Well they would, wouldn’t they… 
Seriously though, I accept that the description is perhaps rather ungenerous to the BfV.
They have the usual spies’ problem of not being able to talk about their successes much while their failures get splashed all over the newspapers.
There do seem to have been a lot of those though.
I’m sure you’re right that they take right-wing extremism seriously but in the past they do seem to have taken the secret policeman’s easy cop out of finding someone in the group you want to infiltrate and giving him money to tell you about what the group is doing.
This is fine until you realise that you can’t actually do anything with the information without burning your source so it has to be something serious to justify the ‘loss’ of your asset. And somehow nothing ever is quite that serious.
So you end up with the farcical situation where a large part of the subversive group is in fact being paid by the security services for information about what the other members of the group (also paid by the security services) are doing, several of the others are undercover officers actively encouraging illegal activity by the other members (if not actively engaging in such themselves) in order to set up their bona fides and the two genuine and as yet unbribed members sit in a corner at meetings wondering where all these fanatics came from.
Eventually, either someone gets outed and it’s a massive scandal or the group members realise that there is no effective oversight and they can actually use the security services to achieve their goals - until something goes wrong and the whole thing gets outed and is a massive scandal.
It’s a trap all security services fall in to - see pretty much any Special Branch undercover operation, the entirety of the UK’s involvement in loyalist groups in Northern Ireland, etc.
The BfV were admittedly just as prepared to hand out bombs, etc. to ‘red’ groups as they were to give them to neo-nazi groups.
Given the history, it would be amazing if it wasn’t. You can’t really spend 40 years as an institution mostly focused on stopping communist spying/insurrection attempts without it leaving some lasting impression.
Are they still spying on Die Linke Bundestagsabgeordnete?
