Picture this: James Bond in a tuxedo, martini in hand, shaken not stirred. He appears calm and cool but his attention is focused only on his mission: to bug the oval office so that M can listen in on all of President Obama’s calls and meetings. It’s a movie that you will never see because it seems unrealistic. The U.S. and Great Britain are allies, and spying on other governments today is seen as a thing of the past, a relic of the Cold War era. Espionage, however, is alive and well today, and we aren’t just spying on our enemies.
Much of Europe was enraged when the documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. had been spying on the European Union. A report by the German magazine “Der Spiegel” accuses the United States of going so far as to bug the offices of the E.U. and to gain access to their internal computer network. According to reports by the U.S.-based magazine “Financial Times,” we didn’t stop there. In fact, for the majority of the last decade, the U.S. National Security Agency has been listening to calls made from or to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. Although this story has not been in the mainstream television news in the United States since the Snowden scandal, during which it played second fiddle to the hunt for America’s newest supervillain, many Europeans are still outraged about the seemingly hostile action.
In the wake of finding out her phone had been bugged for the lion’s share of her time in office, Angela Merkel said that “trust needs to be rebuilt” because, as she put it, “spying among friends is never acceptable.” What was the United States to do? Hands caught in the cookie jar, it seemed the only option was to apologize and go about mending relations with the E.U., a group that calls several of the United States’ closest allies members. Well, according to recent news out of Germany, the U.S. couldn’t resist the temptation of more cookies. An employee of the German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, now stands accused of selling the names of 3,500 German intelligence employees and 218 top secret documents for $31,000 to the CIA. The BND employee, known as Markus R., was arrested last summer on accusations of spying for Russia. In his interrogation he revealed something that was shocking but made all too much sense: he had been working for the United States the whole time.
This new turn of events, which embarrassed the U.S. on an international stage, did not go unpunished. The German government quickly expelled the top-ranking U.S. intelligence official from the country. If the current investigation into the truthfulness of Markus R. finds his claims substantiated, the U.S. has upset the main economic power in the E.U., a major exporter who maintains very low trade restrictions with the United States. German corporations such as Volkswagen, Siemens, and BMW employ half a million American workers. Germany has remained a strategic military location for the U.S., and currently more U.S. military personnel are deployed to Germany than to any other foreign nation except for Japan. In addition, the United States partners with Germany in various international security initiatives including the mutual placement of sanctions on Russia. Notably, Germany is a key partner in the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, an effort to increase U.S. natural gas exports to the E.U. in order to reduce their dependence on Russian energy. Tensions between the two nations are mounting ever higher but the question remains: can the United States afford to make another such misstep? If the U.S. continues to push the envelope, then citizens better be ready for the economic consequences that will come with a strained relationship with one of the world’s economic superpower—consequences which could directly impact your wallet.
The saga of allies catching the U.S. red handed, so to speak, doesn’t stop in Berlin. Next door in France, reports by “Le Monde” suggest that the NSA combed through up to 70.3 million French phone records a month, periodically listening in on calls and reading text messages which contained certain buzzwords. In Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy and an important market for the global expansion of American corporations, spying allegations caused Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to indefinitely postpone her visit to Washington. She even went so far as to accuse the United States of committing “a grave violation of human rights and civil liberties” through surveillance activities in her nation. In Mexico, neighbor to the south and third largest trading partner of the U.S., the NSA is accused of accessing and reading President Enrique Peña Nieto’s personal email.
These incidents may well serve to open a frank debate in the United States as to the advantages and disadvantages of spying on nations with whom relationships are stable and mutually beneficial. In January of last year, President Obama took steps to mend relations by banning surveillance of our allies’ leaders. Many espionage experts, however, criticized this decision and support continued surveillance of allies, saying that you never know when a friend may turn on you. In fact, they go on to insist that everyone spies on their allies, even the countries up in arms about the NSA scandal. There may be some truth to their argument, but the fact remains that continued incidents of this nature could cause the very thing spying on allies is meant to foresee: the nations the United States considers friends today may soon not be so friendly.
