stored about them.

This was announced on Monday by the Interventionist Left (IL), the nationwide organized group whose Bremen branch exposed a suspected informant from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in its ranks at the beginning of the year. The domestic secret service considers the group to be left-wing extremist and therefore a threat to democracy, as stated in the Office for the Protection of the Constitution every year.

In the following months, local media and politicians from almost all factions of Bremen's citizenship were particularly outraged that a deputy Bremen constitutional judge, a lawyer, was said to have been present at the unmasking and that the Left employs a faction employee who is said to be a member of the IL.

Together with other groups, the IL now wants to remind people of what they believe to be the real scandal by handing over the requests for information: that the undercover agent, according to their account, maintained intimate love and friendship relationships and thus possibly passed on confidential information obtained in these relationships to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. This could be viewed by a court as a violation of the fundamental right to privacy.

Sven Adam, the lawyer for one of those spied on, filed a corresponding lawsuit against the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in February. He represents a young man who, according to Adams, belonged to the informant Dilan S.'s closest circle of friends and had shared a lot of personal information with him. This process will take years, Adam told the taz on Tuesday.

At the same time, the lawyer has made exactly the same requests for information for his client that will be handed over to the Bremen Senator for the Interior next week, but to several authorities. The Federal Criminal Police Office said it had no information about his client, Adam said. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution rejected the request for information, and he lodged an objection.

The Bremen authorities are even less willing to provide information. At the beginning of August he filed a complaint for failure to act against the police and the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution after he had already submitted a request for information there in March. He is still waiting for a decision today.

He was successful in another case involving three allegedly left-wing extremist bookstores in Bremen, Berlin and Göttingen. At the beginning of March, shortly after the Bremen V-man affair became known, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the federal Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, had excluded three bookstores from the German Bookstore Prize, with the cloudy and never substantiated reference to “findings from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.”

Sven Adam has now written to the six employees of the Göttingen bookstore Rote Straße, which he represents, that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, against them, neither from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution nor from the police. This is what the requests for information he made to four authorities revealed.

However, the lawsuits for the payment of prize money of 7,000 euros and 15,000 euros to the three bookstores are still open, as an independent jury had suggested to Weimer's cultural authority. Here he and the other two lawyers were able to view files, although with a lot of redacted text, says Adam.

There is apparently no progress at all in two criminal proceedings in connection with the Bremen informant affair. According to the public prosecutor's office, the Bremen Office for the Protection of the Constitution filed a complaint against an unknown person for defamation in the spring. This concerns the accusation made by various, but not unknown, people that employees of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution told Spiegel about the participation of the then constitutional judge in the unmasking of the informant.

The public prosecutor's office is also investigating unknown persons on suspicion of betrayal of secrets. Radio Bremen reported in February that someone from the Parliamentary Control Commission for the Protection of the Constitution had given a reporter from the medium secret information about the Left Party member.

The committee consists of eight members of the citizenry as well as representatives of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Interior Authority. The CDU, which as the opposition had exerted pressure on the red-green-red coalition for months because of its alleged proximity to enemies of the constitution, has the greatest interest in discrediting the left.

According to the Bremen public prosecutor's office, the investigations into these two cases are continuing. The spokesman did not give any details, such as whether politicians had already been heard.