Germany Spurns U.S. Offer to Join "The Club"

In an attempt to ameliorate German concerns over spying on its citizens, Angela Merkel has been offered membership in special intelligence sharing regime occupied by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, colloquially known as the Five Eyes Pact.

She has turned down this offer:

U.S. Ambassador John Emerson made his way to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin armed with a plan to head off the worst diplomatic clash of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.

Emerson came to the July 9 meeting with an offer authorized in Washington: provide Germany a U.S. intelligence-sharing agreement resembling one available only to four other nations. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Berlin.

It wasn’t enough.

The same morning, across the boundary once marked by the Berlin Wall, Merkel convened her top ministers following the 9:30 a.m. Cabinet meeting on the sixth floor of the Chancellery and resolved to ask the U.S. intelligence chief to leave German soil.

Merkel, who ultimately determined the government’s course, had to act. Public and political pressure after more than a year of accusations of American espionage overreach, stoked by indignation at the lack of a sufficient response from Washington, had left the German government with no alternative.

“We don’t live in the Cold War anymore, where everybody probably mistrusted everybody else,” Merkel, who has previously reserved her Cold War-mentality accusations for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF today.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, we see how, when we allow our state security apparatus to operate unsupervised, those in charge of providing intelligence on our opponents serve their own narrow institutional interests, and not the interests of our nation.

Unfortunately, there currently is no political will to keep our intelligence agencies on a leash.