German intelligence eavesdropped on Barack Obama when he was US president

Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

"Spying on friends — that's unacceptable," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2013, after learning that American intelligence had tapped her phone. The eavesdropping scandal then escalated into a crisis in German-American relations, Bild writes.

For the first time, the FRG government summoned the US ambassador, and then-US President Barack Obama explained to the Chancellor that he knew nothing about the wiretapping.

Now it turns out that Germany may have been doing the same — the German intelligence service BND eavesdropped on President Obama! This was reported in a podcast by Bild's editor-in-chief, deputy editor-in-chief of ZEIT, Holger Stark. In his new book "The Informed Country," Stark reveals that the BND eavesdropped on the US president without the Chancellor's knowledge.

"The BND is a service that was never one hundred percent controlled, and when it could, it eavesdropped on both the leadership of the American state, and especially then-President Barack Obama," Stark explains.

For eavesdropping, Obama's plane was used, in particular, where he often held telephone conversations with other heads of state or with his ministers. Since it is more difficult to reliably encrypt conversations in the air, the Americans sometimes conducted less encrypted or completely unencrypted conversations — and then they had German listeners.

"The BND [...] identified a good dozen frequencies that Air Force One used for this type of communication. And it eavesdropped on them. Not always, not systematically — and not on official instruction," says Stark.

On its own initiative, the BND also eavesdropped on then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and American military personnel: "I spoke with people who say: military details were actually much more interesting than Obama's political chatter about the last G7 summit or something similar."

In response to Bild's inquiry on this topic, the BND declined to comment: "The Federal Intelligence Service fundamentally does not comment publicly on issues concerning possible intelligence information or activities. Therefore, no statement is made as to whether this fact corresponds to reality. The Federal Intelligence Service reports on relevant topics, in particular, to the federal government and the competent committees of the German Bundestag, whose meetings are held behind closed doors."

Almost literally the same was answered by the Chancellor's Office to Bild. Angela Merkel's office did not respond to Bild's inquiry at all. According to Stark, she knew nothing about the BND's eavesdropping on the Americans and only learns about it from his book.

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