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Germany Demands Top U.S. Intelligence Officer Be Expelled Germany Demands Top U.S. Intelligence Officer Be Expelled
(about 4 hours later)
BERLIN — Germany’s relations with the United States plunged to a low point Thursday, with the government demanding the expulsion of the chief American intelligence official stationed here because, it said, Washington has refused to cooperate with German inquiries into United States intelligence activities. BERLIN — The German government on Thursday demanded the removal of the top American spy in the country, the strongest evidence yet that mounting revelations about widespread American intelligence operations in Germany have gravely damaged relations between once close allies.
“The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States Embassy has been asked to leave Germany,” a government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement. The decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin station chief was seen as a highly symbolic expression of the deep anger and hurt that German officials have felt since the exposure of the American espionage operations.
German officials have been frustrated in their efforts to receive clarification from Washington since last summer, when it was reported that the National Security Agency had been monitoring the digital communications of millions of Germans. The government tamped down that uproar, but fury flared anew when it was revealed last fall that the N.S.A. had been monitoring Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. It is likely to force another reassessment inside the C.I.A. and other spy agencies about whether provocative espionage operations in friendly nations are worth the risk to broader foreign policy goals. One such assessment was conducted last summer, when President Obama ordered a halt to the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone after it came to light because of former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.
Although President Obama has offered assurances that the United States will no longer spy on leaders like Ms. Merkel, two cases of suspected American espionage that have come to light in the past eight days have sparked a fresh round of outrage. Current and former American officials said that the Berlin station chief, who works undercover, has been in the position for about a year. It was his predecessor in the job, the officials said, who oversaw the recruitment of the German intelligence officer arrested last week who has reportedly told his interrogators he was spying for the C.I.A., touching off a storm of criticism of the United States. German investigators are also looking at a second case of an official inside the Defense Ministry who may have been working for the Americans.
“The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in Germany,” Mr. Seibert said. “The government takes the matter very seriously.” The expulsion of a C.I.A. station chief — the ranking American intelligence officer in a foreign country — was a staple of the Cold War, but it is a move almost never made by allies. “It’s one thing to kick lower level officers out, it’s another thing to kick the chief of station out,” said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive experience working on European operations.
Mr. Seibert said Germany continued to seek “close and trusting” cooperation with its Western partners, “especially the United States.” The closest precedent may be an episode in 1995, when the C.I.A. station chief in Paris, his deputy and two other agency officers were expelled for trying to pay French officials for intelligence on France’s negotiating position in trade talks. But Thursday’s move is potentially more significant, since the intelligence cooperation between the United States and German has historically been far closer than that with the French.
As is usual with intelligence matters, the United States Embassy had no comment on the expulsion request. But in a statement, the embassy also said it was essential to maintain close cooperation with the German government “in all areas.” The former official said that the move could be just the first sign that the Germans intend to escalate the monitoring of C.I.A. operatives in the country — possibly increasing surveillance activities like phone tapping and tailing American spies in cars. It is extremely unlikely that Germany would ever become as hostile a location for American spies as Russia — where the term “Moscow Rules” was coined to indicate the strict procedures used by undercover officers to meet sources and elude surveillance. Still, it could fall into a middle category of countries — Turkey, India and France among them — that are allies but are considered difficult operating environments for American spies.
Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on the development, but said Secretary of State John Kerry would be talking soon with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Despite the apparent effort to keep relations on an even keel, the development marked a low point in relations with a critical ally just as Mr. Obama needed stronger cooperation on issues from dealing with Iran’s nuclear program to bringing stability to Ukraine to forging a broad trans-Atlantic trade agreement.
“Our relationship with Germany is extremely important,” she said. “We’ll continue our dialogue through senior officials in the days and weeks ahead.” As Ms. Merkel put it on Thursday, the two countries have better things to do than “waste energy spying” on each other.
As Chancellor Merkel put it on Thursday, the two countries have better things to do than “waste energy spying” on each other. Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a close Merkel ally, said the latest espionage cases did not reflect well on the Americans. “With so much stupidity, you can only weep,” he said late Wednesday. “And that is why the chancellor is ‘not amused.’ ”  Ms. Merkel’s comments seemed similar to what Mr. Obama said early last summer, after the first of the Snowden revelations. “I’m the end user of this kind of intelligence,” Obama said. “If I want to know what Chancellor Merkel is thinking, I will call Chancellor Merkel,” he said, suggesting it was not necessary to spy on close friends.
Reluctant as German leaders may have been to act, and however conscious they are that America holds most of the cards in their alliance, pressure built so sharply this week that they apparently believed that they had to do something. This leaves Ms. Merkel, and her government, in the unusual position for Germans of not knowing clearly what the next step is. But in the year since, the evidence of American spying operations in Germany has grown so steadily that it called into question whether the intelligence agencies listened to the President that day, or whether the White House had failed to do a complete review of the spying operations against those allies. 
Clemens Binninger, a member of Ms. Merkel’s center-right party, said the move was “a political reaction of the government to the lack of willingness of American authorities to help clear up any questions” arising over the past year in connection with American surveillance of Germany and its leaders. German officials have made it clear that their anger ran deeper than during the recent episodes. There is great frustration in Berlin that the Obama administration has not provided more information about a range of American surveillance activities in Germany — including the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s cellphone.
Mr. Binninger spoke after a session of the parliamentary control commission that oversees German intelligence activities, which he heads. The commission, whose proceedings are secret, was briefed Thursday by Gerhard Schindler, the head of the Federal Intelligence Service, on the two suspected cases of espionage. German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Thursday that the decision to expel the C.I.A. station chief "was made against the backdrop of the ongoing investigations" into American spying activities "as well as the questions pending for months about the activities of the U.S. intelligence services in Germany."
The first case, concerning a midlevel employee of Mr. Schindler’s agency who was arrested last week, is far more serious than the second, in which “very many questions” linger, Mr. Binninger told reporters after almost three hours of talks with Mr. Schindler. No arrest has been made in the second case. "The federal government," he said, "takes these incidents very seriously."
On Wednesday, the police searched the Berlin office and apartment of the man in the second case, who is suspected of being a spy, federal prosecutors said. They declined to give further information, but the German news media reported that the suspect worked for the Defense Ministry. A ministry spokesman confirmed that it was involved in an investigation. Mr. Binninger and other members of his commission said there was still no evidence of espionage. John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, in recent days has made calls to Berlin to try to reassure German officials, and a statement Thursday by the American Embassy in Berlin said it was essential to maintain close cooperation with Germany “in all areas.”
The arrested intelligence employee, who has been identified only by his age, 31, apparently fed American agents 218 documents, some consisting of many pages, from five large files to which he had access, Mr. Binninger said. Over the past two years, he copied the papers, took them home and then scanned them and put the files on a USB stick, Mr. Binninger added. Asked by reporters about security controls, he said the intelligence service did not have the right to check all 5,000 employees as they come and go from the agency’s headquarters near Munich. The embassy statement did not specifically mention the request for the station chief’s departure, but said “our security relationship with Germany remains very important.”
The parliamentary commission said it had asked to see all the documents given to the Americans, but Mr. Binninger said initial accounts indicated that they were relatively harmless, depicting day-to-day business rather than deep secrets. Historically, nations have tried to penetrate the spy services of their allies in order to vet the information they receive through routine intelligence sharing. But Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence who tried to negotiate a non-spying agreement with French officials before leaving the job in 2010, said it makes enormous sense to sit down with allies to broadly discuss which aspects of spying operations are the biggest irritants to bilateral relations.
That assessment was seconded by Mr. Schäuble and Thomas de Maiziere, the interior minister, who suggested that the material was nothing important. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, whose office is busily investigating the spying accusation against the Defense Ministry employee, said common sense alone would suggest that there could not possibly be enough to gain from paying spies for information to offset the damage to a valuable alliance. “If you are not having those conversations,” he said, “you’re making decisions based on guesses.”
When the Snowden revelations emerged last year, German officials suggested that they wanted a “no spy” agreement similar to the one the United States has with the English-speaking victors of World War II: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the negotiations only frayed relations even more.
The way German officials tell the story, they were promised those negotiations by Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, and other American intelligence officials. But the American officials say there was never such a promise, and that German officials blanched when they heard what kind of responsibilities they would have for intelligence collection and cyberoperations around the world if they ever joined that elite club.
The discussions went nowhere, and the public collapse of the talks left Ms. Merkel’s top aides embittered. Politicians, including Ms. Merkel, began talking about creating a “Germany only” segment of the Internet, to keep German emails and web searches from going across American-owned wires and networks.
For some German leaders, last week’s arrest settled any questions about whether the Obama administration had really changed its view about spying in Germany.
Clemens Binninger, a member of Ms. Merkel’s party, said the decision to expel the station chief was “a political reaction of the government to the lack of willingness of American authorities to help clear up any questions” over American surveillance of Germany and its leaders.
Both Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister, and Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister and a close ally of Ms. Merkel, suggested that the material handed to the Americans from the German intelligence employee arrested last week was nothing important. The Americans, said Mr. Schauble, had simply proved to be stupid.
“With so much stupidity, you can only weep,” he said. “And that is why the chancellor is ‘not amused.’ ”