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Barack Obama knew about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel for some years and he also personally approved it, according to a report published on Sunday.
Obama was informed about the NSA’s tapping of Merkel’s mobile phone already in 2010 by its director Keith Alexander. The president “not only did not stop the operation, but he also ordered it to continue,”
Bild am Sonntag newspaper said quoting a high-ranking NSA official.
The White House later ordered the spy agency to prepare a detailed dossier on the chancellor.
President Obama did not trust Merkel and wanted to know everything about her, Bild said quoting the official, who was not identified.
Subsequently, the NSA stepped up its surveillance of Merkel and snooped into all conversations with her mobile phone used for communicating with her party colleagues, the newspaper said.
The agency also cracked the codes of a new supposedly tap-proof mobile phone she has been using since the middle of this year, the newspaper said. This showed that the NSA continued its spying on the chancellor until very recently, it said.
Merkel’s conversation from her office via fixed line phones, which she used to communicate with other world leaders, was secure from eavesdropping, the newspaper said.
A report on Sunday claimed President Obama had assured chancellor Merkel during a telephone conversation last Wednesday that he was not aware of the NSA’s spying on her.
When Merkel called him to complain about the suspected surveillance by the NSA, President Obama told her that he would have stopped it if he knew about it, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Bild said President Obama’s interest in information about Merkel was evident from the fact that intelligence gathered by the NSA did not go as usual to its headquarters in Fort Meade, in Maryland, but directly to the White House.
Another report in weekly news magazine Der Spiegel said NSA may also have spied on the entire government complex in Berlin from the nearby American embassy.
The chancellor’s mobile phone number was on a list of NSA monitoring targets found in classified documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The documents revealed that the spy agency started its surveillance of Merkel’s mobile phone in 2002 when George Bush was in the White House.
The relations between president Obama and Merkel have been difficult from the very beginning, Bild newspaper said. Merkel denied Obama a chance to address the German public from the Brandenburg Gate during his election campaign in 2008.
Besides personal differences, there are also conflicts over policy issues. Obama very often criticised her course in the euro zone debt crisis. The US government was irritated by Germany’s decision to stay out of the Libyan conflict, Bild said.
The newspaper also claimed that according to its information, the NSA's surveillance operations are carried out from the US Embassy in Berlin, where it has a secret operational centre with a team of 18 people.
As the first indications of the NSA’s spying on Merkel emerged last week, the German foreign ministry summoned US ambassador John B Emerson to express its concern.
Merkel’s predecessor Gerhard Schroeder also was monitored by the NSA. The main reason for his surveillance was his refusal to send German troops to the war in Iraq in 2002, Bild said.
