Nearly two months after president Obama assured chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany that the United States would never again target her cellphone, a broader effort to build a new intelligence relationship with Germany is floundering, with each side increasingly reluctant to make major changes in how it deals with the other.
American officials have refused to extend the ‘no spying’ guarantee beyond Ms Merkel, telling German officials in private sessions that if the White House agreed to forgo surveillance on German territory, other partners would insist on the same treatment. “Susan Rice has been very clear to us,” one senior German official said, referring to Obama’s national security adviser. “The US is not going to set a precedent.”
How aggressively to continue targeting the leaders of countries allied with the United States is one of the most delicate questions facing Obama as he weighs the still-confidential report of an outside advisory group that submitted 40 recommendations to him on Friday, including several dealing with spying on the United States’ closest allies and partners.
The director of the National Security Agency, Gen Keith B Alexander, said in an interview after the monitoring of chancellor Merkel was revealed that the United States may soon have to choose between spying on partners and making them full participants in combating digital threats. Merkel has also responded to the disclosures: Among the ministers she named to her new coalition government on Sunday was a former intelligence official.
“This is a consequence of the NSA matter, or affair,” she said, using the common reference in Germany to the reports on American intelligence activities. It is “a justified response to the new challenges we face.” According to officials familiar with the advisory group’s report to Obama, it concluded that the White House must regularly review the NSA’s surveillance programmes to determine whether the intelligence gathered is worth the damage that would be done if a programme were revealed — a process that CIA operations go through annually. Officials said elements of that recommendation were already being adopted ahead of Obama’s broader announcement, expected in January, about the NSA overhauls he plans to make.
But as Obama considers his options, the effort to repair the damage to the United States’ relationship with Germany appears to have stumbled. American officials have so far refused to pull back from electronic spying in the country, save for Merkel’s own communications, even though German officials argue that the United States is violating German law. At the same time, Germany is equally reluctant to enter into a deeper cooperation agreement, at least on American terms.
Germany has for years participated in American counterterrorism operations, especially those tracking suspected Al Qaeda or other terrorist cells inside Germany, but it has refused to provide the United States with information that it believes could help provide targets for drone strikes. Now, officials are reluctant to join in some types of bulk collection of telephone data or preparations for offensive digital strikes against other countries.
“We simply don’t have the capability or the legal authorities,” said one senior German official involved in the talks, who, like other officials interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential.
The White House has tried to engage the German leadership quietly, hoping to avoid further public confrontations while Merkel formed her new government. “At the president’s and chancellor’s direction, we continue to talk with our German partners about how we can strengthen our intelligence cooperation and address some of the concerns that have been raised,” Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said Saturday. “We’ve agreed that these talks are best held confidentially, so I’m not going to provide any details at this stage.”
Continued wariness
Nonetheless, in interviews in the past week, American and German officials described a continued wariness in the countries’ relationship after documents that the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel received from Edward J Snowden, the former NSA contractor, revealed the apparent tracking of Merkel’s personal cellphone and suggested that other surveillance operations had been run out of the United States Embassy here.
While Obama tried to make amends, several senior German officials expressed suspicions that the United States might be using its surveillance technology to strengthen its negotiating hand in trade talks with the European Union, in which Germany is the most important player. The dispute also reflects very different views of how far the state should go in conducting surveillance, both at home and abroad.
In an angry conversation with Obama in October after the phone monitoring was revealed, Merkel said that the NSA’s activities reminded her of growing up as the daughter of a Protestant minister in East Germany. “She told him, ‘This is like the Stasi,’ ” said one person who had discussed the conversation with the chancellor.
Another person familiar with the conversation said Merkel had told Obama that she was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, “the NSA clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”
American officials said that the German accounts accurately captured the spirit of the heated conversation, but that the quotations given by German officials were more direct and pointed than what was actually said. But the exchange set the tone for a dialogue between Washington and Berlin that has only underscored how differently the two countries see the issue.
United States officials talk about conducting surveillance, whether of adversaries or allies, to protect American interests; German officials emphasize the importance of reaffirming the alliance. American officials are intent on gathering the data needed to quickly determine the whereabouts of terrorism suspects; the Germans start with privacy concerns.
The man Merkel tapped for the new post in her coalition government is a veteran of the German security apparatus. Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, 60, now a top Interior Ministry official, was previously deputy head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence service.
The distaste within the German political establishment for the United States’ approach extends beyond former citizens of East Germany, like Merkel. Sigmar Gabriel, chairman of the Social Democratic Party and deputy chancellor in Merkel’s new government, took time in a speech last month to emphasize Germany’s dismay that the United States could engage in the kind of surveillance Snowden has disclosed.
“The United States, the country we Germans have so much to thank for,” Gabriel said at a party congress in Leipzig, “is at the moment endangering the most important foundation of our trans-Atlantic partnership.”