Zee Media Bureau/Supriya Jha
Washington: Adding to the acrimony budding between the US and Germany, a revelation by German magazine Der Spiegel says that the US had been spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone for last 10 years starting from 2002.
The report in the magazine also says that US President Barack Obama in his defence told Merkel that he had no clue that her phone was being spied upon and he would have stopped the monitoring had he been in the know of it.
Irked over the reports of eavesdropping on her phone, Merkel blasted the US saying that the “spying between friends was not acceptable”.
The latest expose is slated to create rifts between the two close allies and it was for the first time that Germany had summoned the US ambassador to explain the spying claims.
Germany is also sending two intelligence chiefs to the US to seek explanations over the eavesdropping on Merkel’s mobile phone.
In further details about the spying in Germany, the Der Spiegel report says that the monitoring was done by NSA’s special unit SCS (Special Collection Services) based in the US embassy in Pariser Platz in Berlin, which had Merkel’s name on its list since 2002.
The magazine has reportedly access to a secret SCS document from 2010, according to which the US had as many as 80 spy bases around the world, which were “not registered legally”.
According to the report, the secret document goes on to say that if these details about the secret spying stations of the NSA were revealed, it would cause “"severe damage for the US`s relations with a foreign government”.
Other than Germany, France is also enraged over the US spying claims with both of the European allies calling for a no-spy deal to be signed by the US.
Earlier, a report in Le Monde newspaper said that the US had tracked over 70 million of calls and text messages.
