Germanys former spy chief arrested at 80

Masked police officers stormed a red brick house in Nordwalde, near the Dutch border, shortly before nine o'clock on Tuesday morning. They emerged with an unhandcuffed, white-haired 80-year-old: August Hanning, former head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND. He is accused of espionage, treason and selling thousands of classified documents to foreign powers. Hanning denies all allegations.

The Guardian's Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly described the events as "pretty seismic" — an unusual word for a country that has spent the past two years absorbing a steady rhythm of Russian sabotage attacks on its soil. The arrest of a former spy chief is a different order of event. Hanning ran the BND, the very agency whose task is to detect men who sell secrets to foreign states. The alleged betrayal is not at the periphery but at the top of the institution.

The scandal lands at a moment of what Connolly called massive pressure in global affairs, and it will test a question Germany has never comfortably answered: who watches the watchers, and what happens when the watchers turn out to be the story. Parliamentary scrutiny of intelligence services is by design the weakest form of oversight in any democracy — the committees meet in secret, see filtered material, and depend on the agencies' own honesty about their failures. An agency that cannot keep its former chief from allegedly selling its archive has little standing to insist that its internal accounts are reliable.

Hanning, born before the Wall went up, belongs to the generation that built the postwar German security state. If the charges hold, the state will have to prosecute a man who embodied it — without handcuffs, given his age and standing, but in open court all the same. If they do not, the raid itself becomes the story: masked officers, terror-operation staging, and an 80-year-old's reputation decided by whatever the prosecution can actually prove.

Either way, the BND's reputation takes the hit Connolly's question anticipated. The man who once ran Germany's spies was led out of his own house by them.