Luke Harding - The Snowden Files

On the first floor are the offices of the man who directed this campaign, Erich Mielke, the Stasi boss from 1957 to 1989. Seen through modern eyes, his bureau seems modest. There is a comfy chair, 1960s furniture, an old-fashioned dial telephone and an electric typewriter. Next door is a day bed in case Mielke needed a snooze. Built into one of the cabinets is a concealed tape machine. There is a large conference room on the same floor. Whenever Mielke met with his fellow Stasi generals he recorded their conversations.

By the standards of the Soviet bloc, East Germany was a success. In a relatively brief period it managed to establish the most thorough surveillance state in history. The number of Stasi agents grew from 27,000 in 1950 to 91,000 in 1989. Another 180,000 worked as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs), or unofficial informers. The true figure was probably higher. They spied on friends, workmates, neighbours and family members. Husbands spied on wives. By the time of the GDR’s demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

The Stasi’s favoured method of keeping a lid on dissent was eavesdropping. There was bugging, wiretapping, observation. The Stasi monitored 2,800 postal addresses; the agency steamed 90,000 letters a day. This was laborious stuff. Most of the voluminous information gathered was banal, of little intelligence value. The Stasi’s version of the Puzzle Palace came crashing down on 15 January 1990, when angry protesters stormed Mielke’s compound in Normannenstrasse and ransacked his files.

Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm . The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.

The ghosts of the Gestapo helped define the West German state, which existed next door to the Stasi. The cultural memory of state snooping still haunts its unified successor. Many of the most successful recent German films and books, such as The Lives of Others – a telling fantasy set in the GDR of 1984 – or Hans Fallada’s Nazi-era Alone in Berlin , dramatise the traumatic experience of being spied on.

For these reasons, the right to privacy is hardwired into the German constitution. Writing in the Guardian , John Lanchester noted that Germany’s legal history focused on carving out human rights: ‘In Europe and the US, the lines between the citizen and the state are based on an abstract conception of the individual’s rights, which is then framed in terms of what the state needs to do.’ (Britain’s common law, by contrast, is different and focused not on the existence of abstract rights but on remedying concrete ‘wrongs’.)

Germans have a visceral dislike of Big Brother-style surveillance; even today there are few CCTV cameras on the streets, unlike in the heavily monitored UK. Google met widespread resistance in 2010 to its Street View project; click yourself through a map of Germany and you’ll still find large areas pixelated. Germany published its first post-reunification census only in the summer of 2013 – previous ones in the 1980s were widely boycotted because people felt uncomfortable with giving the state their data.

The days of Adolf and the Erichs – Erich Mielke and Erich Honecker, the GDR’s communist boss – were over. Or that’s what most Germans thought. The NSA’s post-9/11 practices made the German constitution look like something of a bad joke. Snowden’s documents, dripped out in 2013, revealed that the NSA spies intensively on Germany, in many respects out-Stasi-ing the Stasi. For 10 years the agency even bugged the phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most powerful politician. Merkel grew up in the GDR and had personal experience of living in a pervasive surveillance state. Of the agency’s many poor judgements this was perhaps the crassest: an act of spectacular folly.

The story began when the Hamburg-based news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA routinely harvests the communications of millions of Germans. In an average month it collects around half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages. On a normal day this includes 20 million telephone calls and 10 million internet exchanges. On Christmas Eve 2012 it collected about 13 million phone calls, the magazine reported. Sometimes the figures are higher. On 7 January 2013, the NSA had nearly 60 million communication connections under surveillance. This data was stored at Fort Meade.

In addition, the NSA carried out a sophisticated campaign of state-on-state espionage against foreign diplomatic missions in the US. Bugging the Chinese and the Russians was explicable. They were ideological adversaries. But the NSA also spied on friendly embassies – 38 of them, according to a leaked September 2010 file. Targets included the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as several other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

The agency’s spying methods were extraordinary. It placed bugs in electronic communications gear, tapped cables, and collected transmissions using specialised antennae. Under a program codenamed DROPMIRE, the NSA put a bug in the fax machine at the EU’s office in Washington. It also targeted the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital Brussels, a venue for top-level summits and ministerial get-togethers.

Germany and France were close US allies and NATO members. Their governments shared values, interests, strategic obligations. German and American soldiers had fought and died together in Afghanistan. As far as the NSA was concerned, however, France and Germany were fair game. Neither country was a member of Five Eyes, the exclusive Anglophone spy club. Instead they were ‘third-party foreign partners’. An internal NSA power point says bluntly: ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most third-party foreign partners.’ According to BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, Germany is in the same top category in terms of level of US snooping as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

By the time Barack Obama visited Berlin in June 2013 the NSA row was straining US–German ties. In the wake of the revelations, German commentators likened the NSA to the Gestapo. The comparison was overblown. But the disquiet in Germany triggered by Snowden’s disclosures was real enough.

Obama and Merkel held a press conference in the chancellor’s washing machine-shaped office in Berlin. It was a short but historically resonant walk to the Reichstag, with its transparent Norman Foster dome, and to the Brandenburg Gate. The NSA revelations dominated the agenda.

Obama sought to reassure. He described himself as a critic of his predecessor. He said he came in with a ‘healthy scepticism’ towards the US intelligence community. After closer inspection, however, he felt its surveillance programs struck the ‘appropriate balance’ between security and civil rights. The NSA focused ‘very narrowly’ on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: ‘This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anyone else.’ Obama insisted the system was ‘narrowly circumscribed’. It had saved lives, including German ones.

Merkel was unconvinced. She acknowledged that intelligence-sharing with the US had helped prevent an Islamist terrorist plot in Germany’s Sauerland region in 2007. Nonetheless, Germans were worried: ‘People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information.’