July 29, 2022
An Iranian-born woman has just been named the second ranking official of the German domestic intelligence agency and has surprisingly made a personal visit to Iran following the death of her father, according to the German-language news magazine Focus.
It reported July 8 that Felor Badenberg, the new vice president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), violated the strict security precautions of her own agency by making the private trip to the Islamic Republic.
Badenberg, who was only promoted to the Number Two position in the federal intelligence agency June 15 by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, flew to the Iranian capital a few weeks before that to settle inheritance matters after the death of her father, Focus reported. She had previously been the head since June 2020 of the BfV’s Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism Department, which is focused on German neo-Nazis.
All BfV employees are strictly prohibited from traveling to or staying in countries such as Iran, Syria and Russia unless they have advance permission from the agency as they are at risk of arbitrary detention.
The magazine said security circles assumed the 47-year-old was under “meticulous surveillance” by the Iranian secret service after she landed in Iran, with a senior government official saying that Iranian counterintelligence has certainly recorded very precisely whom she met and where. “This means that Badenberg’s contacts in Tehran could be in real danger,” Focus quoted the unnamed German official as saying.
Badenberg’s agency does not send spies into Iran, but it does devote considerable effort to hunting down Iranian spies in Germany.
Focus said Badenberg was born in Tehran and moved to Germany when she was 12 years old. Normally, the magazine said, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution would not hire a person with such a background because “the risk of blackmail is too high,” given that she has many relatives still living in Iran.
The magazine ended its story by saying the agency told it just before publication that Badenberg had made a trip to Iran five years ago for family reasons and received permission from the agency for that trip. The agency said that was her last trip to Iran. But Focus said it stands by its story that Badenberg only recently visited Iran.
She was born Felor Haqiqi-Niat and is Muslim. From her current name, she appears to be married to a German, but no published material identifies her husband, her marriage date or whether she has any children. She does not have any social media accounts, but that is normal globally for those who work in the intelligence world.
