New NSA Revelations: Inside Snowden's Germany File
An analysis of secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden demonstrates that the NSA is more active in Germany than anywhere else in Europe -- and that data collected here may have helped kill suspected terrorists.
Just before Christmas 2005, an unexpected event
disrupted the work of American spies in the south-central German city of
Wiesbaden. During the installation of a fiber-optic cable near the Rhine River,
local workers encountered a suspicious metal object, possibly an undetonated
World War II explosive. It was certainly possible: Adolf Hitler's military had
once maintained a tank repair yard in the Wiesbaden neighborhood of
Mainz-Kastel.
The Americans -- who maintained what was officially
known as a "Storage Station" on Ludwig Wolker Street -- prepared an
evacuation plan. And on Jan. 24, 2006, analysts with the National Security Agency(NSA) cleared out their offices, cutting off the
intelligence agency's access to important European data streams for an entire
day, a painfully long time. The all-clear only came that night: The potential
ordinance turned out to be nothing more than a pile of junk.
Of course, everybody living there knows of the 20-hectare
(49-acre) US army compound. A beige wall topped with barbed wire protects the
site from the outside world; a sign outside warns, "Beware, Firearms in
Use!"
Americans in uniform have been part of the cityscape
in Wiesbaden for decades, and local businesses have learned to cater to their
customers from abroad. Used-car dealerships post their prices in dollars and
many Americans are regulars at the local brewery. "It is a peaceful
coexistence," says Christa Gabriel, head of the Mainz-Kastel district council.
But until now, almost nobody in Wiesbaden knew that
Building 4009 of the "Storage Station" houses one of the NSA's most
important European data collection centers. Its official name is the European
Technical Center (ETC), and, as documents from the archive of whistleblower
Edward Snowden show, it has been expanded in recent years. From an American
perspective, the program to improve the center -- which was known by the
strange code name "GODLIKELESION" -- was badly needed. In early 2010,
for example, the NSA branch office lost power 150 times within the space just a
few months -- a serious handicap for a service that strives to monitor all of
the world's data traffic.
NSA Sites in Germany
On Sept. 19, 2011, the Americans celebrated the
reopening of the refurbished ETC, and since then, the building has been the
NSA's "primary communications hub" in Europe. From here, a Snowden
document outlines, huge amounts of data are intercepted and forwarded to
"NSAers, warfighters and foreign partners in Europe, Africa and the Middle
East." The hub, the document notes, ensures the reliable transfer of data
for "the foreseeable future."
Soon the NSA will have an even more powerful and
modern facility at their disposal: Just five kilometers away, in the Clay
Kaserne, a US military complex located in the Erbenheim district of Wiesbaden,
the "Consolidated Intelligence Center" is under construction. It will
house data-monitoring specialists from Mainz-Kastel. The project in southern
Hesse comes with a price tag of $124 million (€91 million). When finished, the
US government will be even better equipped to satisfy its vast hunger for data.
One year after Edward Snowden made the breadth of the
NSA's global data monitoring public, much remains unknown about the full scope
of the intelligence service's activities in Germany. We know that theAmericans monitored the mobile phone
of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and we know that there are listening posts in
the US Embassy in Berlin and in the Consulate General in Frankfurt.
But much remains in the dark. The German government
has sent lists of questions to the US government on several occasions, and a
parliamentary investigative committee has begun looking into the subject in
Berlin. Furthermore, Germany's chief public prosecutor has initiated an investigation into the NSA -- albeit one currently limited to its
monitoring of the chancellor's cell phone and not the broader allegation that
it spied on the communications of the German public. Neither the government nor
German lawmakers nor prosecutors believe they will receive answers from
officials in the United States.
German Left Party politician Jan Korte recently asked
just how much the German government knows about American spying activities in
Germany. The answer: Nothing. The NSA's promise to send a package including all
relevant documents to re-establish transparency between the two governments has
been quietly forgotten by the Americans.
In response, SPIEGEL has again reviewed the Snowden documents relating to Germany and compiled a
Germany File of original documents pertaining to the NSA's activities in the
country that are now available for download here. SPIEGEL has reported on the contents of some of
the documents over the course of the past year. The content of others is now being written about for
the first time. Some passages of the documents have been redacted in order to
remove sensitive information like the names of NSA employees or those of the
German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). This
week's reports are also based on documents and information from other sources.
An Omnipotent American Authority
The German publichas
a right to know exactly
what the NSA is doing in Germany, and should be given the ability to draw its
own conclusions about the extent of the US intelligence agency's activities in
the country and the scope of its cooperation with German
agencies when it
comes to, for example, the monitoring of fiber-optic cables.
The German archive provides the basis for a critical
discussion on the necessity and limits of secret service work as well as on the
protection of privacy in the age of digital communication. The documents
complement the debate over a trans-Atlantic relationship that has been severely
damaged by the NSA affair.
They paint a picture of an all-powerful American
intelligence agency that has developed an increasingly intimate relationship
with Germany over the past 13 years while massively expanding its presence. No
other country in Europe plays host to a secret NSA surveillance architecture
comparable to the one in Germany. It is a web of sites defined as much by a
thirst for total control as by the desire for security. In 2007, the NSA
claimed to have at least a dozen active collection sites in Germany.
The documents indicate that the NSA uses its German
sites to search for a potential target by analyzing a "Pattern of
Life," in the words of one Snowden file. And one classified report
suggests that information collected in Germany is used for the "capture or
kill" of alleged terrorists.
According to Paragraph 99 of Germany's criminal code,
spying is illegal on German territory, yet German officials would seem to know
next to nothing about the NSA's activity in their country. For quite some time,
it appears, they didn't even want to know. It wasn't until Snowden went public
with his knowledge that the German government became active.
On June 11, August 26 and October 24 of last year, Berlin sent a catalogue of questions to the US government. During a visit to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland at the beginning of November, German intelligence heads Gerhard Schindler (of the BND) and Hans-Georg Maassen (of the domestic intelligence agency, known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV) asked the most important questions in person and, for good measure, handed over a written list. No answers have been forthcoming. This leaves the Snowden documents as the best source for describing how the NSA has turned Germany into its most important base in Europe in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The NSA's European Headquarters
On March 10, 2004, two US generals -- Richard J. Quirk
III of the NSA and John Kimmons, who was the US Army's deputy chief of staff
for intelligence -- finalized an agreement to establish an operations center in
Germany, the European Security Center (ESC), to be located on US Army property
in the town of Griesheim near Darmstadt, Germany. That center is now the NSA's
most important listening station in Europe.
The NSA had already dispatched an initial team to
southern Germany in early 2003. The agency stationed a half-dozen analysts at
the its European headquarters in Stuttgart's Vaihingen neighborhood, where
their work focused largely on North Africa. The analysts' aims, according to
internal documents, included providing support to African governments in securing
borders and ensuring that they didn't offer safe havens to terrorist
organizations or their accomplices.
The work quickly bore fruit. It became increasingly easy to track the movements of suspicious persons in Mali, Mauritania and Algeria through the surveillance of satellite telephones. NSA workers passed information on to the US military's European Command, with some also being shared with individual governments in Africa. A US government document states that the intelligence insights have "been responsible for the capture or kill of over 40 terrorists and has helped achieve GWOT (Global War on Terror) and regional policy successes in Africa."
Is Germany an NSA Beachhead?
The documents in Snowden's archive raise the question
of whether Germany has become a beachhead for America's deadly operations
against suspected terrorists -- and whether the CIA and the American military
use data collected in Germany in the deployment of its combat drones. When
asked about this by SPIEGEL, the NSA declined to respond.
The operations of the NSA's analysts in Stuttgart were so successful that the intelligence agency quickly moved to expand its presence. In 2004, the Americans obtained approximately 1,000 square meters (10,750 square feet) of office space in Griesheim to host 59 workers who monitored communications in an effort to "optimize support to Theater operations" of the US Armed Forces. Ten years later, the center, although largely used by the military, has become the NSA's most important outpost in Europe -- with a mandate that goes far beyond providing support for the US military.
In 2011, around 240 intelligence service analysts were
working at the Griesheim facility, known as the Dagger Complex. It was a
"diverse mix of military service members, Department of the Army
civilians, NSA civilians, and contractors," an internal document states.
They were responsible for both collecting and analyzing international
communication streams. One member of the NSA pointed out proudly that they were
responsible for every step in the process: collection, processing, analyzing
and distribution.
In May 2011, the installation was renamed the European Center for Cryptology (ECC) and the NSA integrated its Threat Operations Center, responsible for early danger identification, into the site. A total of 26 reconnaissance missions are managed from the Griesheim complex, which has since become the center of the "largest Analysis and Production activity in Europe," with satellite stations in Mons, Belgium, and in Great Britain. Internal documents indicate that the ECC is the operative intelligence arm of the NSA's European leadership in Stuttgart.
- Part 1: Inside
Snowden's Germany File
- Part 2: Targets in Africa, Targets in
Europe
- Part
3: Collection Sites in Germany
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