Spying backlash threatens U.S. relationships in Europe
Officials worry about fallout from disclosures
WASHINGTON — The expanding trans-Atlantic scandal over U.S. eavesdropping on European leaders and spying on its citizens has begun to strain intelligence relationships and diplomatic ties between allies that call each other best friends, according to diplomats and foreign policy experts.
The cascade of embarrassing disclosures is not expected to upend one of President Barack Obama’s goals, a proposed transAtlantic free trade agreement that could generate billions of dollars a year, or halt cooperation on top security issues, such as efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program and to contain the Syrian civil war.
But the documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have caused friction in multiple capitals and put the Obama administration on the defensive at home and abroad.
The greatest damage, officials warn, may be with U.S. relations with Germany, where outrage followed reports that the NSA secretly monitored Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phones for more than a decade. The front page of Die Zeit, a mainstream weekly paper, showed a broken heart, with U.S. and German flags, and a headline “Goodbye Freunde!”
In a sign of a potential backlash, some European officials have begun demanding that the European Union suspend or end the Safe Harbor agreement that lets thousands of U.S. companies safely store and process commercial and Demonstrators with a poster of Edward Snowden protest the NSA’s collection of German data in July in Berlin.
No spying on U.N.
UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations said Wednesday that the U.S. has pledged not to spy on the world body’s communications after a report that the National Security Agency had gained access to the U.N. video conferencing system.
The United Nations contacted U.S. authorities after the spying revelations were made by German news magazine Der Spiegel in August, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. personal data from clients and customers in Europe.
Without the commercial agreement, U. S. firms would face lengthy and costly delays in doing business in Europe. U.S. officials say Safe Harbor is not related to the spying scandal, but they are wary of the growing political fallout amid warnings that trust has been broken.
“For ambitious and complex negotiations to succeed, there needs to be trust among the negotiating partners,” Viviane Reding, European Union justice commissioner, said in a speech Wednesday at Yale University.
On Tuesday, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA chief, said at a House hearing that spy services in France, Spain and Italy had shared more than 170 million telephone records with the agency earlier this year, denying that it had vacuumed up the data on its own. He thus spread the responsibility, if not the blame, for the bulk collection of data.
The finger- pointing “will not make cooperation any easier,” said a European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
Even though U.S. officials have not implicated German spy services, Francois Heisbourg, chair of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, said Germany has suffered the biggest blow from the disclosures so far.
Germany is especially sensitive to government spying, he said, because of its grim history with the Nazi secret police, known as the Gestapo, andthe East German secret police, called the Stasi.
U.S. officials say privately they think they can manage the issue without serious damage to relations.