German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal mobile phone may have been monitored by the US (Reuters)
(The telegraph) British intelligence spied on German leaders as they discussed how to bailout Greece in 2011, newly released cables purport to show.
British officials passed intelligence to the US National Security Agency on proposals by Germany to ask developing nations to help rescue Athens.
The claim was made by Wikileaks, the anti-secrecy website, in the latest release of US cables from the US spy agency. The website did not give a source for the documents, but it follows the leak of thousands of cables by Edward Snowden, a former contractor who is now living in Russia.
The documents also appear to show that the US was intercepting calls of Angela Merkel and a raft of her senior officials.
Reports two years ago that Merkel’s phone had been targeted by the NSA prompted diplomatic friction between Berlin and Washington, but German prosecutors recently dropped their probe into the case citing lack of concrete evidence.
WikiLeaks said the new, partially-redacted list of 69 phone and fax numbers belonged to senior officials at Germany’s economy and finance ministries, among others.
• Wikileaks documents reveal US spied on French leaders
Sigmar Gabriel, the economy minister, and Oskar Lafontaine the former finance minister, are on the list. Suddeutsche Zeitung said some of the numbers are still active.
Wikileaks published two documents it claimed were summaries of conversations intercepted – one involving Merkel and a second involving a senior aide – concerning the Greek debt crisis.
A conversation involving Niklaus Meyer-Landrut was intercepted by British intelligence, which passed it to the NSA, according to WikiLeaks. In it, Mr Meyer-Landrut discloses that “the Germans would support a special IMF fund into which the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations would pool funds for the purpose of bolstering eurozone bailout activities”.
The revelations about US espionage in Germany provoked outrage in a country still haunted by the memory of mass surveillance by the East German Stasi.
In 2013 Mrs Merkel publicly rebuked President Obama over the affair. “Spying between friends, that’s just not done,” she said.