BERLIN, May 15 (UPI) -- After coming under scrutiny for dubious intelligence cooperation with the United States in Iraq, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service is now taking heavy fire for spying on German journalists.
Chancellor Angela Merkel Monday ordered the service, known as the BND, to stop gathering intelligence on journalists, and especially to stop using them to spy on colleagues.
"The chancellor's office today ordered that... no journalists should be used as sources," Ulrich Wilhelm, government spokesman, said Monday at his regular news conference. The BND has until the end of the week to respond to the allegations.
Wilhelm did not say whether the directive would also apply to the country's other two agencies, the Verfassungsschutz and the MDA, a military intelligence service.
The BND is authorized to gather intelligence in foreign countries, and may work domestically only if its security is endangered.
The BND apparently had, until recently, deemed that was just the case when it spied on several journalists who had published material critical of the service. "The highest leadership circles were apparently aware" of the practice, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported.
The newspaper last week cited Gerhard Schaefer, former top judge at the Federal Court of Justice, the country's highest court, as saying that the BND regularly spied on journalists and even pressed reporters to inform on their colleagues' work. Schaefer delivered a 170-page report to a parliamentary panel of lawmakers from all parties which meets in private to oversee Germany's intelligence services.
While the BND says the affair is based on a few overzealous intelligence officers, politicians and journalist organizations have called for far-reaching inquiries into the scandal, as the scope of the intelligence gathering suggests otherwise.
One former journalist for the German news magazine Focus, was paid some $400,000 between 1982 and 1998 for information on his colleagues, the report claims. Focus confirmed it sacked a journalist last year for cooperating with the BND.
The BND was especially interested in information about journalists working for the prestigious news magazine Der Spiegel, known for its investigative reporting. As late as fall 2005, the report says, the BND was investigating a famous German journalist. Restaurants the BND thought served as meeting places between journalists and sources were also monitored.
Observers are reminded of the so-called 'Spiegel scandal' in 1962, which was seen as the first attack on press freedom in Germany after World War II. After an article had been printed in Der Spiegel that reported on the terrible state of the German armed forces, right-wing Minister of Defense Franz Josef Strauss initiated an investigation against the magazine, causing the editorial offices to be raided by police and several editors to be arrested on charges of treason.
Although he had no authority to do so, Strauss made sure that the article's author, Conrad Ahlers, was arrested in Spain where he was vacationing. Due to public protests, the case quickly collapsed, and the whole affair led to a major shake-up in the cabinet of then-Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, including Strauss' resignation.
Hendrik Zoerner, a spokesman for the German journalists' association DJV, said the revelations were "scandalous," and demanded that the report be made public.
"We need the report before we can take legal action, because as of now, the evidence basis is still thin," he told United Press International via telephone. "But even the BND must not tamper with press freedom."
Politicians joined in the call for more transparency and for possible punishments at the BND.
"Even intelligence services may only act within their competencies, and those competencies have been clearly breached," Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy parliamentary leader of Merkel's conservatives, told Monday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
That same newspaper learned that for years one of its political journalists, who investigated the BND, was spied on by the service.
"Obviously we did everything right," the paper said in a Monday editorial, since "our colleague researched in places where the intelligence service wanted to keep something secret which should not stay secret."
The new allegations could not come at a worse time for the BND, which last Thursday celebrated its 50th anniversary. That same day, German lawmakers began investigating the BND's secret cooperation with the United States during the Iraq war and on counter-terrorism.
An 11-member inquiry board is trying to shed light on allegations that two BND spies directly assisted the U.S. military in Iraq at a time when Berlin publicly opposed the war. It is also investigating CIA rendition flights alleged to have landed in Germany and other European countries.
The inquiry will also probe whether Berlin knew of the alleged CIA kidnapping of a German national, Khaled el-Masri, and will try to shed light on interrogations carried out by German intelligence agents in prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Damascus, Syria.
The affair in Germany coincides with an intelligence scandal in the United States, where reports surfaced last week that the National Security Agency collected and stored data on the phone calls of millions of Americans without warrants, allegedly as a counter-terrorism measure.
