US prevented Germany from granting asylum to Snowden: Report
The US government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to American whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to a new report.
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told an audience of journalists in Homburg on Sunday that his country would have been “cut off” from all US intelligence sharing if Snowden traveled to Germany, the Intercept reported Thursday.
Asked by journalists why Germany could not offer asylum to Snowden, Gabriel argued that the US government had “aggressively threatened the Germans that if they did so, they would be cut off from all intelligence sharing,” the report said.
The German vice chancellor, who is also head of the Social Democratic Party and the country’s economy and energy minister, praised the journalists who worked on the Snowden archive.
One senior White House official denied the report on Friday as “baseless.”
“Our intelligence relationship with Germany has saved lives, and we would not seek to diminish our ability to continue countering terrorist and other threats with our German partners,” the official told The Hill.
Snowden is wanted in the US on multiple espionage charges that could land him in prison for decades. Snowden fled his country in May 2013 to avoid prosecution. Russia granted him asylum in August of that year.
Snowden is a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) as well as a former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was also a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Classified documents obtained by Snowden have revealed that American intelligence agencies have found and even created technical vulnerabilities that allow US spies to gather intelligence from phone calls, emails and other communications both in the US and around the world.
Global outrage over US surveillance spiked after a confidential memo, obtained by the German weekly Der Spiegel, revealed in 2013 that the NSA had illegally eavesdropped on the phone conversations of dozens of world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
AHT/HRJ
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