The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) wiretapped then US President Barack Obama for years. According to ZEIT research, the German foreign intelligence service intercepted the US politician’s conversations when he was on board the government plane Air Force One called on the phone. The Chancellery finally ended surveillance of the presidential machine in 2014.
The operation is particularly politically explosive because Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized the NSA in 2013 with the words: “Spying on friends is not possible“.
The BND was able to intercept the US President’s conversations because, according to insiders, the encryption of the plane’s communications was prone to errors. The US government machine’s technicians used about a dozen frequencies for Obama’s phone calls, which the BND knew about and, according to those involved, monitored regularly, if not consistently. The BND was aware of the explosiveness of the operation: the USA was not part of the official mission profile in which the federal government specifies which countries the BND should investigate.
The transcripts of Obama’s communications were therefore kept in a special folder and only in simple form. This folder was only circulated among a small, hand-picked circle at the top of the intelligence service, including the BND president, the vice presidents and the responsible department head. After reading, the transcripts should be destroyed. The findings then flowed into general assessments of the US attitude, which were also sent to the Chancellery.
The South German newspaper reported in 2014 that then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been overheard. The then head of the Chancellery, Peter Altmaier, then ordered the practice to be stopped – without knowing, however, that the US President himself had also become a target of the BND. Since then, the BND has no longer monitored the US presidential machine. The operation against Obama ran for several years. It is unclear when it began and whether his predecessor, George W. Bush, had already been selected as a target.
According to information from ZEIT, the BND did not authorize surveillance of Obama; It is unclear whether and how exactly individual employees of the Chancellery knew about it. The Chancellor herself was therefore not in the know. She probably wouldn’t have allowed such an action either. After the Mirror After revealing in October 2013 that the American NSA had been tapping Merkel’s cell phone for years, the Chancellor famously said that surveillance among friends is simply not possible. In a small circle she had drawn comparisons with the Stasi and pointed out that states could collapse due to surveillance mania.
Angela Merkel’s office left questions from ZEIT unanswered. The BND also declined to comment.
Transparency note: This research comes from Holger Stark’s new book “The Adult Country. Germany without America – a historic opportunity”, which has just been published by Propyläen Verlag.
