Germany’s foreign intelligence agency hoovered up Barack Obama’s telephone communications for several years, allegedly without the knowledge or permission of the federal government in Berlin and only ceased when a separate spy scandal exploded in 2014.
The telephone calls of U.S. President Barack Obama made from Air Force One were routinely intercepted and decrypted by the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) “for years” until 2014, a report in Germany’s Die Zeit claims. Exactly when this monitoring began and whether it also affected Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, remains unclear. However, it is reported that the eavesdropping ended when separate scandals broke out about the United States spying on then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Germany spying on former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Per the report, when a senior government minister in Germany ordered the spying on Clinton — which Berlin claimed at the time to be inadvertent — to be stopped, the BND simultaneously took that as a sign to also stop eavesdropping on Obama, which it is alleged was never revealed by the agency, even to their own political masters. The BND had never actually had permission from the German government to spy on the United States in any way.
WASHINGTON, DC – DECEMBER 02: Former U.S. President Barack Obama introduces former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as they participate in a book talk at The Anthem on December 02, 2024 in Washington, DC. Obama and Merkel discussed her memoir “Freedom” as well as world politics and the history the leaders have witnessed. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
This spying on Obama’s telephone calls took place, Die Zeit states, during his flights on Air Force One. It is stated that the BND already knew the handful of frequencies used for the Presidential aircraft’s telephone traffic, and the “encryption of the aircraft’s communications was prone to errors”. The frequencies were said to be monitored sporadically, not permanently.
The report claimed that the collection of such communications was a highly restricted secret within the BND, with only the most senior leadership in the agency given single-copy readouts on the conversations, which were then destroyed, not filed. Allegedly, the contents of the intercepted conversations filtered through into intelligence reports given to the German government, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, but the source of the intelligence wasn’t divulged.
The level of eavesdropping on President Obama himself is somewhat ironic, given the anger and upset Chancellor Merkel responded with after it became known that America’s National Security Agency had intercepted her communications. After it emerged in 2013 that her cell phone had been hacked, she said: “Spying on your friends – that’s really not on”. Reportedly, she angrily told President Obama in private that his government’s behaviour had been like the infamous Soviet-era Stasi secret police, and that she said, “the NSA clearly couldn’t be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out.”
In reality, it has long been known that even close NATO allies consistently spy on each other, even if individual revelations about particular practices can continue to shock. In many cases, this mutual spying is consensual because it allows individual governments to get around national laws preventing wholesale spying on their own people by turning a blind eye to allied nations doing the spying for them, and then accepting the dossiers.
Germany has been part of that, spying on other European nations on behalf of Washington. Other European nations, in turn, have helped Washington spy on Germany.
That is not to say Germany doesn’t also spy on its own people. The BND, as Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, is separate from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), which, among its roles, includes spying on politicians and political parties. This has been used as something of a weapon in the political left’s now years-long push to outright ban the right-wing-sovereigntist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for supposedly being unconstitutional.
The United States government of President Donald Trump has expressed particular concern about this authoritarian strand emerging in Germany’s politics. Vice-President JD Vance said last year: “The AfD is the most popular party in Germany, and by far the most representative of East Germany. Now the bureaucrats try to destroy it… The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt—not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment.”
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