US denies Obama aware of Merkel spying as scandal spreads

(AFP) Transatlantic tensions reached boiling point Monday as Washington sharply denied reports President Barack Obama knew US spies were tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but fresh allegations emerged of mass snooping in Spain.

As outrage over secret US surveillance of leaders and average citizens mounted with a tide of new reports, a delegation from the European Parliament was due in Washington to demand answers on the extent of the operations.

The trip coincided with a Spanish newspaper report citing a leaked document indicating US security services tracked 60.5 million telephone calls in Spain in a single month.

And it came on the heels of a Wall Street Journal article that Obama learned of the electronic surveillance of Merkel and other world leaders in an internal mid-year review.

The White House then ordered an end to the programmes, according to the Journal.

NSA chief "did not discuss" Merkel operation with Obama

German media had reported at the weekend that eavesdropping on Merkel's phone may have started in 2002, when she was Germany's main opposition leader and three years before she became chancellor.

Newspaper "Bild am Sonntag" quoted US intelligence sources as saying that Obama himself had been informed of the phone tap against Merkel by NSA chief General Keith Alexander in 2010 but allowed it to continue.

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines however denied the allegation, saying on Sunday that Alexander "did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel."

Leaked documents from former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, however, indicate that US spy agencies accessed the electronic communications of dozens of world leaders and possibly millions of foreign nationals.

In Spanish paper "El Mundo" meanwhile, US blogger Glenn Greenwald said the NSA tracked the origin and destination of calls and their duration. The article included a classified graph of 30 days of telephone call tracing last December and January.

The news broke hours before Spanish foreign ministry officials were to meet the US ambassador, James Costos, who has been summoned to provide information about alleged US spying on Spanish telecommunications.

Citizens' fundamental rights

The European Parliament said its delegation's three-day mission to Washington would probe US authorities on the impact of surveillance programmes "on EU citizens' fundamental rights" and discuss a recent request to suspend an EU-US agreement on the transfer of bank data in the wake of the scandal.

It said it would also seek clarity on the charges of spying on Merkel.

Merkel angrily confronted Obama with the spying allegations in a phone call Wednesday, saying that if true it would be a "breach of trust."

She was backed by Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle who said the affair "threatens to undermine ties that bind us and that we need more than ever to jointly shape the future in the globalised world of the 21st century."

The White House has said it is not monitoring Merkel's phone calls and will not do so in future, but refused to say whether it did so previously.

US lawmakers meanwhile sought to play down the scandal.

Representative Peter King, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, said Obama should "stop apologising" about the NSA phone-tapping, claiming the programmes had saved "thousands" of lives.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a fellow Republican, told CNN: "The bigger news story here would be ... if the United States intelligence services weren't trying to collect information that would protect US interests both (at) home and abroad."