The National Security Agency (NSA) stopped spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other world leaders after the White House learned of the snooping, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
President Barack Obama learned of the electronic surveillance in an internal review he ordered at mid-year, the Journal reported, citing unnamed US officials. The review showed that the NSA had tapped the phones of some 35 world leaders. The White House ended programs tracking several of the leaders including Merkel, according to the Journal.
“Some programs have been scheduled to end but have not yet been terminated,” the Journal said. Officials told the Journal that there were so many NSA eavesdropping operations that it would not have been practical to brief the president on all of them. Obama was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection priorities, but deputies decided on specific intelligence targets, the Journal said. “These decisions are made at NSA,” the unnamed official told the Journal. “The president doesn’t sign off on this stuff.”
Germany’s Bild am Sonntag weekly quoted US intelligence sources on Sunday as saying that NSA chief General Keith Alexander briefed Obama on the operation against Merkel in 2010. In Washington, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines denied the claim. 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,” Vines said. “News reports claiming otherwise are not true.”
The snooping allegations, based on documents leaked by former US defence contractor Edward Snowden, indicate that US spy agencies accessed the electronic communications of dozens of world leaders and likely millions of foreign nationals.
Spain enraged over US phone taps
Spain on Monday denounced newly reported mass US eavesdropping on its citizens’ telephone calls, calling it “inappropriate and unacceptable” as outrage spread over the worldwide espionage programme. The Spanish government delivered the message to US Ambassador James Costos, summoned to explain the latest revelations in a growing scandal over US snooping on telephone and online communications of ordinary citizens and world leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The news emerged just as a European Parliament delegation began a three-day mission to Washington to probe the impact of the surveillance on EU citizens’ “fundamental rights” and to discuss a threat to suspend an EU-US agreement on the transfer of banking data. A senior Spanish foreign ministry official met with the US envoy hours after the El Mundo daily published a classified document purportedly showing that the US security services tracked 60.5 million Spanish telephone calls in a single month. The National Security Agency recorded the origin and destination of the calls and their duration but not the content, said El Mundo, which printed a classified graph showing 30 days of call tracing up to January 8 this year.