The neighbor heard the police officers’ footsteps in the stairwell. She also saw the light outside on the street. It was orange and spinning: a tow truck warning light. A light wind blew from Dresden city over to the prefabricated housing estate in the south of the city, where the otherwise quiet house is located. Six floors, twelve parties. “A spy in our house,” says the older woman and shakes her head. Jian G’s name is written at the bottom of the bell. The emergency services wanted to get him at the beginning of last week – they took his car with them and searched the apartment. They found the man himself in his second home a kilometer away. Investigators believe that Jian G. was not only a confidant and employee of top AfD politician Maximilian Krah, but also an agent of the People’s Republic of China. But the neighbor has a bad suspicion: “It’s against the AfD. Maybe they’re just looking for a scapegoat.”
The arrest in Dresden is part of a long series. The agents are among us. And there are many. “Every day, thousands of actors from foreign powers move in the Federal Republic,” says constitutional lawyer Markus Ogorek, who researches intelligence services. The cases that have become known in recent weeks also show the threats that liberal Europe is exposed to: “Russia is the storm, China is climate change,” has warned Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Thomas Haldenwang since the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022. The message is that the emissaries from Moscow can bring death and disaster at any time, while those from Beijing are less brutal, but think in decades and are ultimately even more dangerous. In addition, the autocrats of this world have new friends in the heart of democracy – people like the German citizen Jian G., the suspected spy who has installed himself in the European Parliament.
The star has followed the trail of the secret service agents – those on the Internet as well as those in real life: in the corridors of the European Parliament as well as in rural Bavaria, where a Russian flag flies next to a run-down car repair shop, or in a courtroom in Berlin, where an accused ex -Head of department of the Federal Intelligence Service is supposed to explain where the 400,000 euros that were found in a locker came from.
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