Lis­ten: One Seg­ment

In the wake of the Cold War, the lines of polit­i­cal strug­gle are being redrawn, with poten­tial con­flict between the Unit­ed States and Ger­many (and beyond that the Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed Euro­pean Union) threat­en­ing to replace the con­fronta­tion between the U.S. and for­mer U.S.S.R. In the field of intel­li­gence, the U.S.-German con­flict is already begin­ning to man­i­fest itself. This broad­cast sets forth some of the most impor­tant and recent devel­op­ments in the fric­tion between Amer­i­can and Ger­man intel­li­gence. After a brief dis­cus­sion of Ger­many’s expul­sion of an Amer­i­can diplo­mat who alleged­ly worked for the CIA, the broad­cast sets forth fric­tion between Ger­man intel­li­gence chief Bernd Schmid­bauer and the FBI over indus­tri­al spy­ing, as well as a con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant sto­ry about attempts by the Euro­pean Union (read “Ger­many”) to com­pro­mise the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agen­cy’s vital Men­with Hill elec­tron­ic lis­ten­ing post in Eng­land. Mr. Emory has char­ac­ter­ized that pres­sure on the NSA facil­i­ty as an act of war and believes it to be (in the “Infor­ma­tion Age”) as strate­gi­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant as the Japan­ese attack on Pearl Har­bor in World War II. After that dis­cus­sion, the pro­gram fur­ther devel­ops the sto­ry of Geman-EU pres­sure on Men­with Hill, fol­lowed by analy­sis of a sto­ry about Ger­many’s reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the BND counter-intel­li­gence arm for the pur­pose of improv­ing rela­tions with Wash­ing­ton. The pro­gram con­cludes with analy­sis of an appar­ent rever­sal of Ger­many’s tra­di­tion­al reluc­tance to bring to jus­tice peo­ple involved in Mid­dle East ter­ror­ism and the arm­ing of Iraq.