Outrage in Europe Grows Over Spying Disclosures
Rolf Vennenbernd/European Pressphoto Agency
German officials, including Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, expressed anger over new reports of United States spy activities.
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 1, 2013
PARIS — Damage from the disclosures of United States spying on its European and Asian allies spread on Monday, threatening negotiations on a free trade agreement, hurting President Obama’s standing in Europe and raising basic questions of trust among nations that have been on friendly terms for generations.
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President François Hollande of France issued some of the harshest language yet from a European leader on the issue, telling reporters that “we cannot accept this kind of behavior between partners and allies” and suggesting that talks on the trade pact, scheduled to start next week, should be delayed at least until questions over the spying issue were resolved and confidence restored.
It was not so much the fact of the spying as its sheer scale that alarmed European leaders and others here. Elmar Brok, an outspoken German who is chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said that “the spying has reached dimensions that I did not think were possible for a democratic country.” He said the United States had “lost all balance — George Orwell is nothing by comparison.”
While some of the comments were political and from leaders of countries that also spy with great energy against their allies, there was a new tone of disappointment with President Obama and concern that the American intelligence system had become too large for careful political oversight.
“France is a cynical country,” said François Heisbourg, a defense expert at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “We all spy, but the difference here is the scale — up to 60 million connections in Germany in a day!”
That spies go “spearfishing” after particular targets is one thing, he said. “But no one has understood that our societies were being spied on so massively — this isn’t spearfishing but trawling with a big, big net. That’s the real shocker.”
The European Parliament, which will vote on any free trade agreement, will debate the latest spying revelations in Brussels on Wednesday, with the Parliament’s president, Martin Schulz of Germany, saying that he was “deeply worried and shocked.” If the latest reports, which include American spying on the European Union itself, are true, he said, “it would be an extremely serious matter that will have a severe impact on E.U.-U.S. relations.”
European lawmakers across the political spectrum warned of a loss of confidence in the Obama administration that would make a free trade deal difficult. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Green Party floor leader, spoke for many when he said that the European Union “must immediately suspend negotiations with the U.S. over a free trade agreement.” First, he said, “we need a deal on data protection so that something like that never happens again.”
The reaction was particularly angry in Germany, with its history of Nazism and the East German Stasi, made more acute by the disclosure that a large part of the American interception efforts were aimed there.
Michael Grosse-Brömer, the parliamentary president for the ruling conservative bloc, warned that if the reports proved true, “it would be sufficient to shatter mutual trust and to damage the close, trusting trans-Atlantic relationship.”
Mr. Obama was in Berlin on June 19, giving a speech in which he explained that the spying programs were about counterterrorism and served the interests of all allies. But the online edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and The Guardian, based on leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former American intelligence contractor, reported on Saturday that the spying and data collection included the European Union offices in Brussels and Washington, which struck many here as unlikely places to find terrorists.
Terrorism is real and “there are systems that have to be checked, especially to fight terrorism,” Mr. Hollande said, “but I don’t think that it is in our embassies or in the European Union that this threat exists.”
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