For over a year, Germans have expressed mounting outrage at revelations of American espionage in their country. The opportunity to shake one’s head and wag one’s finger, especially at uncouth Americans, is one that many Germans enjoy, and Washington’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, attempts to recruit officers from the federal intelligence service (BND) as moles, and monitoring citizens’ telephonic metadata, have brought about a crisis in German-American relations not seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. As a means of explaining the outcry, journalists and politicians resort to dubious comparisons of the Gestapo and Stasi, the domestic intelligence services of two, totalitarian regimes that blatantly violated the rights of the German populous. So great was German anger at the United States that Berlin took the unprecedented step of expelling the CIA station chief, a move normally reserved for adversaries, not allies.
Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Last month, the Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that Germany had listened in on telephone conversations conducted by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as her successor, John Kerry. Unlike the American spying, however, this surveillance was apparently unintentional, the mere “by-catch” that inevitably goes with signals intelligence. Given the BND’s allegedly sparse collection of just 2 conversations conducted by American officials, and its immediate deletion of one of them (the Kerry phone call), it would be unfair to compare Washington’s extensive and deliberate surveillance of German targets with Berlin’s seemingly haphazard and accidental retrieval of American ones.
But America’s spies still have some reason for schadenfreude. That’s because of a simultaneous story in Der Spiegel reporting on a 2009 BND document listing Turkey as a long time intelligence target. In a replay of the Germans’ own series of reprimands to the United States, the Turkish foreign ministry summoned the German ambassador in Ankara for a proverbial spanking, decrying the allegations as “absolutely unacceptable.”
Not long ago, I defended the NSA and CIA’s operations in Germany and counseled Germans to calm down. My reason was three-fold: Berlin had been at the center of Cold War espionage for decades, divided in half by the Iron Curtain. The fall of the Berlin Wall, however, did not obviate the need for continued spying; reunified Germany’s cozy relations with Russia and Iran amply justify American spooks trying to divine the intentions of the German government and business sectors. Germans, I argued finally, need to grow up and understand that all countries spy, oftentimes even on friends. Thus far, no none has provided any evidence indicating that an innocent German has been blackmailed or persecuted by information obtained by the NSA, as was routine during the Gestapo and Stasi eras.
Now, rather than rub this latest bit of news in their faces, I’ll defend the Germans: They’re absolutely right to spy on Turkey, and for pretty much the same reasons that America is justified for snooping on Germany.
Since the 1950s, when droves of Turks started coming to help rebuild the post-war Federal Republic, Turkey and Germany have had a special relationship. Originally envisioned as “guest workers,” these young men eventually brought their families to Germany and permanently settled. Today, with some 3 million people of Turkish descent, Germany is home to the largest Turkish diaspora community in the world.
That community obviously brings many benefits, but it also presents challenges. Turkey shares a border with Iraq and Syria, and the heavy traffic of people moving back-and-forth between Turkey and Germany raises serious and legitimate security concerns for Berlin. The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), recently stated that some 400 Germans have traveled to Iraq and Syria as jihadists, presumably many of them through the porous Turkish border, and that five have died in suicide bombings. The PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group that for many years waged an armed struggle against Turkey, operates extensively in Germany among expatriate Turkish Kurds. The BfV estimates that there are 13,000 PKK members in Germany, the majority of them committed to “a mainly peaceful course which, however, is regularly interrupted by militant activities.” On its website, the BfV also lists “Turkish left-wing extremist” and “nationalist” organizations as subjects of its work.
In all these cases, German espionage in Turkey is conducted in the pursuance of goals that also help the Turkish state maintain stability. Like the IRA among the Irish American community in the United States, various Turkish extremist groups work along the edges of the Turkish diaspora to raise funds for their militant activities. German intelligence operations play a crucial role in monitoring and thwarting these operations.
Presumably, then, this is not the sort of spying that so angered the Turks. As was the case with American espionage in Germany, it’s the surveillance of government targets that raises the diplomatic temperature. Indeed, that the BND’s spying on Ankara directly is what led to the latest row could be divined from a German government source who defensively explained to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that, “We have never claimed in the past years that this position [not spying on friends] applies to every NATO country.”
If there is any NATO country that deserves to be spied upon by a fellow member of the alliance, it’s Turkey. Under the leadership of former Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a megalomaniac with increasingly autocratic tendencies, Ankara has adopted an Islamist tinge domestically and internationally, with a foreign policy supportive of Hamas in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Erdogan has tried to shut down Twitter, violently cracked down on political opposition to his iron-fisted rule, and orchestrated politicized prosecutions of suspected “coup” plotters. Turkey jails more journalists than any other country on earth.
Turkey has also abstained from the international coalition assembled by the United States to fight the Islamic State, refraining to even sign a joint communiqué rallying global support against the medieval Islamists. It has refused US pilots to fly out of its Incirilik air base to conduct bombing raids against IS, as it did during the 2003 Iraq War. With NATO’s second largest military and a long border with Syria, Turkey’s sitting out the fight marks a significant strategic cost for the anti-IS coalition. Until last week, Turkey’s excuse for sitting out the fight was the fate of 46 hostages held by the terror group-cum-state. But that explanation masks more complicated motivations. Since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad began in 2011, Turkey has largely looked the other way as an untold number of militants (including many who would go onto form IS) crossed its porous border into Syria. Turkey is also wary of the newfound prominence given to Kurdish fighters, whose campaign for an independent Kurdish state Turkey has long resisted, in the fight against IS.
Turkey is a weak, if not the weakest, link in NATO, which prides itself on being a coalition of liberal, democratic states. As the NATO member with the longest and most extensive connections to Turkey, Germany, then, is well suited to carry out the task of keeping an eye on Ankara.
Germany also has reason to be annoyed at Erdogan’s interference in its domestic affairs. In May, the Turkish prime minister traveled to Germany on what was basically a campaign swing (Erdogan ran for, and won, the office of the presidency in August). The election was the first in which Turks living outside of Turkey could vote, and Erdogan used the opportunity to rile up Germany’s Turks against his critics – including those in Germany. “No one, no country, no international community can shake their finger at Turkey, none can dictate us in arrogance what to do,” Erdogan said, in reference to German president Joachim Gauck, who had raised concerns about the state of Turkish democracy while in Ankara. Gauck, “probably thinks that he is still a pastor,” Erdogan sneered.
Barbs directed at the German president, revered for his role in helping to reunify the two Germanies and opening the Stasi archives, are one thing. Gauck is a public figure and can take the heat. But Erdogan went further, inflaming animosities between ethnic Germans and those of Turkish extraction. “Assimilation? No,” he declared, “I have said this before and I’m saying it again — we don’t compromise our language, religion and culture.” Thousands of ethnic Turkish Germans, meanwhile, protested outside the convention hall where Erdogan spoke, chanting “Corruption, sharia, sultanate – Erdogan, you are not a democrat!” They have reason to be angry at the divisive President inserting himself into a complicated and decades-long conversation between and among ethnic Germans and ethnic Turks. Given Erdogan’s influence over some segment of the Turkish minority, and his proven ability to bring the discord that he’s stirred in Turkey to the streets of Cologne, should not Germany do its best to understand the mercurial leader’s motivations and intentions – the timeless purpose of espionage?
Germans’ reaction to American espionage always had the ring of naiveté to it, unlike the French, who feigned outrage for a day and then returned to their own extensive intelligence activities. The French have no qualms about political hypocrisy (it’s something of an art form), whereas the Germans feel nerve-wracked about any trace of insincerity. It’s no secret that Germany is uncomfortable in the role of a world power, but a world power it is, and it should stop acting like it’s above the low business of espionage. Perhaps through its own, complicated relationship with Turkey, Germany will come to understand why America feels the need to spy in Germany, and start to let go of its smug hang-ups. Willkommen to the club.
James Kirchick is a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative.
