Obama accused of approving tap
NEW YORK — U.S. President Barack Obama was dragged into the trans-Atlantic spying row Sunday after it was claimed he personally authorized the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s telephone three years ago.
Scrambling to contain the growing diplomatic fallout, the NSA was forced Sunday night to deny reports that the president allegedly allowed U.S. intelligence to listen to calls from Merkel’s mobile telephone after he was briefed on the operation by Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), in 2010.
The latest claim, reported in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, followed reports in Der Spiegel that the surveillance of Merkel’s telephone began as long ago as 2002 when she was still the opposition leader, three years before being elected chancellor. That monitoring only ended in the weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June this year, the magazine added. Citing leaked U.S. intelligence documents, it also reported that America conducted eavesdropping operations on the German government from a listening post at its embassy beside the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, one of more than 80 such centres worldwide.
Obama’s European allies will now ask him to say what he personally knew about the NSA’s global eavesdropping operation and its targeting of world leaders, including those from friendly states. The White House declined to comment on the German media reports.
However, a NSA spokesman said Alexander “did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel.”
Last week, Obama assured Merkel her telephone was not being monitored now and will not be in future. But the U.S. has declined to discuss the NSA’s actions in the past. Its surveillance operations raises questions about whether U.S. officials breached domestic laws.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said: “If the Americans intercepted cellphones in Germany, they broke German law on German soil.” He noted that wiretapping was a crime in Germany and “those responsible must be held accountable”.
Even before the latest reports, German intelligence chiefs were preparing to travel to Washington this week to demand answers from the NSA about the alleged surveillance of Merkel.
John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, received a dose of European fury this weekend when he visited Paris and Rome to discuss the Middle East. Instead, he was confronted by outrage over the scale of U.S. surveillance operations. “The magnitude of the eavesdropping shocked us,” said Bernard Kouchner, a former French foreign minister, in a radio interview.