What Did Merkel Know? And When Did Obama Know It?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

03 November 13

ruthdig's Robert Scheer, a political comrade in my Berkeley daze, argues that the National Security Agency (NSA) hid from President Obama that it was spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel and other foreign leaders. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, Bob claims that the NSA kept Obama in the dark about it. This is also the official spin from the White House, and Team Obama is sticking to it.

Professor Juan Cole, whom I read every day, goes even further, warning of "an occult intelligence bureaucracy funded at $52 billion a year by your and my tax dollars that keeps our elected leaders in the dark about its activities."

I admire these guys and share their opposition to government secrecy and the intelligence bureaucracies, which I have spent much of my life fighting against, both as a journalist and nonviolent activist. But, on the NSA's bugging of foreign leaders, I think they are wrong. At least to my ears, the Los Angeles Times offers a more believable spin.

"The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders," write Ken Dilanian and Janet Strobart. They cite several "current and former intelligence officers," all anonymous, which does not strengthen their case. But the article provides a wealth of verifiable detail.

Any decision to spy on friendly foreign leaders is made with input from the State Department, which considers the political risk, one official told the reporters. Any useful intelligence is then given to the president's counter-terrorism advisor, Lisa Monaco, among other White House officials. Much of the information is in the briefing books, the official insists, leaving it to future historians to resolve the issue.

Obama may not have been specifically briefed on NSA operations targeting a particular foreign leader's cell phone or email communications, one official conceded. "But certainly the National Security Council and senior people across the intelligence community knew what was going on, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous."

"People are furious," one senior intelligence official added. "This is officially the White House cutting off the intelligence community."

Which side should we believe? More to the point, why should we believe either one? If all governments lie, as I.F. Stone taught us, different government bureaucracies tell different lies. Even if the L.A. Times account sounds "truthier" than the White House spin, past generations of Washington officials purposely designed the system to give presidents "plausible deniability" - precisely so they could lie to foreign leaders in this type of embarrassing situation.

Spying on foreign leaders is meant to provide information to presidents, top officials, and diplomats to help them in their dealings with foreign leaders and in devising policy toward them. Otherwise, why bother? If the spooks were targeting only Merkel, we might suspect that someone in the NSA had a hunch about her East German past or suspected some lingering affection toward Russia. But spying on at least 35 foreign leaders is a major undertaking, and career-oriented intelligence bureaucrats, who serve at the president's pleasure, seem unlikely to run such a huge risk without informing the State Department and the White House's National Security Council. CYA rules, OK?

Why, then, do I pick a fight with friends? It certainly isn't political, at least not in the narrow sense. Neither Scheer nor Cole are at all shy about attacking Obama when they think he deserves it. But their arguments echo a siren song that has seduced political opposition in our country and abroad ever since the early Cold War. This is the belief that America's military and intelligence bureaucracies secretly run the show.

Sometimes, they try to, though often at cross purposes with each other. And they always push their own interests and policies, as do Big Oil, Big Money, other multi-national corporations, the foreign policy elites, the corporate media, and other major players in our highly complex and not very democratic political system. But, for the most part, American generals and spymasters do what they think their civilian superiors want them to do, explicitly tell them to do, or let them get away with doing. Try to kill Fidel Castro? The lead came from John and Bobby Kennedy. Torture Vietnamese in Operation Phoenix? Blame LBJ and Tricky Dick. Even the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover in his counter-intelligence programs (COINTELPRO) and stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. was more in the presidential tent pissing out than the other way around.

In fact, for all the loose rhetoric in the mid-1970s of the CIA, NSA, and FBI being "rogue elephants," Senator Frank Church's committee to "Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" showed that the spooks generally did what their civilian masters wanted them to do. If presidents and Congressional oversight committees did not know what an intelligence agency was doing, it was usually because they did not want to know and did not make the effort to find out.

The same remains true today. To allow elected officials to escape responsibility by saying I did not know poses a far greater threat to what remains of our democracy than anything the spies themselves are doing. We elected Barack Obama to run the government, which means staying on top of what his government is doing, especially in the shadows. As President Harry Truman used to say, "The buck stops here."

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How To Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.