The agent, 32-year-old Markus R., as he’s identified by the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, was arrested last summer on suspicion of passing information to a contact within the CIA, reported the Telegraph.
The list – which contains the real names, aliases and locations of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad – was discovered on a hard drive seized during a search of Markus’ home following his arrest. The hard drive was just recently analyzed.
In addition to working with the CIA, Markus allegedly approached Russian intelligence and offered to sell them secret information. German intelligence also fears that he may have passed the list of spies' names to hostile foreign agencies, including Afghanistan, the Telegraph reported.
Markus reportedly confessed to passing more than 200 top-secret or classified documents to the CIA over two years in exchange for $34,000.
He was first discovered when German intelligence intercepted an email he sent to the Russian Embassy in Berlin, in which he offered to sell secrets in exchange for cash. He subsequently admitted he was already spying for the Americans.
Markus’ arrest further strained U.S.-German relations that took a big hit when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of U.S. surveillance programs. Among the information was evidence that the NSA targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal cell phone.
The double-agent debacle led Merkel’s administration to surveil American and British intelligence-gathering operations in Germany for the first time since World War II. She also asked the CIA station chief in Berlin to leave the country.
As an employee of the registry section of the BND’s overseas operations department, Markus had access to top-secret documents, including the identities of operatives working abroad.
German intelligence has claimed that the list he stole was out of date and contained far fewer than 3,500 names. Markus’ chief motivation, however, appears to be money, which only deepens concern over the possibility he sold the list to a hostile foreign agency.
