USA caught spying on senior German officials a week after espionage against

It wasn’t immediately possible to confirm the accuracy of the documents. “You have a rather ironic relationship towards all this”, he said.

Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily and broadcasting network ARD reported that the NSA had targeted 69 telephone and fax numbers in the German government administration.

On Thursday, Peter Altmaier, a close aide of Merkel and minister responsible for intelligence, summoned the US ambassador to Germany, John B. Emerson, to the Prime Ministry, to convey Berlin’s protest. Altmaier told the envoy that German law must be respected and violations punished, Seibert said.

Seibert said that Germany’s relevant authorities were now investigating the alleged widespread surveillance revealed by WikiLeaks.

The telephone line in question is still in use, and now belongs to the German federal ministry of finance.

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: “Today’s publication further demonstrates that the United States’ economic espionage campaign extends to Germany and to key European institutions and issues such as the European Central Bank and the crisis in Greece“.

“There is no more ducking away”, said Christian Flisek, a lawmaker from Merkel’s Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partner.

No direct quotes are used to back up the assessments made in the phone call summary, believed to have taken place between Dr Merkel and an assistant during a trip to Vietnam in 2011.

He said that it didn’t come as a surprise.

“We have become more distrustful”, he said.

In the conversation Merkel also stressses the urgency of enacting the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) and of putting pressure on the U.S. and British governments to bring it about.

On a mobile phone?

Relations between the U.S.-German were strained in 2013 after the wiretapping reports emerged. “But as we’ve also said, we do not conduct foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there’s a specific and validated national security goal”.

The allegations, which surfaced Thursday on the website of WikiLeaks, prompted a cautious response from State Department spokesman John Kirby, who sought to downplay the development by stressing that the USA and Germany have already addressed past spying allegations and are “going to continue to work past this”.

Then, last summer, Germany identified two government employees suspected of passing secrets to the USA, leading the German government to order the top USA intelligence official in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to leave Germany.