A recent report in the Washington Post asserted as fact that President Obama was unaware U.S. intelligence services were spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel — an improbable claim supported only by assertions made by the administration.
Obama’s professed ignorance of the spying on a major U.S. ally and trading partner has been a point of dispute since the espionage was revealed.
But the Post took the president’s claim at face value Tuesday in a story about the White House’s claims of Israeli spying on negotiations with Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that unnamed Obama administration officials accused the Israeli government of spying on the negotiations — which involve Iran, the five U.N. Security Council nations, and Germany — and sharing details of the talks with Congress.
“Allies routinely spy on one another, something that has been highlighted recently by revelations that the United States may have been monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone for more than a decade,” the Post report said. It later added, “President Obama never knew that the NSA’s monitoring program also targeted American allies, something he discovered in 2013 amid a series of revelations coming from Snowden’s documents.”
That Obama “never knew” the National Security Agency was spying on U.S. allies is a claim that has been advanced by the administration but never backed up with evidence other than the word of the president and officials in the agency, who had a clear interest in asserting Obama was unaware of the controversial matter. A former special assistant to President Bush at the National Security Council told Der Spiegel in 2013 it was “unlikely” Obama or his staff didn’t know about surveillance techniques used by one of the agencies that compile his Daily Brief. Another German paper in 2013 quoted unnamed NSA sources saying Obama had been briefed about the spying on Merkel in 2010. The German chancellor protested the snooping, which reportedly targeted her mobile phone.
