WASHINGTON—The angry allegation by the German government that the National Security Agency monitored the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel may force President Obama into making a choice he has avoided for years: whether to continue the age-old game of spying on America’s friends and risk undercutting cooperation with important partners in tracking terrorists, managing the global economy and slowing Iran’s nuclear program.
The pressure to make such a choice builds each day, as some of the United States’ closest allies have demanded explanations from Washington after similar disclosures about the breadth and sophistication of American electronic spying. Inside the administration it has touched off behind-the-scenes recriminations between the White House and the intelligence agencies over how much detail was given to White House officials about which world leaders are being monitored.
"This was colossally bad judgment—doing something because you can, instead of asking if you should," said one career American official with long experience in Europe. A senior administration official declined to say what Mr. Obama knew or did not know about monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s phone, but said the president "doesn’t think we are in the right place."
The tension with Germany built last week after German officials were given evidence of the cellphone monitoring by Der Spiegel, the German weekly newsmagazine. The first protests to Washington came in an angry phone call to Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, from her German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen.
During the call, according to German officials, Ms. Rice insisted that Mr. Obama did not know about the monitoring of Ms. Merkel’s phone, and said it was not currently happening, and would not in the future. But according to American officials familiar with the call, Ms. Rice would not acknowledge that the monitoring took place, even though she did not dispute the evidence the Germans had provided to her, which stretched back into the administration of President George W. Bush.
If Ms. Rice’s contention that the president was unaware of the monitoring is correct, it raises the question of why he was not alerted—especially after tensions rose earlier this year, following the first revelations by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, about American spying operations in Germany. Mr. Obama addressed those concerns at length during a visit to Germany.
There is little new in spying among allies: the oft-quoted line from Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” was barely true when he uttered it in 1929, and Mr. Stimson himself later oversaw the breaking of codes during World War II.
But the sentiment is particularly potent in the case of a country like Germany, which has been critical for a number of American intelligence operations.
In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.
Until now the Obama administration has been loath to broker such a deal with the Germans, who have publicly stated their interest in a nonspying pact, partly because other nations would demand a similar arrangement. But the revelations of recent days have so strained relations between Washington and Berlin that that calculus appears to be changing—especially because American officials have difficulty making a credible case for what the United States has to gain from spying on senior German officials.
Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations.
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