BERLIN, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Germany should beef up its intelligence services and allow them more freedom to act in the face of a range of hybrid threats from Russia, the head of the country’s foreign intelligence service said on Friday.

After decades of self-imposed caution over state spying and surveillance following World War Two, German politicians and security officials have been pressing to allow its foreign and domestic intelligence agencies greater leeway to act in the face of what they see as an increased threat from Russia.

“The threat emanating from hybrid warfare has been recognized,” Martin Jaeger, head of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, told a panel at the Munich Security Conference.

“Deterrence is not working yet. This raises the question, do we simply want to continue to observe and record these developments, or have we reached a point where we must take active countermeasures?”

“This question also applies to my service, the BND. In my opinion, the service must and will become more operational,” he said.

Jaeger said Germany had uncovered a major Russian-linked influence operation ahead of last year’s federal election, which he said used pseudo-investigative research, deepfakes, and fabricated witness statements on various platforms. He said police had registered 321 acts of sabotage in Germany last year, many of which were likely to be linked to Russia.

The Russian government has consistently denied running disinformation networks but the perceived threat has been a recurrent theme among Western policymakers since Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the conference of security policy experts in Munich that Germany would strengthen its intelligence services as part of a wider drive to rebuild its armed forces and improve its resilience in the face of a heightened threat from Russia.

“We will protect our free democratic order from both internal and external enemies,” he told the conference in a speech in which he said the old international rules-based order no longer existed as it had in the past.

The German parliament is debating a new bill that would allow the intelligence services, which are currently bound by strict rules curtailing their activities, to take more active measures against security threats.  

(Reporting by James Mackenzie, Editing by William Maclean)