Chancellor Angela Merkel's government is planning to scrap a no-spy agreement Germany has held with Britain and the United States since 1945 in response to an embarrassing US-German intelligence service scandal which has deeply soured relations between Berlin and Washington.
The unprecedented change to Berlin's counter-espionage policy was announced by Merkel's Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière. He said that Berlin wanted “360‑degree surveillance” of all intelligence-gathering operations in Germany.
The intelligence services of the Allied victors, US, Britain and France, have hitherto been regarded as “friendly” to Germany. Their diplomatic and information-gathering activities were exempted from surveillance by Berlin's equivalent of M15 – the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). But de Maizière told Bild that he was now not ruling out permanent German counter-espionage surveillance of US, British and French intelligence operations.
The plan is in response to the scandal resulting from last week's arrest of a 31- year-old BND “double agent” who spent at least two years selling top-secret German intelligence documents to his US spymasters in return for cash payments.
The news came as US-German ties is already under pressure after news broke out last year that NSA bugged Merkel's mobile phone.