by Luke Harding
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.
The NSA subsequently targeted other leaders as well, including the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and her Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto. On the face of things this tasking was bizarre, since both countries enjoyed positive relations with the US. Rousseff’s predecessor, the leftist populist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had annoyed Washington by inviting Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a visit. After taking office in 2011, however, Rousseff sought to improve ties with the White House. She distanced herself from Tehran and hosted Obama, who had previously cancelled his Brazil trip.
The NSA wasn’t interested in these good vibrations; what interested US spies was Rousseff’s private thinking. An NSA slide obtained by Der Spiegel shows that analysts managed to get access to Rousseff’s messages. Fort Meade investigated ‘the communication methods and associated selectors of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and her key advisers’, Spiegel reported. It also discovered other ‘high-value targets’ inside her inner circle.
As well as bugging democratically elected leaders, the NSA was secretly targeting the country’s most important company, the state-run oil firm Petrobas. Petrobas is one of the 30 largest businesses in the world. Majority-owned by the state, it is a major source of revenue for the Brazilian government. It is developing several massive new oilfields, which are in a region deep under the Atlantic.
Files given by Greenwald to Brazil’s news programme Fantástico show the NSA managed to crack Petrobas’s virtual private network. It did this using a secret program codenamed BLACKPEARL. Other targets identified by BLACKPEARL include the Swift network for global bank transfers, the French foreign ministry and Google. A separate GCHQ document, titled ‘network exploitation’, suggests that UK–USA routinely targets the private network traffic of energy companies, financial organisations, airlines and foreign governments.
Unsurprisingly, Rousseff took a dim view of the NSA’s snooping, seeing it as an outrageous violation of Brazil’s sovereignty. The White House responded to her protests with generalities; it used the same template with the Germans and the French. In September, Rousseff announced she was cancelling her official visit to Washington, due to take place on 23 October. Obama called Rousseff in a vain attempt to get her to change her mind. In the absence of a ‘timely investigation … there aren’t conditions for this trip to be made,’ the Brazilian government said.
At best, the NSA’s activities in Brazil looked distinctly un-fraternal. At worst, they appeared to be a clear-cut example of industrial espionage, and precisely the kind of economic spying the US heartily condemned when the Chinese or the Russians did it. The NSA said it was doing something different, telling the Washington Post: ‘The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain including cyber.’ In a somewhat pained statement, Clapper insisted that the US didn’t steal trade secrets from foreign entities and pass them to US companies, so as to give them a competitive advantage.
But Clapper’s vague defence of the NSA’s goals did little to assuage Rousseff. In a blistering speech to the UN in September, the president said the US’s now exposed ‘global network of electronic spying’ had caused worldwide anger. Not only was this ‘meddling’ an affront to relations between friendly states, it was a breach of international law, she said. Rousseff stamped on the idea that the NSA was somehow fighting terrorism. ‘Brazil knows how to protect itself,’ she said.
If anything, the US’s southern neighbour Mexico was the subject of even greater intrusion. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA mounted a sophisticated spying campaign against President Nieto, and his pro-US predecessor Felipe Calderón. A special NSA division, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), carried out this delicate mission.
In May 2010, TAO managed to hack into the mail server hosting President Calderón’s public email account. Other members of Mexico’s cabinet used the same domain. The NSA was delighted. It could now read ‘diplomatic, economic and leadership communications’ which provided ‘insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability’. The operation was called FLATLIQUID. Two years later the NSA was at it again; it managed to read Peña Nieto’s private emails, when he was a presidential candidate, according to Brazil’s TV Globo.
The US’s main clandestine objective in Mexico was to keep tabs on the country’s drug cartels. A secret April 2013 document seen by Der Spiegel lists Washington’s priorities from 1 (high) to 5 (low). Mexico’s drug trade is 1; its leadership, military capabilities and foreign trade relations 3; with counter-espionage at 4. In another August 2009 operation the NSA successfully hacked the email accounts of top officials from Mexico’s public security secretariat, yielding useful information on drug gangs and ‘diplomatic talking points’.
How is this spying done? The NSA, it appears, monitors Mexico’s mobile phone network under an operation called EVENINGEASEL. The NSA’s facility in San Antonio, Texas, is involved, together with US listening stations in Mexico City and Brasilia. The agency’s resources are formidable. In the early summer of 2012, alarmed that Nieto might shift resources away from fighting the drug cartels, the NSA zoned i
n on Nieto’s mobile phone as well as the phones of ‘nine of his close associates’. Software sifted out Nieto’s most important contacts; they too were then placed under surveillance, Der Spiegel said.
By early 2014 it was clear that the ramifications from Snowden’s revelations were far greater than those caused by WikiLeaks. The publication of secret US diplomatic cables from around the world in late 2010 did have consequences. A handful of US ambassadors were forced to depart; others shifted posts; the cables fed into the Arab Spring, crystallising popular resentment against corrupt regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Not all of the consequences were negative. Paradoxically, the reputation of the US foreign service went up. American diplomats, broadly speaking, emerged as intelligent, principled and hard-working. A few had genuine literary talent.
With the Snowden files, however, the consequences were more profound. It felt, slowly and not always coherently, as if the world was re-ordering itself – coming to terms with the fact that the US was spying not just on foreign leaders but on entire civilian populations. The question – for European allies, and for rival authoritarian powers – was how to react? The NSA seemed to view close US allies with shared values and history not really as allies at all. Rather, they were ‘frenemies’, part friend and part enemy.
There were several trends. In the aftermath of the ‘Handy crisis’, Merkel called for a new framework to regulate spying between partners. In the early stages of the Snowden affair the NSA and BND had been trying to patch things up. Now Merkel and Hollande said they wanted a new transatlantic no-spy accord negotiated by the end of 2013. Britain and other EU states were free to sign up to this code of conduct, which would regulate the behaviour of the security and intelligence services.
