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VBS boss Viola Amherd separated from NDB boss Jean-Philippe Gaudin in May 2021.
Reza RafiDeputy Editor-in-Chief SonntagsBlick
The provisional balance of Peter Marti (72) is impressive: turmoil in federal Berne, distrust of the media and administration, various open investigations and a sacked department spokesman.
The former head of communications for the health department, Peter Lauener (52), is likely to be Marti’s most prominent trophy so far. It is also known that the special investigator has accused two employees of the Department of Foreign Affairs of suspected violation of official secrecy. Both were about indiscretions related to the crypto affair.
The interrogation lasted more than four hours
In this matter, another track is now coming to light: As Sunday view research shows, Marti was also targeting the former secret service chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin (60).
The two-star general headed the Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) from 2018 to 2021. Marti questioned him on March 28, 2021 in Zurich as a person providing information. The reason for the four-and-a-half-hour interrogation was a classified report by the parliamentary business control delegation (GPDel) on manipulated encryption devices, some of the content of which had reached the media in advance in 2020.
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Marti noticed that the FIS had come off “actually quite well” in an “NZZ” article from October 2020 on the subject: “Neither the FIS as an organizational unit nor the intelligence work as such are fundamentally questioned.”
“If proceedings were opened against me, that would be the end of me.”Ex-NDB boss Jean-Philippe Gaudin
Which led the special investigator to the “working hypothesis” that “it must have been someone from the FIS” who must have passed passages from the confidential draft report to the journalists.
Viola Amherd incompletely informed
Gaudin replies that he cannot imagine that someone from the FIS chatted.
Marti, on the other hand, believes he is on the trail of a “violator of official secrets” from the FIS who wanted “in the interests of good ‘impact control'” that “the spectacle value of the primeur” would lead to fundamentally questioning neither the FIS nor its intelligence work place.
In the course of the conversation, he repeatedly insists on a position determination that Gaudin had commissioned for the Crypto affair and about which he apparently only informed VBS boss Viola Amherd (60) incompletely. Gaudin admits: “Perhaps I didn’t inform Ms. Amherd enough. That may have been a mistake on my part.”
“I really don’t know anything”
Nevertheless, Marti keeps the sword of Damocles hovering over Gaudin. He doesn’t see his opponent as a suspect, but he can’t “exclude him as a suspect either”, especially since the FIS boss “must have an immense interest in being able to influence reporting by controlling information”. Gaudin’s “hesitant testimony” forced him “to consider whether I need to initiate authorization proceedings against you, i.e. whether it needs to be checked whether proceedings for breach of official secrecy should be initiated against you as an accused”. Whereupon the chief official asserts: “If proceedings were opened against me, that would be the end of me. I really don’t know anything.”
Reports in the Tamedia newspapers and in Blick suggest the type of special investigator: Towards Lauener, he relied on the so-called article on terror, bringing up the charge of an attempted “attack on the constitutional order”. Reason: The former communications chief of Federal President Alain Berset (50) is said to have slipped confidential information about corona measures to the head of the Ringier publishing house, which also publishes the SonntagsBlick, at the height of the pandemic.
It was later terminated
Six and a half weeks after Marti’s questioning, Gaudin was dismissed by the DDPS head. Presumably because of the contract with an external consultant, which he had kept secret from the Federal Councilor.
As the DDPS reported to SonntagsBlick, they commented “not on ongoing investigations”. There is no connection between the interrogation and the termination. The presumption of innocence applies to all parties involved.