American espionage in Germany
In 2013, the global surveillance and espionage affair revealed that the American NSA had eavesdropped on and spied on almost all top German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
[3] According to revelations by WikiLeaks in 2017, there is a secret hacker unit called Vault 7 in the US consulate in Frankfurt, which is responsible for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Numerous German émigrés worked for the service and passed on information to it, including Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Kuczynski, Carl Zuckmayer and Franz Neumann.
The priorities of the American services in the immediate post-war period were the denazification and democratization of Germany, the recruitment of German scientists and the monitoring of the activities of the Soviets, with whom relations quickly deteriorated after the victory over the common enemy.
Operation Overcast was a secret US intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians were brought from Germany to the US between 1945 and 1959 to work for the American government after the end of the War.
The operation was carried out by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), which was largely run by special agents from the US Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC).
[12] Later President Theodor Heuss owed his rise to his good contacts in US military intelligence circles and possibly acted for a time as an informant for the CIC.
Brandt was recruited as an agent in 1950 and, as an "informant 'O-35-VIII'" together with fellor SPD man Hans E. Hirschfeld, received 200,000 German marks in political support from the Americans, who helped his career.
Here, the Americans were closest to the emerging Eastern Bloc and the Soviet armed forces and all intelligence services recruited among the population of Berlin.
Numerous SIGINT listening posts, radar surveillance stations and CIA bases were established in Germany, which played an important role in the Cold War for the Americans.
The BOB was located in a three-story building in Berlin's Dahlem district, which had been the headquarters of the German Air Force during World War II.
[15] Even after the Federal Republic had achieved foreign policy sovereignty, the victorious powers retained privileges to protect their security, some of which were suspended by the German Basic Law, in particular the secrecy of correspondence, post and telecommunications.
[20] American intelligence services financed various anti-communist groups such as the Bund Deutscher Jugend, the Untersuchungsausschuß Freiheitlicher Juristen and the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit.
More than a dozen organizations received funds from the CIA in the mid-1950s, including publishing houses and the political opposition in East Germany.
The efforts failed in particular due to the determined counterintelligence of the Stasi and the KGB as well as the lack of coordination between the numerous American intelligence agencies.
[22] The USA also tried to obtain information about the GDR via spy flights and the interrogation of East German refugees to West Germany.
[15] In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USA obtained the Rosenholz files, a list of Stasi employees who helped the US to expose spies, by unknown means.
[15] In 1995, US President Bill Clinton is said to have instructed the CIA to step up economic espionage against friendly countries such as Japan and Germany.
During the UN inspections of the facilities operated by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the CIA is said to have stolen secrets from the German nuclear industry.
[29] The revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 revealed that the NSA had monitored and tapped the cell phones and telephones of 35 heads of state worldwide, including the communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
[31][32] In the case that Edward Snowden would be summoned to appear before the committee of inquiry, the USA has threatened to stop cooperating with German intelligence services and counter-terrorism efforts.
The latter was of interest to the CIA because the BND ran covert operations abroad via the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
[2] A document made public by the Pentagon leaks of 2023 suggests that the US intelligence services can still read communications from the German Ministry of Defense.
One successful joint collaboration was Operation Rubicon, in which almost 100 countries were spied on from 1970 onwards through the sale of manipulated encryption technology (CX-52) from the Swiss company Crypto AG.
[36] According to media reports, the BND, the BKA and the BfV are said to have cooperated with the CIA in setting up secret prisons (black sites).
