The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (27 page)

By the time Barack Obama visited Berlin in June 2013 the NSA row was straining US–German ties. In the wake of the revelations, German commentators likened the NSA to the Gestapo. The comparison was overblown. But the disquiet in Germany triggered by Snowden’s disclosures was real enough.

Obama and Merkel held a press conference in the chancellor’s washing machine-shaped office in Berlin. It was a short but historically resonant walk to the Reichstag, with its transparent Norman Foster dome, and to the Brandenburg Gate. The NSA revelations dominated the agenda.

Obama sought to reassure. He described himself as a critic of his predecessor. He said he came in with a ‘healthy scepticism’ towards the US intelligence community. After closer inspection, however, he felt its surveillance programs struck the ‘appropriate balance’ between security and civil rights. The NSA focused ‘very narrowly’ on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: ‘This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anyone else.’ Obama insisted the system was ‘narrowly circumscribed’. It had saved lives, including German ones.

Merkel was unconvinced. She acknowledged that intelligence-sharing with the US had helped prevent an Islamist terrorist plot in Germany’s Sauerland region in 2007. Nonetheless, Germans were worried: ‘People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information.’

In an interview with the
Guardian
and other European newspapers, Merkel was scathing. She described the spying scandal as ‘extremely serious’: ‘Using bugs to listen in on friends in our embassies and EU representatives is not on. The cold war is over. There is no doubt whatsoever that the fight against terrorism is essential … but nor is there any doubt that things have to be kept proportionate.’

Still, it appeared that Merkel was keen to avoid a full-scale confrontation, her legendary pragmatism once more to the fore. Meanwhile,
Der Shitstorm
billowed across Germany’s media, in print and online. Generally, the tone was alarmed. The German sage Hans-Magnus Enzensberger referred to the ‘transition to a post-democratic society’. Hans-Peter Uhl, a staunch conservative, called the scandal a ‘wake-up call’. Even the right-wing
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
was worried. Publishing the Snowden files was crucial if freedom were ‘to exist in the future’, it said.

Nevertheless Merkel chose to downplay the topic in the run-up to Germany’s September 2013 general election, while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) tried to big it up. The SPD’s strategy backfired when it emerged Gerhard Schröder, the party’s former chancellor, had approved a wide-ranging intelligence-sharing agreement with the US back in 2002.

It was left to ordinary Germans to make a noise. Hundreds took to the streets and waved placards with anti-surveillance slogans; others heckled Merkel’s election rallies and blew vuvuzelas. In Berlin, one group
wearing Snowden masks gathered in the Tiergarten, next to the classical victory column, where presidential hopeful Obama had made a memorable foreign policy speech in 2008. Participants held banners which read ‘Nobama’, ‘1984 is Now’ and ‘Those who sacrifice freedom and security deserve neither’. Down the road, along Unter den Linden, diggers were busy rebuilding a neo-classical palace on the spot where the communist Palace of the Republic once stood, an emblem of communist dictatorship.

By the time of the election most of the earlier indignation had ebbed away. Roland Pofalla, Merkel’s chief of staff, declared the NSA affair ‘over’. Merkel breezed to a third straight victory with an increased majority. The new and insurgent Pirate Party – which had done well in regional elections and campaigned on data protection – slumped to 2.2 per cent in the polls. It failed to enter parliament.
Der Spiegel
captured this debacle with the headline ‘Calm instead of Shitstorm’.

And then suddenly in October 2013 came a new and extraordinary claim: the NSA had bugged Frau Merkel’s phone!

Der Spiegel
found Merkel’s mobile number on an NSA document provided by Snowden. Her number featured next to the words: ‘GE Chancellor Merkel’. The document, S2C32, came from the ‘European States branch’ of the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS). It was marked top-secret. Discovery would lead to ‘serious damage’ in the relations between the US and a ‘foreign government’, the document warned.

The magazine rang the chancellery. German officials launched an investigation. Their findings were explosive: officials concluded that it was highly likely the chancellor had been the victim of a US eavesdropping operation. German sources said Merkel was livid. Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said that such practices, if proved, were ‘completely unacceptable’, a ‘serious breach’.

Ironically enough, Merkel picked up the phone, called Obama and asked him what the hell was going on. The president’s reply was a piece of lawyerly evasion; Obama assured her that the US wasn’t bugging her phone and wouldn’t do so in the future. Or as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: ‘The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.’

It didn’t take an Einstein to work out that the White House was saying nothing about what had happened in the past. It emerged the NSA had bugged Merkel’s phone since 2002, beginning during George W Bush’s first term. Merkel had a personal and an office phone; the agency bugged the personal one, which she used mostly in her capacity as Christian Democrat (CDU) party chief. The eavesdropping continued until a few weeks before Obama’s Berlin visit in June 2013. According to Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, the president had been in the dark about this.

It was well known the German chancellor was a fan of the ‘Handy’, as Germans call their mobiles. Indeed, Merkel ruled by Handy. Her mobile phone was her control centre. At a 2008 EU summit in Brussels she
had used it to speak to French president Nicolas Sarkozy; the pair had swapped text messages. In 2009 Merkel got a new encrypted smartphone. It seems the NSA found a way round the encryption. But if the president didn’t know about the bugging, who did?

This unedifying snooping may have given the US an edge in diplomatic summits and an insight into the thinking of friends and foes. But, as the revelations piled up, sparking diplomatic crises in Europe, Mexico and Brazil, it was reasonable to ask whether such practices were really worth the candle.

Certainly, they were causing enormous damage to the US’s global reputation. Obama appeared increasingly isolated on the world stage, and strangely oblivious to the anger from his allies. The man who had charmed the Nobel committee simply by not being President Bush was no longer popular. Europeans didn’t like him. ‘Barack Obama is not a Nobel peace prize winner. He is a troublemaker,’ Robert Rossman wrote in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
. On its cover,
Stern
magazine called Obama
Der Spitzel –
the informer.

Excruciatingly, Obama’s fellow Nobel Laureates turned on him as well. More than 500 of the world’s leading authors warned that the scale of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden had undermined democracy and fundamental human rights around the globe. ‘In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested,’ the statement read. Snooping by states
and corporations had rendered this basic right ‘null and void’, it added.

Ouch! For Obama, a president and an intellectual, this must have hurt. The statement’s signatories amounted to a who’s who from the world of letters, among them five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek and Tomas Tranströmer – and numerous other grandees of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.

The NSA affair was turning into a foreign-policy disaster for an administration that already seemed semi-detached. The
Guardian
’s diplomatic editor Julian Borger wrote: ‘With each leak, American soft power haemorrhages, and hard power threatens to seep away with it … Nothing could be more personal for a foreign leader than to find their own mobile phones tapped by a nation they considered an essential friend and ally.’

The storm unleashed by Merkel’s bugged mobile reached France the same week, when
Le Monde
published further embarrassing claims of NSA spying.
Der Shitstorm
became
la tempête de merde
. Using material fed by Greenwald, the paper revealed the US was also spying in France on a massive scale. The numbers were astonishing. Over a 30-day period, from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, the NSA intercepted data from 70.3 million French telephone calls.

According to the paper, the NSA carries out around 3 million data intercepts a day in France, with 7 million on 24 December 2012 and 7 January 2013. Between 28 and 31 December no interception took place. Were
the NSA’s spies having a festive rest? The documents don’t say.

There were intriguing clues as to how NSA operations work. Spying against France is listed under a secret codename, US-985D. Germany gets its own espionage codes, US-987LA and US-987LB. The programs include DRTBOX – used for data collection – and WHITEBOX, for recording content. Further clandestine acronyms are used to describe spying on French diplomats in the US. In Italy it was the same picture. The Special Collection Service that spied on Merkel was bugging the Italian leadership too, from embassy ‘sites’ in Rome and Milan. Italian metadata was ingested by the millions.

The French government’s response to this was double-layered. In what by now was a much-repeated ritual, the US ambassador to Paris, Charles Rivkin, was summoned to explain himself. François Hollande, the country’s struggling president, called Obama to remonstrate, while his foreign minister Laurent Fabius dubbed the affair ‘totally unacceptable’. ‘Rules are obviously needed when it comes to new communication technologies,’ France’s interior minister Manuel Valls said.

But French reaction was milder than in Germany, and more
outrage
than outrage. In June, Hollande had threatened to suspend transatlantic trade talks but overall his response was half-hearted, with his rhetoric aimed at domestic voters. One paper,
Le Parisien
, characterised it as ‘gentlemanly’. Everyone knew that France had its own spying operation, and was a leader in industrial snooping. More importantly, Paris was clearly keen to preserve
good relations with Washington. That said, French politicians did seem genuinely stunned by the sheer scale of NSA trawling.

By this point the US was giving the same stock response to anxious allies around the world. The White House said that questions raised by France and other disgruntled Europeans were ‘legitimate’, adding that Washington was reviewing ‘the way that we gather intelligence’ so that ‘we properly balance’ security and privacy. On the other hand, Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council spokesperson, said: ‘The US gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.’ In other words, ‘We spy on you and you spy on us. Get over it, dude.’

Director of national intelligence James Clapper – the man who misled Congress – said
Le Monde
had got its facts wrong. Clapper denied that the NSA
recorded
70.3 million French phone calls. He gave no further details but seemed to imply that the NSA only scooped up the metadata. He suggested that western intelligence agencies were themselves behind much of this European spying.

In effect, the Europeans were hypocrites. Was Clapper right?

The answer – up to a point – was yes. Western intelligence agencies also spied, albeit with fewer resources than the NSA. They worked closely with the US intelligence community, and had done so for decades. Germany’s domestic intelligence body, the BND, for example, shared information with Fort Meade including metadata and had even handed over copies of its two digital spy systems, Mira4 and Veras. Snowden himself
flagged these close connections, telling the journalist and internet freedom activist Jacob Appelbaum that the NSA was ‘under the same roof’ as the Germans, and ‘most other western states’.

The extent of this collaboration could be confusing. One BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slide, shared by Greenwald with the Norwegian tabloid
Dagbladet
, suggests the NSA is hoovering up 1.2 million Norwegian telephone calls daily. Norway’s military intelligence service, however, said the slide had been misread. It said Norway itself collected the calls from Afghanistan, and passed them on to Fort Meade. This claim, however, is difficult to reconcile with NSA’s own PowerPoint, subtitled: ‘The mission never sleeps.’ It makes clear that collection of metadata under the program is
against
a country rather than from it. There is a separate slide for each country, including Norway and Afghanistan.

The big picture was obvious. And troubling. With or without help, the NSA was sucking in everyone’s communications. One document seen by
Le Monde
said that between 8 February and 8 March 2013 the NSA collected 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items. These figures were for the entire world. In an editorial the paper noted that new technology had made possible a ‘Big Brother’ planet. There were no prizes for guessing which nation played the role of Winston Smith’s nemesis.

The NSA’s core mission was national security. At least that was the idea. But by the end of 2013 it appeared
that the agency’s intelligence-gathering operations were about something much simpler – global power.

Merkel, it transpired, wasn’t the only foreign luminary whose phone the NSA had hacked. An NSA memo from 2006, published by the
Guardian
, showed it was bugging at least 35 world leaders. The agency had appealed to other ‘customer’ departments such as the White House, State and the Pentagon to share their ‘Rolodexes’ so it could add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to the NSA’s surveillance system. One eager official came up with 200 numbers, including the 35 world leaders. The NSA immediately ‘tasked’ them for monitoring.