‼️ retired PLA major general Wang Jianzheng (王建政) ‼️

August Hanning, the former head of Germany’s answer to MI6, who has been arrested on suspicion of passing highly classified information to a foreign spy agency, is also feared to have provided sensitive details to a high-ranking Chinese military official.

Hanning, 80, who ran the BND intelligence service from 1998 to 2005, is facing charges of attempted treason and espionage on behalf of a foreign country in one of Germany’s most serious spy scandals since the Second World War.

He is accused of obtaining nearly 2,000 internal documents through his former chief of staff, Manfred Dankesreiter, from 2010 to 2012. He is alleged to have used some of them to prepare an analysis for an officer from a foreign intelligence agency, reported to be Azerbaijan.

The German public prosecutor general’s office also claimed that Hanning was in “close contact” with an employee from another foreign spy agency and supplied him with confidential “political information”, partly based on the BND files, over several years.

This employee was reportedly Wang Jianzheng (王建政), a retired Chinese army major general who had also spent 23 years as a military diplomat in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Wang had first been posted to East Berlin in 1987-90, at the end of the socialist German Democratic Republic, and returned twice after reunification, most recently from 2009 to 2013.

Now regarded as one of Beijing’s most influential experts on Germany, he continues to work for the China Institute for International Strategic Studies, a state think tank under the aegis of the Chinese military. 

Wang, who had thanked Hanning for his “insights and explanations” in the foreword to a 2017 book, appears to have met the former BND president at several conferences. They also sat together on the board of advisers for a German-Chinese “eco-park” in Qingdao, Shandong province.

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