Van Debnath
On October 2, the day after the G8 Leaders visited Greece, a “group” of German politicians, police and military officials gathered at the German embassy in Athens to discuss ways to “smooth the path for a referendum on independence”. The meeting, which went unnoticed by the Greeks themselves, was one of a number of meetings between representatives of Germany’s intelligence services and leaders of Greek independence movements, including the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (Maoist) and the left-wing group Revolutionary Youth, to discuss “security and coordination” of the G8 meeting.
It seems that some time in 2011, Germany’s NSA and GCHQ, as well as several of its local counterparts, had developed the tools to monitor mobile phone transmissions between G8 leaders as they flew through Athens and other European cities. German intelligence also had the ability to intercept emails within email servers and through internet cafes.
As well, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) internal “black” file, which is the database that contains all the data that NSA can capture incidentally, was also accessible during the G8 Leaders visit to Greece.
According to a recently published report by the German weekly Die Zeit, published on September 27, 2011, in October the NSA’s technical team monitored the mobile phone calls and emails of the four leaders, along with the communications of “hundreds” of other senior European politicians, including Angela Merkel and Mario Monti, the prime ministers of Italy and Greece.
From a security point of view, this information was likely to be of great value to intelligence agencies working inside the US, as it allowed them to monitor the movements of the leaders in real time without having to build up their own monitoring stations at the appropriate locations.
As mentioned before, this particular document may also be classified, and in November 2011 the NSA was forced to declassify some of its intelligence gathering activities, after Edward Snowden, former NSA contractor, leaked a set of documents revealing that it had been gathering information on American citizens.
The Snowden revelations gave the US government access to information about the way German Chancellor Merkel dealt with the NSA, among other methods to influence her policies. These include spying on the leader’s communications on her mobile phone, listening in for her calls and listening in on her fax lines.
The spying also included information on the phone calls of her husband, former President George W. Bush, who was in the White House when the NSA