A protester with the organization Code Pink wears giant glasses as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Director of National Security Agency (NSA) General Kieth Alexander testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, October 29, 2013/AFP
General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, said that in many cases European spy agencies had turned over phone call records and shared them with US intelligence.
The revelations came as a senior official said President Barack Obama was considering banning US spies from tapping the telephones of allied leaders, in the wake of German outrage over alleged snooping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s communications.
America’s European allies have spent days angrily protesting after newspaper reports, based on leaks from fugitive analyst Edward Snowden, that Washington collected tens of millions of telephone calls and online communications in Europe as part as a vast anti-terror sweep.
But Alexander and the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, testifying before Congress said the reports were based on a misunderstanding of information passed by Snowden to European newspapers.
“The assertions by reporters in France, Spain, Italy that NSA collected tens of millions of phone calls are completely false,” Alexander told the House Intelligence Committee
“To be perfectly clear, this is not information that we collected on European citizens,” he said.
Hours earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported that electronic spying was carried out by the intelligence agencies of France and Spain – outside their own borders and sometimes in war zones – and was then passed onto the NSA.
The claims, if true, could embarrass European governments which have vehemently protested to the United States about alleged overreaching and infringements on the privacy of their citizens by the NSA.
Alexander said journalists had misinterpreted leaked data about the alleged spying operations.
“They cite as evidence screen shots of the results of a web tool used for data management purposes, but both they and the person who stole the classified data did not understand what they were looking at,” he said.
Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, backed up claims that the European media reports were wrong.
“This was not the United States collecting on France and Germany. This was France and Germany collecting. And it had nothing to do with their citizens, it had to do with collecting in NATO areas of war, like Afghanistan,” she said.
There was no immediate comment from the spy agencies in the European countries mentioned.
A senior official meanwhile said that Obama was considering whether to bar US spy agencies from eavesdropping on allied leaders in the wake of the Merkel row.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence matters, said the step was under consideration, but that no policy decisions had yet been finalized, as Obama awaits results of several already announced reviews into US surveillance practices.
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