If you believe Barack Obama, then Angela Merkel can feel secure during her trip to Washington, D.C. The team led by the U.S. president has reaffirmed its message: Chancellor, you are not being monitored by us now, nor will you be in the future! But can the Christian Democratic Union politician really trust the Americans during her two-day visit?
The response to the current crisis in Ukraine shows that the U.S. and Germany still stand closely together. In addition to the desired free trade agreement between the EU and the U.S., the conflict there will be the main topic on the agenda when Merkel and Obama meet at the White House on Friday.
But over all this hangs a deep black cloud: The trans-Atlantic partnership has shown cracks in the past year. The reason: the rampant surveillance by the American intelligence service, the National Security Agency.
The NSA Led Germany by the Nose
German politicians felt especially duped. After the first Snowden revelations, they had vociferously defended the Americans and rejected all allegations. Soon, however, things gradually became clearer: The NSA and its partner services were spying on millions of German citizens. The highlight was the news that Merkel had been an NSA target for years.
Much of what the Americans had previously claimed now proved to be simply untrue. In the Bundestag in January, Merkel spoke these unusually clear words: “A procedure in which the end justifies the means, […] violates trust, it sows mistrust.” Even a trip to the U.S. will not solve a problem of this magnitude. In the German government, only Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, CDU, was sharper in his language, referring to the actions as being “beyond measure” during the Munich Security Conference in January.
Even today, almost a year after the first revelations and shortly before Merkel’s arrival in the American capital, it is unclear whether the United States will make an attempt at reparation. Perhaps its motto is simply: Keep on going!
Nevertheless, if the chancellor returns from her trip with concessions of any kind, great skepticism will remain; so far the Americans have failed to keep too many promises in this affair. Above all, there are three lies that Merkel must forgive if German-American relations are to improve again.
1. “We are not ‘rifling through’ the emails of Europe’s citizens”
The scandal was only a few days old when the U.S. president arrived in Berlin in June 2013. The reports in the British newspaper, The Guardian, on the Americans’ spying program had caused a furor around the globe. The question arose as to whether German citizens were also affected, but Obama told Merkel that ordinary emails from German citizens had not been “rifled through,” and that in any case, judicial authorization would be required to do so.
However, it only took a few days before a new revelation from Snowden shattered this statement: Together with the British Government Communication Headquarters, the NSA had tapped the fiber optic cable which transmits a large proportion of global e-mail and telephone calls. Even when an email is sent to a recipient within Germany, the data will often flow through these cables on the bottom of the Atlantic.
The reports described nothing more than a groundless program of spying, and none of the details of the programs had been approved by any U.S. judge. The Christian Social Union internal and judicial expert Hans-Peter Uhl later put the consequence of this aptly: The fundamental right to self-determination with regard to information had degenerated into an “idyll of the past.”
2. “We adhere to German laws”
Ronald Pofalla had actually wanted to declare the affair ended. On Aug. 12, 2013, after a meeting of the Parliamentary Control Committee, the then-head of the Chancellery said, “The NSA and British intelligence services have assured us that they respect the law in Germany.” On July 23, the NSA promised the German government in writing that “the NSA would not do anything to harm German interests.” In a “Memorandum of Agreement” as far back as April 2002, the American intelligence agency had assured Germany that it would “abide by the German laws and regulations governing the implementation of telecommunications and electronic information and processing.”
For a short time, everything was quiet on the topic in this country, although this was also due to the fact that there were no named monitoring victims. For many people, Snowden’s documents showed only an abstract form of surveillance that did not concern them any further. Then at the end of October came the sensational news that Merkel’s cell phone had been monitored for years.
The Americans’ promises were thus exposed as just a lot of hot air. They had clearly broken fundamental rights, including those of the chancellor.
Incidentally, it is not yet entirely clear where Merkel was actually being monitored from. The U.S. Embassy at the Brandenburg Gate is a possibility that has been mentioned several times in the past year. However, the two Spiegel editors, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark, who had access to Snowden’s original documents, wrote in their book about the affair that there are some indications that Merkel’s cell phone was tapped via nodal points of telephone networks.
3. “The U.S. offers a ‘no-spy’ agreement”
The German government assumed it held a jewel in its hand. As early as last summer, Berlin declared that the NSA had agreed to pursue a “no-spy” agreement. Pofalla was exultant: “This offer could never have been made if the Americans’ assurances that they will abide by German law in Germany were not actually true,” the CDU politician said. The hope was that the agreement would relieve the present and future concerns of the German citizens.
In their answer to a minor interpellation from the Social Democratic Party, the government presented assurances that had already been orally agreed. Among other things, they declared that the two governments would not operate any form of “mutual espionage.”
The U.S. could have stuck to these plans even after the subsequent embarrassing revelations about Merkel’s cell phone, but instead Washington backed down and no longer wanted to associate itself with the promises of its intelligence services. Obama’s team decided not to create a precedent with the Germans, since they feared that other partner countries would then demand similar agreements.
Berlin was left empty-handed and humiliated. Government spokesman Steffen Seibert has now said quite openly that there will be no “no-spy agreement.” Negotiations are instead taking place over a secret agreement on cooperation between the German federal intelligence service, BND, and the NSA.
Outcome of the Affair: Open
What happens next is unclear. Broken trust usually takes a long time to rebuild itself. In January, Obama said that the degenerated NSA surveillance program is to be tamed to a kind of American data retention program.
In addition, the U.S. says that it no longer intends to monitor friendly heads of state and heads of government, but after this year, to what extent can such promises be trusted?
As chancellor, Merkel appears to be protected from any kind of future surveillance, but for all the other members of the government or her fellow travelers to the U.S., this assurance is no longer valid. Our message can only be: Have a good trip!
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