Report: Germany spied on U.S. embassies, Vatican

Doug Stanglin | USA TODAY

Germany's foreign intelligence service has systematically spied on its closest allies and friendly countries around the world, including snooping on U.S., French and British embassies, the U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. diplomatic offices at the United Nations and even the Vatican, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Saturday.

The magazine, in its current edition, says spying by the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, occurred despite German Chancellor Angela Merkel's angry response to reports in 2013 that the U.S. had spied on her mobile phone: "Spying among friends? That's just not done."

Europe's largest weekly said it learned from unnamed sources that the extent of spying by the BND was even broader than reported when news surfaced in October of BND snooping on friendly countries.

“(It) has emerged that the BND spied on the United States Department of the Interior and the interior ministries of (European Union) member states including Poland, Austria, Denmark and Croatia,” said the magazine’s online international edition.

“In Germany, the BND’s own selector lists included numerous foreign embassies and consulates," Der Spiegel reported. "The e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers of the diplomatic representations of the United States, France, Great Britain, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and even the Vatican were all monitored in this way.”

In addition, the magazine reported, the BND spied on such non-governmental organizations as Care International, Oxfam and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva.

The reports from October emerged after Merkel's Chancellery, which is in charge of overseeing Germany's intelligence agencies, informed the Bundestag's Parliamentary Control Panel, which is responsible for applying checks and balances to intelligence efforts, that the BND "had been surveilling the institutions of numerous European countries and other partners for many years," the magazine said.

"The search terms used by the BND in its espionage also included communications lines belonging to U.S. diplomatic outposts in Brussels and the United Nations in New York," it said. "The list even included the U.S. State Department's hotline for travel warnings."

Surveillance is an especially sensitive issue in Germany because of widespread abuses of civil rights during the former Nazi and Communist eras, the magazine noted.

Obama apologized to Merkel over the mobile phone spying incident in 2013, Der Spiegel wrote at the time, citing a source in Merkel's office. The German magazine, citing documents disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, said the U.S. intelligence agency's Special Collection Service had listed Merkel's phone number since 2002.