Mrs Merkel telephoned President Barack Obama to express her anger at reports that her phone had been hacked Photo: Getty Images
- US intelligence operates 80 listening posts worldwide, including 19 in European cities, and targeted Angela Merkel's phone from 2002 to 2013, according to new eavesdropping leaks
The Telegraph
By Philip Sherwell
26 October 2013
US intelligence has been operating a global network of 80 eavesdropping centres, including 19 European listening posts in cities such as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid, the German magazine Spiegel has reported.
The new revelations, which Spiegel said were based on leaked American intelligence documents, are certain to fuel international outrage at the sweeping scale of US international surveillance operations.
Spiegel also reported that the telephone number of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has been a target of US surveillance since 2002, when she was leader of the opposition.
Mrs Merkel, who telephoned President Barack Obama on Wednesday to express her anger at reports that her phone had been hacked, was still under surveillance until a few weeks before the US leader Berlin in June, Spiegel said.
Even before the latest reports, Germany said that it would send a high-level delegation to the US this week to demand answer s at the White House and National Security Agency (NSA) about the reports that Mrs Merkel's phone was tapped. The team will include spy chiefs, German media reported.
Spiegel has broken a series of stories about US surveillance of its allies and neighbours from documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor.
In the latest disclosures, it reported that the NSA and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established 80 listening posts around the world under a joint unit set up in the 1970s. Several were based in the capitals of European allies, apparently operating out of US diplomatic missions.
The Americans ran two such posts in Germany, one in the US embassy in the heart of the government quarter in Berlin and the other in the country's financial hub of Frankfurt. German counter-intelligence officials told the magazine that they would step up their monitoring of the US embassy as a result.
The new disclosures will do further damage to America's fraying transatlantic ties. The US ambassadors in Paris and Berlin were both summoned for complaints by their host countries last week.
The US does not operate similar surveillance operations in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under intelligence-sharing agreements with those countries.
Mr Obama assured Mrs Merkel that her phone is not being and will not be listened to, but US officials have consistently declined to address reports of past surveillance.
Spiegel said that from the leaked documents, it was unclear which communications by Mrs Merkel were the target of US surveillance.
According to another leaked US memo last week, the US sought to monitor the telephone numbers of 35 world leaders.
The spying row prompted leaders meeting at a European Council summit to demand a new deal with Washington on intelligence gathering .
And at the United Nations, Germany is working with Brazil, another country whose leader has been targetted, to draft a General Assembly resolution to strengthen Internet privacy. Although the resolution would not mention the US by name, diplomats said the momentum for the measure to extending the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to Internet activities had been invigorated by the recent disclosures.
Meanwhile, Michael Morrell, the former CIA deputy director and acting chief, told CBS' 60 Minutes programme that the Snowden leaks have undermined American efforts to track terror threats.
"What Edward Snowden did has put Americans at greater risk because terrorists learn from leaks, and they will be more careful, and we will not get the intelligence we would have gotten otherwise," he said.
Mr Morrell said the former contractor was a traitor to his country. "I think this is the most serious leak - the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the US intelligence community," he said.
original article found here
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