Earlier in the week, more allegations of US eavesdropping on German officials emerged, not just involving Angela Merkel but also some of her minsters. Merkel summoned the US ambassador yesterday to explain the latest Wikileaks release. The leaked material apparently predates the rapprochement between the US and Germany since the initial revelations of NSA surveillance in 2013:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office asked the US ambassador to come in Thursday over new allegations of NSA spying, which threaten to drive a new wedge through transatlantic ties.

In the latest eruption in a nearly two-year rift over illicit espionage, Merkel’s chief of staff Peter Altmeier called the US envoy, John Emerson, to the chancellery “to make clear that respect for German law is non-negotiable and proven violations will be prosecuted”, Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said. …

According to the latest Wikileaks documents, the NSA did not limit its snooping activities to Merkel, and showed particular interest in the ministries of finance, economy and agriculture, the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and two public broadcasters reported.

They said WikiLeaks had shown them a list of 69 phone numbers that were reportedly targeted, belonging to ministers and senior officials. The list appears to date back to between 2010 and 2012.

The initial exposure of the surveillance of German officials came in 2013, shortly after Edward Snowden absconded with NSA material. Barack Obama and Angela Merkel patched up their differences after a period of chilliness in relations, but it’s not clear whether the US disclosed the scope of that intelligence collection. The extent demonstrated in the latest release may have come as a surprise to Merkel, or it may not, but it will once again rankle Germans who read about the whole mess again. That may very well explain Merkel’s “invitation” to Emerson yesterday, as much of the outrage over allies conducting intelligence operations is posturing anyway.

One interesting point may have specific application to the present, however. The surveillance on the finance ministry was conducted by listening in on a phone number assigned to Oskar Lafontaine, who left government in 1999 — but the same number rings through to a man whose name is in the news these days, Deborah Cole notes:

The list also features the number of former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, who left the job in 1999. But the number is “still active”, according to the Sueddeutsche report, and now rings through to the office of the powerful current finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Schaeuble is the point man for negotiations with Greece. He’s taken a hard line with the Tsipras government in Athens, bluntly refusing the 13th-hour changes that Alexis Tsipras attempted to make to the EU’s final — and now expired — offer. If the NSA still monitors that line, they may be getting a front-row seat for the Grexit.

CNN’s Jake Tapper also notices another aspect of the espionage row. The Bundestag has conducted an investigation into whether the US spied on German media as well as government officials, an allegation that could force the scandal to erupt on both sides of the Atlantic:

On Thursday, the German government’s intelligence coordinator, Günter Heiss, testified before a parliamentary investigative committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, focused on the activities of the U.S. National Security Agency’s spying on Germany and the knowledge and/or role of German intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND.

The NSA and/or CIA interfered with the exercise of the free press? Er … not exactly, or at least that wasn’t the issue:

CNN has learned that in early Summer 2011, the CIA station chief in Berlin (also representing the NSA at the U.S. Embassy) met with Heiss, and his assistant, Guido Müller. The CIA station chief urged the two men to take action against Heiss’s deputy, Hans-Josef Vorbeck, whom he said was leaking classified information to journalists.

Later that summer, CNN has learned, Heiss went to Washington, D.C. and discussed this same matter with U.S. government officials. In the meantime, the Chancellery opened a file on U.S. protocols of intercepted communications between Vorbeck and journalists.

By August, Vorbeck had been re-assigned to the Archive — a move widely seen as a punishment for his cooperating with reporters.

The incident raises many questions. That the U.S. government thought it appropriate to spy on journalists doing their jobs is controversial enough. But why would it be appropriate for U.S. officials to use these tools — given to save lives and protect U.S. national security — to notify the German government about officials talking to reporters in the normal exercise of a free press?

 Is this a serious question? People who work in the intelligence field can’t leak sensitive information to the press on their own. Part of operating an intelligence organization is keeping information and communications secure (a task at which the NSA and CIA failed miserably with Snowden). Of course an intel group will use the tools at hand to plug leaks and secure their operations. Getting reassigned to the archives sounds like a fairly mild punishment, and nothing in this article even suggests that the journalists suffered anything but the loss of a loose-lipped source.

The CIA wasn’t spying on journalists in this case, but on other intelligence operatives who were disseminating information.  That may be a distinction lost on the journalists involved, but it’s hardly illegitimate to keep operational security within intelligence operations. Journalists who undertake to get classified material from intelligence agents would have to accept that as part of the risk. At any rate, it’s not “interfering with the exercise of a free press” to keep intel officials from illegally sharing classified material.