Angela Merkel’s reputation as an unassailable chancellor is under threat amid mounting pressure for her to reveal how much she knew about a German-supported US spying operation on European companies and officials.
The onus on her government to deliver answers over the spying scandal has only increased with the Austrian government’s announcement that it has filed a legal complaint against an unnamed party over “covert intelligence to the detriment of Austria”.
EADS, now Airbus, one of the companies known to have been spied on by the BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence agency – is also taking legal action, saying it will file a complaint with prosecutors in Germany.
The BND stands accused of spying on behalf of America’s NSA on European companies such as EADS, as well as the French presidency and the EU commission. There are also suspicions that German government workers and journalists were spied on.
The Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s government partners, along with Germany’s federal public prosecutor, Harald Range, are demanding the release of a list of “selectors” – 40,000 search terms used in the spying operations – the results of which were passed on to the NSA.
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“The list must be published and only then is clarification possible,” said Christine Lambrecht, parliamentary head of the SPD faction. Merkel has so far refused to allow its release. Her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said she would make a decision on whether or not to do so only “once consultations with the American partners are completed”.
Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister and a close Merkel confidante, is under even more pressure than the chancellor over allegations he lied about what he knew of BND/NSA cooperation. On Wednesday he answered questions on the affair to a parliamentary committee investigating the row, but only in camera and in a bug-proof room. Among other alleged shortcomings over the affair, he stands accused of failing to act when the BND informed him of the espionage activities in 2008 when he was Merkel’s chief of staff. He has repeatedly been portrayed in the tabloid media with a Pinocchio nose.
Responding to journalists during a break in the proceedings, he once again vehemently denied the allegations. “As chief of staff in 2008, I learned nothing about search terms used by the US for the purposes of economic espionage in Germany,” he said. But he acknowledged knowing about American efforts to intensify the intelligence swapping, calling it “problematic cooperation”, and said the requests had been turned down by the BND.
On Wednesday evening the committee is due to question the incumbent chief of staff, Peter Altmaier.
The former BND chief, Gerhard Schindler, is due to speak before the separate NSA parliamentary committee – set up to investigate the activities of the US agency as revealed by Edward Snowden – on Thursday.
While Merkel appeared to have remained relatively unscathed by the scandal until now, an opinion poll showed that most Germans believed the trustworthiness of the three-times chancellor was now seriously at stake. 62% of Germans said her credibility was in doubt, according to the poll, carried out by the Insa institute, while 18% said it was not.
Merkel told Radio Bremen in an interview that she was prepared to speak out over the allegations to a parliamentary committee. “I will testify there and justify myself to them where it is required,” she told the broadcaster.
Sigmar Gabriel, the deputy chancellor and economy minister, who is also the leader of the SPD, upped the ante still further by relaying a conversation he had with Merkel in which he asked her twice if the government had evidence of economic espionage, and she said no. He added that if it emerged Germany had been involved in helping the NSA spy on companies, it would greatly strain relations between business and the government and “put a large burden on the trust the economy has in government behaviour”.
The scandal has already strained relations within Merkel’s grand coalition, with many observers commenting that Gabriel was seeing the affair as a chance to make political gains. Political observers were lining up to remark that the crisis is the single most critical of Merkel’s decade in government and could even lead to her and her government’s downfall.
But the scandal has its roots much further back than Merkel’s own government, harking to a time when Europe was gripped by the cold war. Both the US and the UK, as victors of the second world war who had Germany under close supervision, ran spying networks from Germany, most notably from Bad Aibling in Bavaria, the biggest listening station outside the US and Britain. Officially, the US withdrew its operations in 2004. But unofficially it stayed there under an agreement in which Germany agreed to hand over its intelligence findings in return for the highly sophisticated technology the US was able to provide. The events of 9/11 and the revelations that three of the pilots had lived in Germany undetected only served to increase the pressure the US was able to put on Germany that its presence was necessary.
Bad Aibling, officially now solely a BND listening facility, was the post used by the NSA in the current scandal.
The affair has underlined just how dependent Germany still is on the US and to a lesser extent the UK, on issues of intelligence and defence. Their desire for still-closer cooperation culminated in Operation Monkey Shoulder (named after a blend of three different types of malt whiskys) involving the BND, NSA and MI6, Spiegel recently revealed.
With such a background, the German government has to appear to be criticising the US at the same time as underlining the importance of cooperation.
Merkel, who appeared to be hugely at odds with the US government when it was revealed in 2013 that the NSA’s mass intelligence operation included tapping her mobile phone, has so far responded in a characteristically vague and flat manner. While acknowledging that allies should not spy on each other, she has stressed that spying’s most important role is to prevent terrorist attacks.
“The government will do everything to guarantee the ability of the intelligence services,” she said on Monday. “Taking terrorist threats into account, that ability is only possible in cooperation with other agencies. That very much includes the NSA, as well as others.”
Commenting on the crisis, Spiegel magazine called it the “biggest challenge that the ‘Merkel Regime’ has had to face”, and potentially the “turning point of her chancellorship”.
“She enjoys such trust because many Germans feel she looks after the country’s needs and their own very well. But the scandal … could cause the foundations of her power to crumble,” the magazine said.
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