What’s a little espionage among friends?: Station Chief Ousted as CIA Spies Found in German Parliament and Spy Agency

By Dave Lindorff 

Munich -- You have to wonder how much more the German public will take of the country’s ongoing humiliation by the United States and its extensive program of secretly spying on what nominally is one of America’s most reliable allies.

The latest scandal involves the discovery of a CIA mole working in the highest reaches of Germany’s Defense Ministry. This exposé follows, by less than a week, the arrest of another US spy in Germany’s own intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtsdienst (BND). 

Yesterday, the German government ordered the expulsion of the CIA station chief in Berlin because of the discovery of two active spies. It was the first such expulsion of a CIA station chief by a US ally in memory, but even so, the action appears to be largely symbolic, and designed to appease public anger domestically, not to seriously impact US spying within Germany by the US. The German government, after all, didn’t even blow the station chief’s identity -- an act of professional courtesy that in this case was totally inappropriate to the offense.

The German people then -- and we Americans watching this farce -- must be left wondering why the German government, almost like an abused child who is old enought to strike back, puts up with this kind of embarrassment at the hands of the US government. 

Germany, after all, has a powerful economy -- one that, driven as it is by a strong manufacturing sector and a solid trade surplus, including with the US, in many ways is much stronger than the US economy. Germany has no need to worry about any risk of US trade sanctions, the way most countries do in standing up to the US. Nor does Germany need to rely on the US military for protection. The country faces no threat from any direction. (As anti-war activist David Swanson puts it in his column US out of Germany, “Protection from Russia?  If the Russian government weren't demonstrating a level of restraint that dwarfs even that of the Brazilian soccer team's defense there would be full-scale war in Ukraine right now.  Russia is no more threatening Germany than Iran is preparing to nuke Washington or the U.N. is confiscating guns in Montana.”)

Why, one has to ask, would such a powerful country put up with the crap that the US is doing here, which even includes the tapping Chancellor Merkel’s cell phone (as disclosed in documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden), or paying spies to rat out the inner workings of a Bundestag?...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new, uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2371