And then suddenly in October 2013 came a new and extraordinary claim: the NSA had bugged Frau Merkel’s phone!
Der Spiegel found Merkel’s mobile number on an NSA document provided by Snowden. Her number featured next to the words: ‘GE Chancellor Merkel’. The document, S2C32, came from the ‘European States branch’ of the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS). It was marked top-secret. Discovery would lead to ‘serious damage’ in the relations between the US and a ‘foreign government’, the document warned.
The magazine rang the chancellery. German officials launched an investigation. Their findings were explosive: officials concluded that it was highly likely the chancellor had been the victim of a US eavesdropping operation. German sources said Merkel was livid. Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said that such practices, if proved, were ‘completely unacceptable’, a ‘serious breach’.
Ironically enough, Merkel picked up the phone, called Obama and asked him what the hell was going on. The president’s reply was a piece of lawyerly evasion; Obama assured her that the US wasn’t bugging her phone and wouldn’t do so in the future. Or as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: ‘The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.’
It didn’t take an Einstein to work out that the White House was saying nothing about what had happened in the past. It emerged the NSA had bugged Merkel’s phone since 2002, beginning during George W Bush’s first term. Merkel had a personal and an office phone; the agency bugged the personal one, which she used mostly in her capacity as Christian Democrat (CDU) party chief. The eavesdropping continued until a few weeks before Obama’s Berlin visit in June 2013. According to Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, the president had been in the dark about this.
It was well known the German chancellor was a fan of the ‘Handy’, as Germans call their mobiles. Indeed, Merkel ruled by Handy. Her mobile phone was her control centre. At a 2008 EU summit in Brussels she had used it to speak to French president Nicolas Sarkozy; the pair had swapped text messages. In 2009 Merkel got a new encrypted smartphone. It seems the NSA found a way round the encryption. But if the president didn’t know about the bugging, who did?
This unedifying snooping may have given the US an edge in diplomatic summits and an insight into the thinking of friends and foes. But, as the revelations piled up, sparking diplomatic crises in Europe, Mexico and Brazil, it was reasonable to ask whether such practices were really worth the candle.
Certainly, they were causing enormous damage to the US’s global reputation. Obama appeared increasingly isolated on the world stage, and strangely oblivious to the anger from his allies. The man who had charmed the Nobel committee simply by not being President Bush was no longer popular. Europeans didn’t like him. ‘Barack Obama is not a Nobel peace prize winner. He is a troublemaker,’ Robert Rossman wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. On its cover, Stern magazine called Obama Der Spitzel – the informer.
Excruciatingly, Obama’s fellow Nobel Laureates turned on him as well. More than 500 of the world’s leading authors warned that the scale of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden had undermined democracy and fundamental human rights around the globe. ‘In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested,’ the statement read. Snooping by states and corporations had rendered this basic right ‘null and void’, it added.
Ouch! For Obama, a president and an intellectual, this must have hurt. The statement’s signatories amounted to a who’s who from the world of letters, among them five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek and Tomas Tranströmer – and numerous other grandees of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.
The NSA affair was turning into a foreign-policy disaster for an administration that already seemed semi-detached. The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Julian Borger wrote: ‘With each leak, American soft power haemorrhages, and hard power threatens to seep away with it… Nothing could be more personal for a foreign leader than to find their own mobile phones tapped by a nation they considered an essential friend and ally.’
The storm unleashed by Merkel’s bugged mobile reached France the same week, when Le Monde published further embarrassing claims of NSA spying. Der Shitstorm became la tempête de merde. Using material fed by Greenwald, the paper revealed the US was also spying in France on a massive scale. The numbers were astonishing. Over a 30-day period, from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, the NSA intercepted data from 70.3 million French telephone calls.
According to the paper, the NSA carries out around 3 million data intercepts a day in France, with 7 million on 24 December 2012 and 7 January 2013. Between 28 and 31 December no interception took place. Were the NSA’s spies having a festive rest? The documents don’t say.
There were intriguing clues as to how NSA operations work. Spying against France is listed under a secret codename, US-985D. Germany gets its own espionage codes, US-987LA and US-987LB. The programs include DRTBOX – used for data collection – and WHITEBOX, for recording content. Further clandestine acronyms are used to describe spying on French diplomats in the US. In Italy it was the same picture. The Special Collection Service that spied on Merkel was bugging the Italian leadership too, from embassy ‘sites’ in Rome and Milan. Italian metadata was ingested by the millions.
The French government’s response to this was double-layered. In what by now was a much-repeated ritual, the US ambassador to Paris, Charles Rivkin, was summoned to explain himself. François Hollande, the country’s struggling president, called Obama to remonstrate, while his foreign minister Laurent Fabius dubbed the affair ‘totally unacceptable’. ‘Rules are obviously needed when it comes to new communication technologies,’ France’s interior minister Manuel Valls said.
But French reaction was milder than in Germany, and more outrage than outrage. In June, Hollande had threatened to suspend transatlantic trade talks but overall his response was half-hearted, with his rhetoric aimed at domestic voters. One paper, Le Parisien, characterised it as ‘gentlemanly’. Everyone knew that France had its own spying operation, and was a leader in industrial snooping. More importantly, Paris was clearly keen to preserve good relations with Washington. That said, French politicians did seem genuinely stunned by the sheer scale of NSA trawling.
By this point the US was giving the same stock response to anxious allies around the world. The White House said that questions raised by France and other disgruntled Europeans were ‘legitimate’, adding that Washington was reviewing ‘the way that we gather intelligence’ so that ‘we properly balance’ security and privacy. On the other hand, Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council spokesperson, said: ‘The US gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.’ In other words, ‘We spy on you and you spy on us. Get over it, dude.’
Director of national intelligence James Clapper – the man who misled Congress – said Le Monde had got its facts wrong. Clapper denied that the NSA recorded 70.3 million French phone calls. He gave no further details but seemed to imply that the NSA only scooped up the metadata. He suggested that western intelligence agencies were themselves behind much of this European spying.