Sonata For A Good Man: German TV Vindicates Special Agent Johnathan Buma
What a German documentary reveals about tech oligarchs and their foreign connections
A recent documentary appeared in Germany and prominently features my old FBI handler, Special Agent Johnathan Buma, being interviewed about his work involving the Russian compromise of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.
Germany’s libel law standards are allegedly more stringent than America’s. German public broadcaster ZDF wouldn’t have run with Buma as a source had he not cleared their famously serious vetting.
Buma’s interview means that a major U.S. ally — Germany’s preeminent newscaster— has declared Jonathan Buma credible. Which, in effect, means that these institutional European forces find me credible as I worked on Musk (and other) matters as a confidential informant for the FBI. Some of that work has become public but quite a bit has not.
You can listen to Buma’s attorney, Scott Howard, explain, in English, the Stasi-like tactics deployed against Buma by both the Bureau and unnamed “dirty tricksters.” Buma was arrested earlier this year in a strange effort to stop him from publishing his memoirs. He’s currently running for Congress in Arizona.
Unbeknownst to me Buma was involved in a counterintelligence investigation against Russians targeting American billionaires with ties to South Africa — Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks. Peter turned government witness—sort of—but Musk decidedly has not. Who knows what Sacks’s deal is now that he’s crypto czar. We’ve probed Sacks’s alleged mob ties elsewhere but one thing is for sure: Sacks looks a lot older than his nearly 53 years.
I haven’t watched the ZDF documentary fully — there isn’t an English version yet and my German language skills aren’t what they once were — but a German friend of mine watched it and she told me it’s quite good. (She used to work for the outgoing Vice Chancellor so she’s clued in on the political situation in Germany.) I understand that there will apparently be other segments so stay tuned, as it were.
The larger forces here appear to be the role of German counterintelligence in sweeping compromised foreign-born American billionaires now that German chancellor Friedrich Merz has formed his government.
That Buma’s primetime interview coincides with Merz’s speech before the Bundestag promising a more robust German military isn’t entirely coincidental. It will shape Europe for many years to come. I think we’re starting to see things really move.
If I had to guess the European efforts to step up in NATO in the face of perceived American retrenchment is going to lead to a lot more counterintelligence investigations of foreign-compromised Americans.
And maybe that’s a good thing. Friends can keep one another honest.
It’s perhaps fitting that the Germans get involved here. Buma and I often talked about the 2006 German movie The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) which details how a Stasi officer is tasked with investigating a writer by his corrupt superiors—only for said Stasi officer to protect the very writer he was asked to spy for. The emotionally powerful moment of the film is when the writer realizes that the officer had been protecting him this whole time.
It’s nice people are realizing that Johnathan Buma is a good man.
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