Intel cooperation

Spying on Friends? Atmosphere of Distrust Hinders EU Anti-Terror Cooperation

The man who wants to explain the psyche of Germany's foreign intelligence service sips a cappuccino and talks about the abduction of German tourists in the Sahara Desert a few years ago. A crisis committee was meeting at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, and agents at the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) in Pullach, outside Munich, were trying to figure out how to get information about the kidnappers. Human lives were at stake, the pressure considerable.

The French intelligence services had good sources in the region, but they had been unwilling to share their information with the Germans, so the BND decided to spy on the French to get it. This was how it came to be that the Germans spied on a government agency in a friendly country, one they treated as being among of their closest political allies. Friendly? Allied? In the man with the cappuccino's work, the two were mutually exclusive terms.