Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail,” Henry Stimson, US secretary of state, sniffed in 1929 as he closed down his department’s code-cracking outfit. America did not have a national intelligence service until 1946, when the wartime Office of Strategic Services morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency. Today, the US has 16 agencies spying on literally everybody – including, apparently, the German chancellor.
Naturally, Angela Merkel is not amused, and her minions are now running through the usual gamut of diplomatic displeasure. The US ambassador has been upbraided for “totally unacceptable practices”. Two days earlier the French huffed and puffed about “completely unacceptable” US behaviour. According to Le Monde, the National Security Agency had scanned 62m French “telephone records” in a four-week period at the turn of this year.
Do they protest too much? Helmut Schmidt, German chancellor from 1974 to 1982, likes to quip that Washington listened in on every one of his telephone conversations. Ms Merkel may be an old target, too; NSA records apparently contain a mobile phone number the chancellor abandoned years ago.