Germany’s foreign intelligence service secretly spied for years on then–U.S. President Barack Obama, intercepting his phone calls while he was aboard Air Force One, according to an explosive investigation published by Die Zeit.

The surveillance was carried out by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) and continued until 2014, when Germany’s Chancellery finally ordered it stopped. The operation is politically incendiary because it ran directly counter to public assurances by then–Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in 2013 famously rebuked the United States over NSA spying with the declaration: “Spying among friends — that is simply not done.”

According to Die Zeit, the BND was able to intercept Obama’s calls because the encryption used aboard the presidential aircraft was vulnerable. Insiders said Obama’s communications were transmitted over roughly a dozen known frequencies, which German intelligence monitored regularly, though not continuously. The United States was not among the countries the BND was officially authorized to spy on, making the operation especially sensitive.

Aware of the political risk, BND leadership reportedly restricted access to the transcripts. Intercepts of Obama’s conversations were placed in a single, specially marked folder circulated only among a small inner circle at the top of the agency, including the BND president and his deputies. After review, the transcripts were to be destroyed. Intelligence gleaned from the calls was folded into broader assessments of U.S. policy that were forwarded to the Chancellery without explicitly citing their source.

The scope of the operation remained hidden even after Germany halted similar practices in 2014, following reports that the BND had monitored then–U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At the time, then–Chancellery chief Peter Altmaier ordered such surveillance stopped — apparently unaware that the U.S. president himself had also been targeted.

It remains unclear when the spying on Obama began, whether it extended to his predecessor George W. Bush, or which officials inside the Chancellery knew of the operation. Die Zeit reported that the surveillance was never formally authorized and that Merkel herself was not informed — and would likely have rejected it outright.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)