Germany and U.S. Intelligence: Spies, Culture, and Politics

Recent revelations about espionage could have a lasting impact on U.S.-German relations. If they do, the mechanism will probably be through Germany’s domestic politics. Despite being close allies, neither country seems to understand the other side’s perspective on the issue.

Due largely to the enduring legacy of Hitler’s Secret State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo) — and for some, the longer history of East Germany’s State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi) — contemporary Germans are allergic to secret agencies and highly sensitive to real and perceived violations of their privacy rights. Because of privacy concerns, Germany has not held a proper census since 1987. “Data protection officers” at both the state and the federal level report regularly on the status of the nation’s privacy. Earlier this year, German privacy activists and data protection officers protested when it was revealed that the police had used “mass data collection” to apprehend a gunman who had fired at least 762 shots at random cars and trucks on Germany’s highways over the past six years. According to legal scholar Ralf Poscher, privacy rights have taken on a near mythical status in the German psyche that goes beyond the actual provisions of German law.

Even academics in Germany avoid the subject of intelligence. German political scientists have neglected it almost completely. Only a handful of historians study the history of intelligence or intelligence agencies, and those only since the 1990s. Most studies are based on the Stasi files, which were thrown open after 1989, and those studies are conducted largely in institutions outside of academia by people with little founding in the subject of intelligence. Historian Wolfgang Krieger, a rare exception among academics, has called German intelligence history “a field in search of scholars.” In part he attributes that to the lack of primary documents. (Writing in 2004 he noted that German intelligence had yet to declassify a single page of official documentation.) In addition, he sees the problem rooted in the culture of postwar German academia. Intelligence studies, security studies, and even international relations are poor choices in terms of career advancement.

Given the public attitude toward privacy and espionage, German politicians are virtually obliged to take a strong stance against the sort of activities carried out by the NSA and the CIA in their country (regardless of their own personal or professional views). This obligation to oppose U.S. espionage is reinforced by a growing anti-American sentiment in some sectors of German society.

Germany, of course, has its own spy agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), or Federal Intelligence Service, which conducts both civilian and military espionage. It is banned from engaging in covert operations, but it is highly secretive and has long and deep ties to U.S. intelligence.

The founder of postwar German intelligence was Maj. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen. During World War II, Gehlen had been in charge of military intelligence on the Eastern Front. Late in the war, as the Red Army pushed the Germans back, Gehlen convinced his superiors that they could not allow his files to fall into Soviet hands. Thus the files—and Gehlen—were transferred to Bavaria and found themselves in the American occupation zone when the war ended. At that point Gehlen offered his files and his services to U.S. military intelligence. Intrigued, the U.S. Army allowed him to recruit other Germans (including former Nazis and SS veterans) to establish an espionage network, the Gehlen Organization, in the Soviet zone and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Infiltrated by double agents, the organization developed a reputation for questionable reliability that German intelligence has not yet fully shaken off.

After the founding of the CIA in 1947, that agency assumed responsibility for handling the Gehlen Organization. In 1956, after West Germany was permitted to rearm within the framework of NATO, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer established the BND and appointed Gehlen to run it.

The BND continued Gehlen’s tradition of close cooperation with U.S. intelligence. Yet its history of infiltration left it somewhat suspect in U.S. eyes. West Germany was the target of extensive spying by East German and Soviet agencies. (Chancellor Willy Brandt resigned after discovering that Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was a Stasi spy.) Thus the CIA and other agencies also targeted Germany, often in cooperation with the BND and the BfV, the German internal security agency, but also often without their knowledge. The recent revelations are not the first time that U.S. intelligence has been caught.

At the end of the Cold War, U.S. intelligence agencies cut back on their cooperation with the BND, and their subsidies to it, but continued their own activities in Germany. Their focus shifted to German financial, trade, and diplomatic ties with countries like Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. The CIA also sought to keep an eye on Russian intelligence activities, which also continued there. Meanwhile, the BfV kept tabs on CIA officers in Germany. In 1997 Germany expelled a CIA officer for trying to obtain information about German equipment sales to the Iranian nuclear industry. Three more were expelled in 1999 for trying to recruit government officials with access to sensitive economic information.

The relationship stumbled again with the opening of the new century. The Germans were somewhat anxious about the new American emphasis on espionage and surveillance after 9/11. The Americans were somewhat anxious about the fact that the 9/11 plotters had devised their scheme in Hamburg while under German surveillance. The run-up to the Iraq War produced mutual recriminations. The BND had an Iraqi source, codenamed Curveball, who claimed to know from first-hand experience that Iraq had chemical weapons. The BND shared that information with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which shared it with the CIA, but the BND would not allow direct access to the source for verification. The information later proved to be a complete fabrication (invented by Curveball in the hope of gaining asylum in Germany). U.S. intelligence held it against the BND, even though the Germans had told them (probably too late to affect war planning) that they doubted Curveball’s reliability. When the Iraq War came, as is well known, the government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder vocally opposed it. Subsequently, although the BND officially remained a close partner of U.S. intelligence agencies, it was expressly forbidden to share information that could be used for targeting drone strikes, for interrogations that might involve torture, or for wars that are not sanctioned by the United Nations.

It was against this background that Edward Snowden’s pilfered NSA documents were released in 2013. Thus the Germans learned that the NSA conducts more espionage in Germany than in any other European country and that it maintains regular listening posts at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, the U.S. consulate general in Frankfurt, and various military installations. Matters became graver in October 2013 with the news that the NSA had been listening in on Chancellor Merkel’s mobile phone since 2003. Although much of the espionage conducted in Germany was actually directed against other countries, the issue was clearly a touchy one in Germany, and it was as much a matter of domestic politics as it was of international relations.

A poll conducted by Pew Research in April–May 2014 indicated that Germany was the only country in Western Europe in which U.S. favorability had dropped significantly since 2009, having fallen to 51 percent from 64 percent. Fully 90 percent of Germans opposed U.S. spying on their national leaders. German leaders, especially Merkel’s CDU, certainly did not want to break relations with the United States or even with U.S. intelligence, but they demanded some act of contrition and reform of the system. Chancellor Merkel said she would not visit Washington until there was a “restoration of trust.”

Washington viewed its surveillance programs as necessary to national security and was not interested in substantially altering them to suit Merkel’s domestic political needs. Germany submitted questions to the U.S. government about its surveillance operations on at least four occasions in 2013, and Washington reportedly failed to respond. Germany requested a mutual no-spying agreement similar to that of the “Five Eyes”—the intelligence consortium of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which share information extensively and purportedly refrain from spying on each other—but negotiations broke down. Washington denied that it had the sort of agreement Germany wanted with anyone. (The problem may have been that Berlin wanted absolutely no violations of German law and no spying conducted on German soil regardless of the target.) The Americans offered extensive information sharing, but without the no-spying agreement the Germans were not interested. Intensified cooperation in espionage would not solve the government’s political problems.

Of course, Berlin’s domestic political problems are also complicated by Snowden’s revelations of the BND’s longstanding cooperation with the NSA. The relationship had generally been one-sided, with the BND receiving information from the NSA, but its own technical capabilities have improved in the past decade and it has taken the lead in some joint programs. The BND has called this cooperation vital for the struggle against terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and organized crime. Much of it was directed against African countries and Afghanistan. The revelations, however, left people skeptical that the government did not really know of the NSA’s surveillance programs from the beginning, and some have called the mere use of information provided by the NSA unconstitutional. This, no doubt, intensified the pressure on the government to get some sort of concession out of the Americans.

Lacking an adequate response from the United States, Merkel was subject to conflicting pressures. Some in the government strongly opposed any action that might damage U.S.-German relations. Others—even among Christian Democrats as well as the public at large—vocally insisted that something be done. The justice minister, a Social Democrat, raised no objection to legal action against the United States. Of the two issues at hand, the legal advisers believed, an investigation of the case involving Merkel’s mobile phone was more likely to succeed than one involving mass surveillance. Besides, the chancellor was reportedly irate about it. Thus, in June 2014, Harald Range, the federal prosecutor, launched a formal investigation of the monitoring of Merkel’s phone. Formally, he reserved the right to open an investigation of the mass surveillance at a later time.

The following month, the espionage issue blew up again. The BfV intercepted an e-mail from a BND functionary to the Russian consulate in Munich in which he offered to be a spy for Russia. As a sign of his sincerity, he had attached three classified documents to the e-mail. In keeping with German practice (privacy concerns again), the functionary has been identified only as Markus R. (although at work he used a codename, Markus L.) After he was detained, Markus R. confessed that he had been spying for the CIA for two years. He had given the Americans some 218 classified documents, which he had taken from the office and scanned at home. (Because of privacy concerns, BND employees are not searched.) Beyond that, one of the documents he had given the Russians concerned the case of Leonid K., an official at the German Ministry of Defense. In 2010 an anonymous tip indicated that Leonid K. might be spying for the Russians, and the German authorities had been following him ever since. In this case, too, however, the original Russian connection had given way to a suspicion that he was spying for the Americans, based solely on a long-standing relationship between him and a U.S. government official that he had met while on assignment in the Balkans. With news of the investigation now out, Leonid K. was detained as well, although the case against him was much weaker.

With these latest revelations, German anger was reaching a boiling point, and Washington’s seemingly indifferent attitude did not help. On July 10, to impress U.S. officialdom, Merkel expelled the CIA’s Berlin station chief. The interior minister spoke of the need to introduce 360-degree counterintelligence with plans to monitor the embassies and consulates of friendly countries. Members of the Bundestag began acquiring secure “crypto phones” to protect their conversations. Ministries began reviewing their security arrangements, although they disagreed on how much needed to be done. The Defense Ministry began updating its internal security regulations, which were out of date and had been generally ignored for years. A proposal to conduct spot checks on Interior Ministry officials with access to sensitive information, however, was dropped out of privacy concerns. Meanwhile, both the BND and the BfV sought to use the new political climate to their advantage, gaining budget increases and pressing for the capacity to carry out the sort of programs that triggered the whole NSA scandal, such as the monitoring of social networks, purportedly to assure their independence from U.S. and British intelligence.

Then, in August, the worm turned. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich daily, and Der Spiegel, a weekly newsmagazine, reported that the BND had been spying on NATO allies Turkey and Albania regularly for at least five years. In addition, the agency had intercepted phone calls by successive secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The BND insisted that the intercepts had been accidental, had happened only once in each case, and that the recordings had immediately been destroyed. The Clinton recording, however, had not been destroyed. The person assigned to do the task was none other than Markus R., and he forwarded it to the Americans instead. This, no doubt, colored U.S. interpretations of German shock over the Snowden revelations.

The revelations of German espionage undermined Berlin’s complaints about U.S. surveillance. In addition, they came at a time when crises in Ukraine and Iraq were forcing the Germans and the Americans to cooperate. These factors could push the surveillance issue into the background of U.S.-German relations. Yet German domestic politics works in the opposite direction. The German revelations have upset the political scene. Dissatisfaction is now directed toward both the U.S. and German governments. Commentators have thrown Merkel’s own words back at her: Friends don’t spy on one another (“Ausspähen unter Freunden—das geht gar nicht.”) One columnist asserts that the episode shows the BND is operating “outside of democratic control.” Since the current German government is a grand coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU-CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD)—and also because SPD leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier ran the Chancellery, with direct responsibility for the BND, under Chancellor Schröder—both of Germany’s major parties are touched by it. With voters blaming the political elite, the political elite may well try to divert attention back to the CIA and NSA, keeping the issue alive on the international plane as well.

What will the ultimate outcome be? The spying episodes are not going to bring about a reversal of alliances. Germany and the United States have too many common interests and other bonds holding them together. Still, the revelations highlight the differences in American and German attitudes, priorities, and understandings regarding what is reasonable and appropriate in politics, government, and international relations. These differences may be rooted in culture, history, or the two countries’ very different roles in international affairs, but it is significant that many leaders were not even aware of them. They may reinforce a trend toward anti-Americanism in Germany that could weaken the relationship over the longer term. This could be the biggest concern.