Luke Harding - The Snowden Files

In an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers, Merkel was scathing. She described the spying scandal as ‘extremely serious’: ‘Using bugs to listen in on friends in our embassies and EU representatives is not on. The cold war is over. There is no doubt whatsoever that the fight against terrorism is essential… but nor is there any doubt that things have to be kept proportionate.’

Still, it appeared that Merkel was keen to avoid a full-scale confrontation, her legendary pragmatism once more to the fore. Meanwhile, Der Shitstorm billowed across Germany’s media, in print and online. Generally, the tone was alarmed. The German sage Hans-Magnus Enzensberger referred to the ‘transition to a post-democratic society’. Hans-Peter Uhl, a staunch conservative, called the scandal a ‘wake-up call’. Even the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was worried. Publishing the Snowden files was crucial if freedom were ‘to exist in the future’, it said.

Nevertheless Merkel chose to downplay the topic in the run-up to Germany’s September 2013 general election, while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) tried to big it up. The SPD’s strategy backfired when it emerged Gerhard Schröder, the party’s former chancellor, had approved a wide-ranging intelligence-sharing agreement with the US back in 2002.

It was left to ordinary Germans to make a noise. Hundreds took to the streets and waved placards with anti-surveillance slogans; others heckled Merkel’s election rallies and blew vuvuzelas. In Berlin, one group wearing Snowden masks gathered in the Tiergarten, next to the classical victory column, where presidential hopeful Obama had made a memorable foreign policy speech in 2008. Participants held banners which read ‘Nobama’, ‘1984 is Now’ and ‘Those who sacrifice freedom and security deserve neither’. Down the road, along Unter den Linden, diggers were busy rebuilding a neo-classical palace on the spot where the communist Palace of the Republic once stood, an emblem of communist dictatorship.

By the time of the election most of the earlier indignation had ebbed away. Roland Pofalla, Merkel’s chief of staff, declared the NSA affair ‘over’. Merkel breezed to a third straight victory with an increased majority. The new and insurgent Pirate Party – which had done well in regional elections and campaigned on data protection – slumped to 2.2 per cent in the polls. It failed to enter parliament. Der Spiegel captured this debacle with the headline ‘Calm instead of Shitstorm’.

And then suddenly in October 2013 came a new and extraordinary claim: the NSA had bugged Frau Merkel’s phone!

Der Spiegel found Merkel’s mobile number on an NSA document provided by Snowden. Her number featured next to the words: ‘GE Chancellor Merkel’. The document, S2C32, came from the ‘European States branch’ of the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS). It was marked top-secret. Discovery would lead to ‘serious damage’ in the relations between the US and a ‘foreign government’, the document warned.

The magazine rang the chancellery. German officials launched an investigation. Their findings were explosive: officials concluded that it was highly likely the chancellor had been the victim of a US eavesdropping operation. German sources said Merkel was livid. Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said that such practices, if proved, were ‘completely unacceptable’, a ‘serious breach’.

Ironically enough, Merkel picked up the phone, called Obama and asked him what the hell was going on. The president’s reply was a piece of lawyerly evasion; Obama assured her that the US wasn’t bugging her phone and wouldn’t do so in the future. Or as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: ‘The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.’

It didn’t take an Einstein to work out that the White House was saying nothing about what had happened in the past. It emerged the NSA had bugged Merkel’s phone since 2002, beginning during George W Bush’s first term. Merkel had a personal and an office phone; the agency bugged the personal one, which she used mostly in her capacity as Christian Democrat (CDU) party chief. The eavesdropping continued until a few weeks before Obama’s Berlin visit in June 2013. According to Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, the president had been in the dark about this.

It was well known the German chancellor was a fan of the ‘Handy’, as Germans call their mobiles. Indeed, Merkel ruled by Handy. Her mobile phone was her control centre. At a 2008 EU summit in Brussels she had used it to speak to French president Nicolas Sarkozy; the pair had swapped text messages. In 2009 Merkel got a new encrypted smartphone. It seems the NSA found a way round the encryption. But if the president didn’t know about the bugging, who did?

This unedifying snooping may have given the US an edge in diplomatic summits and an insight into the thinking of friends and foes. But, as the revelations piled up, sparking diplomatic crises in Europe, Mexico and Brazil, it was reasonable to ask whether such practices were really worth the candle.

Certainly, they were causing enormous damage to the US’s global reputation. Obama appeared increasingly isolated on the world stage, and strangely oblivious to the anger from his allies. The man who had charmed the Nobel committee simply by not being President Bush was no longer popular. Europeans didn’t like him. ‘Barack Obama is not a Nobel peace prize winner. He is a troublemaker,’ Robert Rossman wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung . On its cover, Stern magazine called Obama Der Spitzel – the informer.

Excruciatingly, Obama’s fellow Nobel Laureates turned on him as well. More than 500 of the world’s leading authors warned that the scale of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden had undermined democracy and fundamental human rights around the globe. ‘In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested,’ the statement read. Snooping by states and corporations had rendered this basic right ‘null and void’, it added.

Ouch! For Obama, a president and an intellectual, this must have hurt. The statement’s signatories amounted to a who’s who from the world of letters, among them five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek and Tomas Tranströmer – and numerous other grandees of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.

The NSA affair was turning into a foreign-policy disaster for an administration that already seemed semi-detached. The Guardian ’s diplomatic editor Julian Borger wrote: ‘With each leak, American soft power haemorrhages, and hard power threatens to seep away with it… Nothing could be more personal for a foreign leader than to find their own mobile phones tapped by a nation they considered an essential friend and ally.’

The storm unleashed by Merkel’s bugged mobile reached France the same week, when Le Monde published further embarrassing claims of NSA spying. Der Shitstorm became la tempête de merde . Using material fed by Greenwald, the paper revealed the US was also spying in France on a massive scale. The numbers were astonishing. Over a 30-day period, from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, the NSA intercepted data from 70.3 million French telephone calls.

According to the paper, the NSA carries out around 3 million data intercepts a day in France, with 7 million on 24 December 2012 and 7 January 2013. Between 28 and 31 December no interception took place. Were the NSA’s spies having a festive rest? The documents don’t say.