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New revelations about the scandal of “friendly” spying by the United States on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European politicians have implicated Denmark, whose secret services apparently contributed to these activities.
According to coinciding reports by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the public television stations NDR and WDR, the Danish espionage helped the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap the cell phones of Merkel and her then-foreign minister and current German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
The scandal over such eavesdropping came to light in 2013 and tarnished relations between the two great transatlantic allies, Berlin and Washington.
Merkel expressed her displeasure to then-President Barack Obama, saying that “spying on friends is not acceptable”.
Successive journalistic revelations brought these practices to light, which the NSA had been carrying out since the 1990s and which also affected other European leaders, as well as the European Central Bank (ECB).
According to the new information, Denmark was aware of these activities and presumably cooperated with the United States to carry them out.
The issue implicates Denmark, as Germany’s neighbor and a partner of the European Union (EU), the media report.
Its cooperation with the NSA made possible not only the eavesdropping on Merkel’s cell phone but also on other leaders of Nordic countries, such as Sweden and Norway.
