CIA spied on German press: Report
The US government was eavesdropping not only on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her cabinet, but also on Germany's free press under the cover of US national security, according to a new report.
CNN has learned that in the summer of 2011, the CIA station chief at the US Embassy in Berlin met with Germany's intelligence coordinator, Günter Heiss, and his assistant Guido Müller.
The CIA station chief, who was also representing the National Security Agency (NSA), urged the two men to take action against Heiss' deputy, Hans-Josef Vorbeck, who he said was leaking classified information to the German press, specifically Der Spiegel.
Later that summer, Heiss went to Washington and discussed this same matter with US government officials, CNN has learned. At the same time, the Chancellery opened a file on US documents of intercepted communications between Vorbeck and journalists.
By August, Vorbeck had been reassigned to oversee the historical archives of Germany’s intelligence agency, or BND, a demotion widely seen as a punishment for his cooperating with reporters.
"It feels bitter to learn that American intelligence agencies spied on reporters in another country and denounced alleged sources to the government," said one reporter involved, who asked not to be identified for fear of repercussions from his government or the US government.
The incident raises questions about what exactly the German Chancellery knew and when it knew it, specifically that officials were notified by the CIA station chief in 2011, two years before the revelation that the NSA was spying on Merkel's cell phone.
The latest report comes as the whistleblower website WikiLeaks revealed late last month that the NSA had spied on the last three French presidents, as well as French ministers and on the country’s largest companies.
AHT/HRJ
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