General Alexander's Predecessor Threatens the German Bundestag

The National Security Agency would indeed have nearly prevented World War II: If the matter involving her telephone wasn’t so embarrassing for Mrs. Merkel, the Americans would have long ago put this saga to bed.

If the American intelligence services had tapped into the telephone of Adolf Hitler, World War II would have been prevented. This is the understanding of the latest plea by Mike Rogers in defense of the NSA. The chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence was talking on the CBS show “Face the Nation.” He counters colleagues in Congress, who say that after the revelation of the bugging operation against Angela Merkel the time has come for a law limiting the authority of the NSA, by saying that in the 1930s monitoring of communications of friends and foes had been stopped — with catastrophic consequences. “We did this in the 1930s. We turned it off. In 1929, [the] secretary of state at that time, where they were collecting information to protect America said, you know, we shouldn’t do this. This is unseemly. They turned it off. Well, that led to a whole bunch of misunderstanding that led to World War II, that killed millions and millions of people.”

Henry Stimson, who took over the leadership of the State Department after the 1929 election of Republican President Herbert Hoover, struck his department’s contribution to the budget of the Black Chamber, the NSA precursor built by Herbert Yardley in New York, and justified the cost-saving measure with the immortal words: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In his criticism of Stimson, Rogers left open whether he disputes the validity of this maxim or whether he is of the opinion that American statesmen cannot afford the luxury of being gentlemen. Also unclear was whether the history lesson was really in relation to the beginning of the European war or maybe just to the Pacific War against Japan, whether Rogers wanted to suggest that the attack on Pearl Harbor could have been thwarted with intelligence-related communications reconnoitering. In favor of a politician who is proud of his historical education and takes the opportunity to remember that the word “espionage” comes from French, one would indeed like to assume that historiographically he is no supporter of isolationism, but would let World War II begin in 1939.

Talk of misunderstanding also works well for the debate about the familiar idea of the appeasement politics of England and France; to start with, Hitler concealed his true global political aims. Yet we accept that Yardley’s people really would have overheard how Hitler signaled to Mussolini, Göring or Heidegger that after dispatching the English he would deal with the Americans. If this information had been put before President Hoover in the daily summary of the newest secret intelligence, how would Hoover and Stimson have persuaded the German chancellor not to translate his megalomaniacal plan into a self-destructive act? Would they have summoned the ambassador or made contact with presumably outmoded sympathetic diplomats like Ernst von Weizsäcker through official channels? Any official protest would surely only have meant that they shut Hitler up but would have still left him able to do his deeds.

Against the background of the historians’ dispute of the question whether the Roosevelt administration refrained from making the necessary moral use of messages from secret sources about the Holocaust due to strategic reasons is excluded in Rogers’ confusingly outlined mind games. Similar to the representative from Michigan but just as unclear was the statement last Sunday by his party colleague, Peter King of New York. Such flippancy isn’t a good reference for the opinion represented by historians Alexander Demandt and Niall Ferguson; the assessment of alternative courses of history sharpens the faculty of judgment.

Michael Hayden, General Keith Alexander’s predecessor as director of the NSA, used a counterfactual scenario in an interview with Bob Scheiffer on “Face the Nation.” His analysis of the — according to Fritz Stern — greatest crisis for the German-American relationship since 1945 is based upon the assessment that the “foolish, criminal act” of accessing Mrs. Merkel’s telephone is not so much unpleasant for the American president, but for the German chancellor. According to Hayden’s opinion, it would have been Germany’s concern to deal with the global embarrassment or rather not to let it out in the first place. “Let us suppose that this activity was not discovered by the press, but by the German counterintelligence. The last thing that the Germans would have wanted was for the case to be made public. They would have turned to us in private and we would have solved the problem. But, as it turned out, important connections which we support, have been destroyed or put under threat.”

The only question remaining is: How would Hayden’s colleagues have solved the problem? Not by shutting down the surveillance of the chancellor’s telephone. Previously, Hayden said that the secret branch of the Berlin embassy was only doing its job. On the question of whether Mrs. Merkel had been spied upon during his six-year tenure, between 1999 and 2005, as director of the NSA, he said: “I can’t comment on any specific activities. But leadership intentions were a very high intelligence priority for the life of the National Security Agency. It’s nothing special, and it’s certainly nothing new.” Hayden uttered a blatant threat in case Edward Snowden should be invited as a witness before a court of inquiry. Should the Germans “give Mr. Snowden a platform from which he could reveal even more American secrets,” then “that would kind of tend to moot the whole debate here about whether or not we’re spying on a friend.”

Rogers, the chairman of the board, and his colleague in the Senate, Californian Democrat Dianne Feinstein, talked about contact with Snowden on Schieffer’s program, after which Snowden manifested the hope, in a letter to the federal government delivered by Deputy Ströbele, that the U.S. government would desist from its intention to punish him for actions which high American officials would otherwise by now have called a service to the public. Rogers and Feinstein categorically ruled out any clemency for Snowden. Feinstein, who created a furor with her sharply worded reproof against Mrs. Merkel, didn’t even mention that the president has the power of clemency according to the pardon clause of the Constitution, which he can exact after the criminal proceedings. Callously they point out to Snowden that he should have trustingly turned himself in to the board — like Tomas Drake, the NSA employee who did exactly that during Hayden’s time in office and was not indicted. This type of endorsement for the criminal proceedings doesn’t improve the United States’ chances of extradition.

Rand Paul, the Republican senator for Kentucky who has taken up the torch for the libertarian wing of the conservative movement from his father Ron Paul, dismissed the idea of whether Snowden deserved clemency on the ABC show “This Week,” without having sufficient knowledge of the facts to be able to give an opinion. Has he revealed secrets to a foreign power? “That would be a great deal of concern.” The senator also said it concerns him that James Clapper, the national defense director, lied to Congress. “I haven’t heard of anybody talking about repercussions for him. I think he’s seriously damaged our standing in the world.”