Berlin: The German Foreign Intelligence Agency has admitted tapping "at least one" phone call each by US Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton while they were aboard United States government jets.

The disclosure is an embarrassing reversal of the spying scandal that blew up when it was revealed last year that America bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile.

German spies reportedly listened to a phone call by Hillary Clinton in 2012. Credit:AP

The German media reports claim Mr Kerry's intercepted communication was a satellite phone call from the Middle East in 2013. Mrs Clinton's communication was also a satellite call, in 2012, and was reportedly to then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Both calls were reported to have been intercepted accidentally while German intelligence was targeting terror suspects in the Middle East and northern Africa.

The intelligence agency (the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) told German media that terror groups often use the same frequencies that the secretaries phone calls were made over, so the calls were picked up. The calls were among what the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung said intelligence sources described as several cases of US official phone calls being picked up accidentally during anti-terror communications monitoring.