To the regret of all of us who worked on them, Berto stopped publishing the Afrika-Bulletin and the Afrika-Schnellbrief at the end of 1971 for financial reasons. The subsidies we had originally received had ended and the publishing house's own resources weren't sufficient to cover the costs. I joined the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND), based in Pullach near Munich, for a probationary period as a senior civil servant. In those days it was impossible just to apply for a job with the BND; they chose you. It's probably the same nowadays.

The history of the BND is well known. At the beginning it focused exclusively on the Eastern Bloc, but in the late 1950s it developed into the foreign intelligence service of the Federal Republic. In order to play a full role in global politics the Federal Republic had to extend its foreign relations to the countries of the “Third World”, which had colonial rule behind them and independence ahead of them and often had high expectations of “the Germans”.

I had already developed a reputation as an expert in African political, economic and social affairs. And so one day – quite unexpectedly – I was invited to cooperate with the BND. I was astounded, and I hesitated. I had very clear memories of the Gestapo, and after all, a secret service was a secret service. But after some discussions I came to the conclusion that the BND could not be compared either with the intelligence services of the Third Reich or with the GDR's State Security Service, the Stasi. They were interested not in the political attitudes and activities of German citizens, but in political information from abroad.

I felt quite honored. Up till then I had so often been blocked or even expressly rejected because of my African heritage when I applied for a position, even in the public sector. Now my difficult mother country was asking me of her own accord to enter into active service. I took up the challenge, knowing among other things that I could be a model for generations of younger Afro-Germans, and to prove that we could fulfill important functions and duties in the state of the kind that up to now people had doubted we were capable of and which they certainly had never offered us the chance to take on.