Germany and France ask Denmark and the United States …

From Paris

Good friends are our best confidants, but best friends can be established allies and addicted spies on orders from another great friend. Denmark, member of the European Union since 1973 and of the Schengen area since 2001 (free movement of goods and people) he behaved like one of those excellent friends of the European Union whose leaders he spied on as a second-hand employee of the American secret service, More precisely the now famous NSA (National Security Agency). A journalistic investigation published a few days ago by the French evening newspaper The world, German South German newspaper and initiated by the Danish public broadcaster DR revealed how the Danish intelligence services (FE), between 2012 and 2014, “collaborated” with the North American agency to spy on, among other EU countries, Germany , Norway, Sweden and France.

This Monday, May 31 French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel demand “full clarification” on how Denmark has played the punch phone game vswith leaders as high up as Merkel herself, the head of German diplomacy of those years, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, or the opposition leader Peer Steinbrück.

“This is not acceptable among the allies, even less among the European allies and partners,” said Emmanuel Macron after a Franco-German cabinet meeting. The names of the German executive are the only ones known at the moment, but there are many more leaders in Europe being spied on by Denmark and the United States. According to the investigation first made public by the Danish channel DR, the content of which reproduces an internal Danish secret service report, the North American NSA “used” the Danish systems for intercepting submarine telecommunications cables. The National Security Agency got this information through a series of cooperation agreements signed with Denmark.

Suspicions began to circulate in 2014. That year, Thomas Ahrenkiel, head of the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE), launched an internal investigation to determine whether, suddenly, the Barack Obama administration did not did not abuse the terms of the cooperation agreement. signed between the two countries. The result is a report called Operation Dunhammer. The date is not innocent. In 2013, American journalist Glen Greenwald began publishing in the British newspaper The Guardian the revelations of former CIA and NSA agent Edward Snowden (now a refugee in Russia) about the overwhelming way in which the NSA itself was spying on the entire planet with, among other friendly gestures, the full cooperation of Google, Microsoft , Yahoo! and Apple. In 2013, Angela Merkel told Obama that espionage between friends was “unacceptable”.

Through a connection to Danish telecommunications cables, the National Security Agency had access to text messages, phone calls and all traffic generated by the Internet. This includes search, chat, and messaging services. The names of the leaders spied on and the positions of responsibility they occupy show unambiguously that Copenhagen and Washington focused their curiosity on their own allies and not on so-called “bad boy” areas, in this case Russia, China or Turkey. The European Commission has bowed its head, for the moment. Brussels has confined itself to saying that everything relating to the intelligence services is “a national affair”. However, The ruler of the world and a member of the EU are involved in the scandal.

Washington seems more interested in its “allies” than in its supposed enemies, and in particular Angela Merkel and the French presidents.. From 2006 to 2012, theThe American NSA spied on no less than three French leaders: Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande. Most likely, there are no penalties or waivers. If the spy had been Russia, an earthquake would have struck, but since it is the United States, there will only be a sigh of indignation, a pure claim and nothing more. . The Old Continent has rediscovered how one of America’s friendliest presidents, Barack Obama, was one of the friend-allies most concerned with other people’s secrets.