"It’s not yet at the nightmare scenario - one in which Germany gets closer to Russia - but it’s heading toward that"

“The situation has become extremely bad and it is seriously regrettable it has gotten to this stage,” said Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at England’s University of Buckingham. “With the Middle East in turmoil it is not a good time for a country that is democratic and Western to be at loggerheads with the U.S. It’s not yet at the nightmare scenario – one in which Germany gets closer to Russia – but it’s heading toward that.”

How the U.S. and Germany got into this situation can be traced back to the end of the Second World War, when the Nazi regime was disbanded and the country split in two: West Germany, which was overseen by the West, and East Germany, which was part of Stalin’s Soviet bloc.

The U.S. was responsible for setting up the German spy agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (or BND). It was treated by Washington “as a kind of colony,” according to Glees, until the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany in 1990.

“Germany has always been considered a rather junior-league intelligence agency,” according to British intelligence analyst Glenmore Trenear-Harvey. “The BND used to be terribly, terribly leaky.”