EPA-EFE/CHRISTIAN MARQUARDT
Angela Merkel
The Danish secret service helped the American National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a European media investigation published today revealed, Deutsche Welle writes.
That the United States spied on its allies first came to light in 2013, but journalists have only now gained access to reports detailing NSA support from the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE).
The report showed that the German ally and neighbor cooperated with the American spy operations directed at the highest officials.
The then candidate for the chancellor of the German Socialist Party of the Left Center (SPD), Per Scheinbrick, was also a target, it is revealed in the new report.
Secret service sources forwarded the information to a team that includes Danish, Swedish and Norwegian broadcasters (DR, SVT and NRK), as well as the French newspaper “Le Monde”, the German “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and the German public broadcasters GDR and VDR.
Neither Merkel nor Steinmeier had “any knowledge” about the spy operations carried out by leading Danish government officials.
A spokesman said the chancellor had been informed of the findings.
The Danish government found out about the involvement of their country’s secret service in the scandal with the NSA by 2015 at the latest.
They began gathering information about the FE’s cooperation with the NSA between 2012 and 2014 in a secret Dunhammer report after revealing the data of former NSA officer and whistleblower Edward Snowden, the GDR reported.
The data they collected clearly showed that the FE helped the NSA spy on leading politicians in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France, as well as Germany.
The Danish intelligence service also helped the American agency to spy on the Danish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Finance, as well as the Danish arms manufacturer, according to DW.
The FE also collaborated with the NSA on espionage operations against the U.S. government itself.
Revealing exactly how far the cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries went, the Danish government forced the entire leadership of the FE to resign in 2020.
Danish expert on secret services operations Thomas Wegener Fries believes that the FE was faced with a choice with which it would cooperate more closely with global partners and that they made a clear decision to work with the Americans and against their European partners, according to the GDR.
The NSA, FE and the Danish Ministry of Defense did not comment on the research, however, a statement from the Ministry of Defense said that “systematic wiretapping of close allies is unacceptable.”
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