A former German intelligence employee has said he started spying for the US and Russia because he felt under-appreciated and not sufficiently challenged in his job.
Markus Reichel, 32, was sentenced by a Munich court to eight years in jail for spying for both the CIA and the Russian secret service.
The triple agent admitted giving more than 200 classified documents to the CIA, including names and addresses of agents in Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) for €95,000.
He also provided three classified documents to the Russian service.
Reichel had been employed in post room of the BND near Munich between 2008 and July 2014, where he was netted €1,200 a month in the lowest salary band. Before 2008 he had been unemployed for several years.
He told the court: “No one trusted me with anything at the BND. At the CIA it was different. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t like that.”
The agent copied sensitive documents at work, smuggled them home and then sent them to contacts at the CIA. Payments were handed over at face-to-face meetings with agents in Austria and via secret postboxes.
But he blew his cover in May 2014 by offering his services to the Russian consulate in Munich via email and attaching three secret documents to prove his authenticity.
The scandal came to light two months later during the period when widespread US spying was exposed in documents released by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden
Judge Bayer said Reichel had “seriously disturbed the BND’s activity”, destabilising cooperation with another intelligence service in the Middle East and revealing Turkey as a German surveillance target.
