Germany probing new case of alleged US spying
Print Edition
THE second case within days of alleged US spying in Germany has threatened to further strain transatlantic ties already frayed by the NSA surveillance scandal.
German authorities said yesterday police had searched the Berlin-area home and office of a man who is a German military employee accused of passing secrets to the United States.
The case follows last Friday’s news that a 31-year-old German BND intelligence service operative had been arrested, suspected of having sold over 200 documents to the CIA.
The documents reportedly included papers on a German parliamentary panel probing the activities of the US National Security Agency, whose targets have included the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merkel’s government has refused to comment on the specifics of the two cases while investigations continue, but has made clear its anger and sense of betrayal to its decades-old strategic ally the US.
“Espionage is a very serious accusation,” said Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert.
Officials involved in the latest case consider the second case of spying “more serious” than that of the alleged BND mole, according to a report by the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung
The defence ministry said that an internal “investigation is ongoing.”
Merkel’s intelligence services coordinator late Tuesday spoke by phone with CIA chief John Brennan, the chancellor confirmed, and a senior foreign ministry official yesterday met for a second time in five days with US Ambassador John B. Emerson.
The foreign ministry said it had “made vividly clear how important it is in our view that the US government actively and constructively participates in clearing up the accusations.”
Merkel said early this week that the BND double agent case, if true, would be “a clear contradiction as to what I consider to be trusting cooperation between agencies and partners.”
And Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told a newspaper that “it would be most disturbing if the spying merrily continued while we’re looking at the NSA wiretapping activities and have set up a committee in parliament.”
Emerson acknowledged in a speech on Tuesday that “we must acknowledge that the German-American relationship is now undergoing a difficult challenge.”
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