The news that the National Security Agency was monitoring the telephones of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many other foreign leaders is less shocking than the revelation that, for the first four and a half years of his Presidency, Barack Obama, the Commander-in-Chief, didn’t know anything about it. Can this be true?

Evidently, it is. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, the spying program targeted as many as thirty-five world leaders, but it didn’t come to Obama’s attention until this summer when, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Administration carried out an internal review of the N.S.A.’s activities. “These decisions are made at N.S.A.,” someone described as “a senior U.S. official” told the Journal. “The President doesn’t sign off on this stuff.”

Who does, then? The head of the N.S.A.—a post currently held by Army General Keith Alexander, a four-star officer who recently signalled his intention to stand down? Somebody lower down the totem pole at the spying agency? And what role, if any, is played by the Director of National Intelligence, currently James R. Clapper, a former lieutenant general in the Air Force, who reports directly to the President?

We don’t have the answers to any of these questions. What we do know, courtesy of the German magazine Der Spiegel, which, in turn, relied on documents acquired by Snowden, is that the monitoring of Merkel’s communications, including her cell-phone conversations, began back in 2002, which was three years before she was elected Chancellor. The fact that the United States has spied on opposition politicians in Europe and other parts of the world is hardly news. But during the Cold War, the targets of such operations were generally left-wingers critical of U.S. foreign policy, rather than the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union.

Did somebody at the N.S.A. suspect that Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, harbored anti-American sentiments? Or was she caught up in a broader program aimed at monitoring overseas politicians at a time when many of them were critical of the Bush Administration’s determination to wage war in Iraq? (In August, 2002, Gerhard Schröder, who was the Chancellor at the time, declared that Germany would play no role in an attack on Iraq.) These are more unanswered questions. It appears, though, that there was more than one N.S.A. program targeting foreign politicians—perhaps many more. The report in the Journal says that “the White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, including the one tracking Ms. Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior U.S. official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but haven’t been phased out completely yet, officials said.”

At least we now know that the American public wasn’t singled out for having its privacy violated, and neither was Merkel. Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, had her e-mail intercepted. So did Felipe Calderón, the former President of Mexico. Countless other foreigners also received the N.S.A.’s uninvited attention. Over the weekend, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that, in a single month, the N.S.A. monitored more than sixty million phone calls in Spain. That news came a few days after Le Monde reported that in France the N.S.A. logged more than seventy million phone calls.

People who follow intelligence matters always knew that the technical capabilities of the N.S.A. and its British sibling, C.G.H.Q., were far-reaching. But five months after Snowden’s initial revelations, it is evident that its appetite for intercepting data, and its willingness to circumvent legal and diplomatic niceties, were also extraordinary. Indeed, the agency now appears to be using the astonishing extent of its activities as a justification for failing to keep the President informed that it was listening in on the German Chancellor and other world leaders. According to the Journal, “officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn’t have been practical to brief him on all of them.”

Well, that’s O.K. then. Except, of course, it isn’t. From the very beginning of this, the biggest question has been about the supervision—or lack of supervision—of the spying agencies: Who watches the watchers? At a White House press conference in August, President Obama addressed the general public in the United States and other countries, saying:

I want to make clear once again that America is not interested in spying on ordinary people. Our intelligence is focussed, above all, on finding the information that’s necessary to protect our people and, in many cases, protect our allies. It’s true we have significant capabilities. What’s also true is we show a restraint that many governments around the world don’t even think to do, refuse to show.

Did Obama know then that the U.S. government had been routinely spying on Merkel and other prominent leaders of countries allied with the United States? Did he know that it was busy sweeping up metadata about phone calls in France, Spain, and other friendly countries? (According to press reports, this N.S.A. program logged telephone numbers and the duration of conversations, but didn’t record the content of calls.) If he did, it is disturbing. If he didn’t, it is even more disturbing.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty