Under Constant American Surveillance

The double agent who collected and transferred all the data from intelligence service contacts in Germany to Washington on behalf of the U.S with Snowden, is the new episode which is being recorded a few months following the revelation that the National Security Agency was listening in on Angela Merkel’s cellphone calls.

After the confusion which followed the collapse of Eastern Germany and the impending unification of Germany in the summer of 1990, the Stasi’s files were smuggled to the also failing USSR. From there, a great part was transferred to the U.S., and from there the data was returned to unified Germany.

In other words, apart from the eavesdropping which is now continuing both electronically and through Americans inside the German Federal Intelligence Service BND, the first reading and to some extent, the careful choice of what should be withheld and what should be returned from the Stasi files, was done without the knowledge of the competent German state authorities.

The first surveillance scandal broke in 1974 with the case of the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt being spied on by U.S.-controlled Günter Guillaume, his personal assistant and head of his private political office. That scandal not only involved espionage, but also conspiracy. It provoked political instability. Initially, the CIA identified Guillaume as being a Stasi agent and then as being with BND intelligence, and concealed data from Brandt for at least a year. When the case was made public, the chancellor was so politically exposed that he was forced to resign.

Germany’s troubled history—first its Nazi past and then the abrupt dissolution of East Germany—offered, without doubt, unique opportunities in the history of espionage for intelligence, blackmail and influence from the U.S. intelligence services, first in Bonn and then in Berlin.

There is a mutual lack of trust. Last Monday in Beijing, Merkel talked with unusual harshness about Washington’s surveillance practices, to the delight and satisfaction of the Chinese leadership.

She said, “If the allegations are true, it would be for me a clear contradiction as to what I consider to be trusting cooperation between agencies and partners.”

That is an ostensibly naïve observation, as it is known that in Berlin the CIA and the NSA act as in a hostile territory.

A head-on collision between Germany and the U.S. is inconceivable. It had not even been attempted during Ostpolitik, the eastern policy era of Willy Brandt, and currently Merkel is even more careful. This is shown by Berlin’s policy toward the U.S. and Russia during the Ukraine conflict.

The U.S. would have preferred a total alignment of Berlin’s policy with its own, but it can be happy with the current balance struck by the chancellery, which differs by offering the Kremlin a more respectable option to adapt to the harsh reality of Ukraine turning to the EU, but in the foreseeable future it is not going to join the NATO.

The fact that the double agent prioritized informing the U.S. intelligence services about what is going on between Snowden and Berlin directly demonstrates the permanent uncertainty of the German political elite, regarding what the Americans know and what they can do if they feel that any aspect of German politics—mainly in connection to Russia—is becoming annoying.