Germany plans to reform its foreign intelligence service BND to make it more adept at combating terrorism and preparing the ground for missions abroad, its president Ernst Uhrlau said on Monday.

Uhrlau told Die Welt newspaper that the Bundesnachrichtendienst will be streamlined by cutting its number of management levels. Its relocation to Berlin from Pullach near Munich in 2012 will enable it to merge operations under one roof after they were spread among 60 different buildings in Pullach, Uhrlau added.

The service will also get better at sharing its information with the government and with other security agencies in Germany and abroad in a shift of emphasis from "need to know" to "need to share," said Uhrlau. "We want to operate with a flatter hierarchy, which means a smaller number of management levels," Uhrlau told Die Welt.

The BND still had its old structure which was geared to fighting the Cold War, and to monitoring and fending off the KGB and East Germany's espionage operations, said Uhrlau. "Over the last decade the asymmetrical threat of international terrorism has increased dramatically. We've got to adapt to these changed demands," said Uhrlau.

The increasing deployment of German troops abroad as part of NATO, United Nations of European Union missions has also changed the requirements for its agents, said Uhrlau.

"The most recent example is the Congo mission.  We as BND started preparing for it at the start of the year when the mandate was already looking likely. In a region which hadn't in the past been one of our core intelligence areas we suddenly had to provide precise and detailed information-gathering to protect the lives of soldiers as well as possible."

Uhrlau denied that BND agents provided "just in time" information to help the US  during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. And he said the agency had changed its operational procedures in response to revelations that it had monitored journalists to find out about a leak in its ranks.