Germany espionage scandal: Did it spy on EU allies on behalf of US?

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been drawn into a deepening espionage scandal triggered by reports that German intelligence had spied for years on French government and European Union officials at the behest of the United States National Security Agency.

The embarrassing disclosures came in a leaked German intelligence report published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. The report said that at the request of the NSA, Germany’s BND intelligence service had used one of it principal listening posts in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling to spy on top officials including members of the French foreign ministry, the Élysée palace and the European Commission.

The purpose of the operation, the report said, was to collect information on European governments and firms to check whether they were breaking trade embargoes.

The disclosures provoked anger from Germany’s opposition MPs. “The Chancellor must apologise to our European partners,” insisted Christian Lindner, the head of the liberal Free Democrat party. “Apparently, nobody is safe where the BND is concerned. This affair breaks all the rules.”

“The chancellery must put all the facts on the table,” insisted Christian Fisek, the Social Democrat spokesman of a parliamentary committee investigating allegations of unauthorised NSA spying in Germany.

According to the report, German and US officials were said to have remained exempt because they were protected by a BND-NSA agreement signed in 2002. It said that in 2013 the NSA fed the BND with 690,000 phone numbers and 7.8 million IP search codes that it wanted put under surveillance.

It emerged that in 2008, Germany’s current conservative Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière, was the chancellery official directly responsible for the BND. At that time, the report claimed, the BND informed the chancellery that it was assisting the NSA in its spying operation against Germany’s European partners.

Bild newspaper published a picture of Mr de Maizière with his nose elongated to Pinocchio proportions, and the headline: “You lie with impunity.” However, Mr de Maizière denied all knowledge of any operation yesterday and denied any allegations of a cover-up. The Interior Minister said he was unable to comment publicly because the information involved remained classified. However he pledged to divulge all he knew to the parliamentary committee investigating NSA spying next week. “The sooner this is cleared up the better,” he insisted.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker appeared to laugh off the reports: “The Commission should have a secret service,” he said, adding it was up to “the German authorities to deal with that, and I suppose that they will do so”.

Margaritis Schinas, Mr Juncker’s spokesman, added: “We would be a bit disappointed if our activities… did not draw some attention from outside.”

The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Ms Merkel and her government. Two years ago Ms Merkel pledged to combat NSA spying in Germany following disclosures that the agency had bugged her mobile phone. The affair caused public indignation and appeared to sour ties between Berlin and Washington.