When Schröder became federal chancellor in 1998, Steinmeier followed him, taking a job in the chancellery and becoming commissioner for the federal intelligence service.
He has confirmed that the federal intelligence service kept two agents in Baghdad who helped the Americans with co-ordinates for "non-targets" such as hospitals and embassies.
A classified report by Germany's federal intelligence service was leaked to Der Spiegel in September, and its assessment of the Afghan mission was much drearier than the one that the Merkel government had presented to the public.
Pointing to documents obtained by the federal intelligence service, officials in La Paz last week said a group from the lowland city of Santa Cruz had elaborated a plan to sabotage the Constitution assembly, stoke regional tension and initiate protests to topple Mr. Morales.
The comments by Mr. Hanning, a former head of the federal intelligence service, underscore why this case is viewed as the gravest terrorist threat in Germany since 2001, when militant Islamic students living in Hamburg laid the plan to hijack commercial airliners in the United States.
"There must be better communication among the various intelligence agencies and between the police and the intelligence agencies". Meanwhile, the federal intelligence service has drawn sharp criticism for its observation of federal lawmakers from the Left Party.
The official said the federal intelligence service would respond to its failure to detect the activities of the National Socialist Underground, and thus prevent the killings the group allegedly carried out, by making "structural, communication and procedural" changes.
In the United States, election oversight is divided between state and local authorities and a patchwork of federal agencies and intelligence services.
Immediately after Abiy spoke, state television announced that the government had arrested Addis Ababa's deputy police commissioner, as well as other high officials within the federal police and intelligence services, so far charging more than 30 people related to the attacks.
Now we have an intelligence-industrial complex composed of close to a dozen and a half federal intelligence agencies and services, many of which are duplicative, and in the last decade or two the growth of a private sector intelligence world.
