Angela Merkel was the chancellor of Germany whose mobile phone the NSA was intercepting — a revelation John Kiriakou counts among the multiple occasions on which the scale of American signals intelligence has been exposed since 2013.[1]
“That’s big news,” he says. “She was one of our closest allies.” When the interception was first revealed, Hillary Clinton went to Germany and apologised — “and then we did it again.”[1]
The distinction he draws
Kiriakou uses the episode to draw a distinction he says the American public makes and the law does not. Spying on foreign leaders, even allied ones, is broadly popular: at the very least it reveals what a government intends in trade negotiations, at the very most it might disrupt an attack. “The American people love it and they want more of it.” Domestic surveillance is a different matter — “that is very specifically illegal. These intelligence services are not allowed to spy on Americans, and they do it anyway.”[2][3]
He does not exempt himself from that public. Asked about the interception by a member of the audience after a speech he gave in Berlin — “oh my god, did you see that the CIA was intercepting Angela Merkel’s cell phone?” — his answer was flat: “That’s their job. That’s what I want the CIA to be doing. I want them to intercept Angela Merkel’s cell phone.” The complaint, in his framing, is not that it happened but that it became public: “we shouldn’t be talking about that stuff.”[4][5]
The position sits inside a larger one he states in the same breath: he wants his country’s intelligence service looking at the Russians, the Chinese and the North Koreans in a highly technical fashion, and he treats some of what has been exposed — elements of Vault 7 among them — as material that should have stayed classified and compartmented.[6][4]
Merkel as the reality check
In April 2023 Kiriakou used Merkel a second way — not as an example of surveillance but as an argument against disbelief. A German reporter telephoned him about a set of leaked documents and told him she did not believe they were real, because one of them showed the American government spying on South Korea, an ally.[7][8]
His answer was that it is well documented that the United States spies on its allies, on Germany included: “just go ask Angela Merkel, she’ll tell you all about the CIA spying and NSA spying on her.” The reporter’s reply was that this was in the past, that Hillary Clinton had apologised for it, and that she had a hard time believing the CIA would continue to spy on Merkel.[8][9]
“With all due respect,” he told her, “only a fool would think that the United States wasn’t spying on its allies.” Thanks to Edward Snowden, he said, we know the NSA spies on everybody — “if they’re spying on me and they’re spying on you, why wouldn’t they be spying on Angela Merkel?” The reporter’s answer was that she had not thought about it that way.[9]
The same conversation produced his gloss on the wider leak: that the United States was also spying on Ukraine, apparently because Ukraine does not trust Washington to keep its secrets, so American agencies were reduced to collecting on the health of an allied military rather than being told.[10]
Contact with her government
Kiriakou’s connection to Merkel’s Germany is not only rhetorical. Describing what Europeans could do about American pressure, he noted that he travels to Europe frequently, has addressed the European Parliament three times since 2015, and had met Angela Merkel’s national security adviser on his most recent visit to Berlin.[11]
His advice on that occasion was directed at European voters rather than at Merkel: push your elected officials, and especially your representatives in the European Parliament, to carry out an independent foreign policy, and do not fall under the spell of the United States. The warmongering foreign policy Washington demands of its allies is, he said, a mistake in both the short and the long term — what is needed is European leadership, because none is coming from the United States.[11][12][13]