EU unites over fury at spying by the U.S.

BRUSSELS - European leaders united in anger Thursday as they attended a summit overshadowed by reports of widespread U.S. spying on its allies - allegations German Chancellor Angela Merkel said had shattered trust in President Barack Obama’s administration and undermined the crucial trans-Atlantic relationship.

The latest revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency swept up more than 70 million phone records in France and may have tapped Merkel’s cellphone prompted denunciations from theFrench and German governments.

Merkel’s unusually stern remarks as she arrived at the European Union gathering indicated she wasn’t placated by a phone conversation she had Wednesday with Obama, or his personal assurances that the U.S. is not listening in on her calls now.

“We need trust among allies and partners,” Merkel told reporters in Brussels. “Such trust now has to be built anew. This is what we have to think about.

“The United States of America and Europe face common challenges. We are allies. But such an alliancecan only be built on trust. That’s why I repeat again: Spying among friends, that cannot be.”

The White House may soon face other irked heads of state and government. The British newspaper The Guardian said Thursday that it obtained a confidential memo suggesting the NSA was able to monitor 35 world leaders’ communications in 2006. The memo said the NSA encouraged senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and other agencies to share their contacts so the spy agency could add foreign leaders’ phone numbers to its surveillance systems, the report said.

The Guardian did not identify who reportedly was eavesdropped on, but said the memo termed the payoff very meager: “Little reportable intelligence” was obtained, it said. Other European leaders arriving for the 28-nation meeting echoed Merkel’s displeasure. Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called it “completely unacceptable” for a country to eavesdrop on an allied leader.

If reports that Merkel’s cellphone had been tapped are true, “it is exceptionally serious,” Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told national broadcaster NOS.

“We want the truth,” Italian Premier Enrico Letta told reporters. “It is not in the least bit conceivable that activity of this type could be acceptable.”

Echoing Merkel, Austria’s foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, said, “We need to re-establish with the U.S. a relationship of trust, which has certainly suffered from this.”

France, which also vocally objected to allies spying on each other, asked that the issue of reinforcing Europeans’ privacy in the digital age be added to the agenda of the two-day summit. Before official proceedings got underway, Merkel held a brief one-on-one with French President Francois Hollande, and discussed the spying dispute.

After summit talks that lasted until after 1 a.m. Friday, Herman Van Rompuy, European Council president,announced at a news conference that France and Germany were seeking bilateral talks with the United States to resolve the dispute over electronic spying by “secret services” by the end of this year.

Without a partnership of “respect and trust,” intelligence agencies of the European nations cannot cooperate fully with the Americans in fighting terrorism, Van Rompuy said.

The Europeans’ statements and actions indicated that they hadn’t been satisfied with assurances from Washington. On Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama assured Merkel that her phone is not being listened to now and won’t bein the future.

“I think we are all outraged, across party lines,” Wolfgang Bosbach, a prominent German lawmaker from Merkel’s party, told Deutschlandfunk radio. “And that also goes for the response that the chancellor’s cellphone is not being monitored - because this sentence says nothing about whether the chancellor was monitored in the past.

“This cannot be justified from any point of view by the fight against international terrorism or by averting danger.”

Asked Thursday whether the Americans had monitored Merkel’s previous communications, Carney wouldn’t rule it out. “We are not going to comment publicly on every specified alleged intelligence activity,” he said.

But while the White House was staying publicly mum, Carney said the Obama administration was discussing Germany’s concerns “through diplomatic channels at the highest level,” as it was with other U.S. allies worried about the alleged spying.

In the past, much of the official anger in Europe about revelations of U.S. communications intercepts leaked by former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden seemed designed for internal political consumption in countries thatreadily acknowledge conducting major spying operations themselves.

But there has been a new discernible vein of anger in Europe as the scale of the NSA’s reported operations became known, as well as the possible targeting of a prominent leader such as Merkel, presumably for inside political or economic information.

Information for this article was contributed by Raf Casert, Juergen Baetz, David Rising and Cassandra Vinograd of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/25/2013

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