The WireCard Spring

Franz Pokorny

The German commentariat reacted smugly to the news of Mr. Epstein’s demise. The disgraced financier was yet another symptom of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy’s terminal degeneration, rooted in inequality, lack of regulatory safeguards, and unbalanced budgets. Axel Springer drone Ulf Poschardt, hitting a rare biblical note, even compared Epstein’s America to Sodom and Gomorrah, admonishing — in an implicit defence of Germany’s world-beating Rechtsstaat — that „neither God nor Batman can help here, only a robust constitutional state and strong journalism“. And bad news, yanks: you are only 57th in the World Press Freedom Index.

Complacency gave way to surprise and dismay when it transpired that there were indeed Germans in the emails, and not just any Germans. „Philippa finished her masters degree in compsci and starts a job w the super elite German secret service and is placed within the ministry of Finance to follow money“ reads one black rectangle’s missive to jeevacation, and there were more to follow. There was only one person this could be.

Philippa Sigl-Glöckner, lately of Marlborough College, Oxford University, and the Tony Blair Institute, has one of the most LaRouchian CVs in all Germany. To cap off this illustrious cursus honorum, she spent several years in the office of Wolfgang Schmidt, Olaf Scholz’s consigliere at the Finance Ministry in the last Merkel government. Schmidt, one may recall, played a not immaterial role in the WireCard scandal, and Sigl-Glöckner, as his assistant, apparently drafted the Agreement on German-Chinese Financial Dialogue (there is nothing more bundesrepublican than an agreement on dialogue) that gave the disgraced fintech firm its foothold in the Far East, and was his office manager when all record of his emails to shady Anglo-Russian software entrepreneur Nicolaus von Rintelen mysteriously vanished. With the Social Democrats apparently poised to exit government after the 2021 election, Sigl-Glöckner ran for parliamentary office in the constituency of Munich North, where she lost to a bombadilesque municipal water bureaucrat running on an anti-cancel culture platform. She has since slouched back into the unaccountable nether-regions of the SPD’s economic council and her fairly innocuous centre-left think tank.

German journalists lack the robust epistemology that can only be won by reading a dozen or so Galkovsky blogposts, and the telegram channels and déclassé economics professors that set on the tone on the right have so far blown the affair out of proportion. The critical press has converged on the line that Our Pippa was sent down by a shady international cabal to attack Merkel’s constitutional debt brake, as if there were not easier ways to do this than funding a wonkish think tank that framed its proposals not as sound Mittelstand common sense but esoteric modern monetary theory from America. Even the WireCard stuff is difficult to pin down to Sigl-Glöckner, who like any self-respecting German can always say she was just following orders, although follow-up reporting might turn up something else. The focus on this bright and enterprising woman who stands accused of doing no more than serving her country, while understandable perhaps for a beleaguered German right accustomed to no greater success than forcing the resignation of this or that minister, has predictably caused the political bubble to close ranks around one of its own. In consequence, the political fireworks that this affair has the potential to set off remain unlit.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the most important political trend of the past ten years is the encroachment on popular sovereignty by „former“ intelligence officers (we all know there is no such thing as a former intelligence officer), usually drawn from the foreign intelligence services. The likes of Mike Tapp, Rory Stewart, the Northern Ireland security mafia, Abigail Spanberger, Elissa Slotkin, and, in Germany, the turbowoke former head of the Verfassungsschutz Thomas Haldenwang have become regular fixtures in democratic politics, usually under the banner of a libtarded Bach System in which the bureaucracy is empowered to defend the social order against invisible enemies from within and without. Sigl-Glöckner stands out from these siloviks only in that she did not disclose her affiliations with the „super elite German secret service“, and she is most certainly not the only one. In the heroic age of German parliamentarism, the mere suggestion of „police spies“ in the house of the people would incite mobs of the city’s top businessmen and lawyers to storm the ducal palace. It should be obvious to all that this assault on popular sovereignty by the unaccountable agents of the executive represents the most serious threat to whatever remains of liberal democracy today, far more so than Putin’s populism or dark data.

All this comes at a moment when Germany’s intelligence services are uniquely vulnerable to a surprise attack from the democratic public sphere. Merz plans to issue the BND a license to kill through a new law to be presented to parliament later this year. He will try to do this before former MP Fabio de Masi’s long-awaited book on WireCard, which promises new disclosures on the BND’s involvement with the disgraced payments processor, hits the shelves in mid-July — just in time to be on everyone’s reading list in the summer doldrums. De Masi will no doubt be backed up by Holger Friedrich, the Berlin press baron and old battler against West German espionage, who in the past has given the leftist parliamentarian ample space in his Berliner Zeitung to air his thoughts as to the true nature of Mr. Marsalek’s game. Friedrich, whose megalomaniacal tendencies were already noted by his Stasi handler back in 1988, has refashioned himself as an Ostboomer Citizen Kane through his new media venture, the Ostdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which seems to have a sizeable war chest and his will be staffed by former Russia Today hands. Friedrich’s papers have earned him the opprobrium of a Putinversteher; in fact, he is a good friend of Matthias Döpfner, majority owner of Axel Springer and Germany’s top atlanticist, which makes his promotion of de Masi all the more curious.

The Ostdeutsche will find odd bedfellows in a blossoming civil libertarian alternative media scene (Nius, Tichy, and their more cerebral competitor Apollo) which has already scored some palpable victories, and must surely see in the BND’s overreach the potential for its own Woodward and Bernstein moment. Watergate, as every child now knows, was no David’s slingshot against Nixon’s persönliches Regiment, nor was the Church Committee, but took place within a broader struggle for power within the bowels of the American deep state. It is unlikely we will see anything of a similar magnitude — there is too much professional solidarity in Berlin for the kind of siloviki turf wars that we know from the United States to occur here — but this is not to say that there are no fights over the watering hole. I predict the public airing of old WireCard grievances this summer will be seized upon by the atlanticists to finally close the book on the sinophilia of the Merkel-era BND and force a few holdovers from those days into retirement; whether these turbulences can be channelled towards a more thorough audit of the intelligence community will depend entirely on the intellectual powers of the journalistic corps and the opposition parties. The case of Ms. Sigl-Glöckner, where the WireCard scandal intersects with the deep state’s interventions into domestic politics, would be a good place to start digging.