Ukraine: What is the Proper Historical Parallel?

Ukraine: What is the Proper Historical Parallel?

by Robert Freeman

Pundits and politicians are falling all over themselves to identify the appropriate historical precedent for Ukraine.  The larger issue of superpower conflict in the region is portentous of World War I.  But the more immediate events, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea, are still waiting to be properly defined.

The easy, if vapid, analogy is to equate Vladimir Putin with Adolph Hitler, and his annexation of Crimea with Hitler’s annexation of Austria—the Anschluss.  Hillary Clinton offered just such a comparison of Putin to Hitler in a recent speech in California.  German media have been floating comparisons with the Anschluss.  It’s nothing new.

Western commentators try to make everyone who stands in their way into Hitler:  Chavez in Venezuela; Saddam Hussein in Iraq; Amedinejad in Iran; Khadaffi in Libya; Assad in Syria.  The analogy is so trite you would imagine it had lost its hortatory value.  But not in the Western media, where insight is less prized than incitement.    

Why does “Putin-as-Hitler” fail the test of historical validity?  And is there a better precedent we could recall for comparison?

It was Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 that is the would-be parallel with Crimea.  But it breaks down immediately upon examination.  To be sure, Hitler wanted to re-unify the German-speaking people.  But he was forbidden from doing so by Treaty of Versailles, which had settled World War I.  In 1934, Austrian Nazis, supported by their German counterparts, attempted a coup d’etat of the Austrian government, murdering its Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss.  The coup failed but did not deter Nazi ambitions. 

In February 1938, Hitler summoned Dollfuss’ replacement, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to Germany where he ordered Schuschnigg to turn over the Austrian government.  Schuschnigg refused. Instead, he went back to Austria and announced a referendumto determine whether the Austrian people wished to remain independent.  Hitler was enraged, knowing that the outcome would thwarthis plans for takeover. 

So, on March 11, 1938, a Nazi minister acting on Hitler’s orders announced that he was Chancellor of Austria.  He immediately issued a request for the German military to enter Austria to “restore order.”  Two hundred thousand German troops marched into Austria the next day.  This event forms the backdrop for the popular movie, “The Sound of Music.”

In other words, the Austrian annexation was almost the exact opposite of the Crimean one.  The Anschluss occurred precisely to prevent a referendum of the people that would have rejected annexation.  The Crimean annexation occurred in response to a referendum which favored it.  The difference is profound, virtually complete.  Conflating one with the other betrays either ignorance on the part of those making the comparison, or the intent to deceive.

So, if Crimea is not the Anschluss, if Putin is not Hitler, what is going on?  What is the appropriate analogy?  What is going on here is the fascist overthrow of a democratically elected government, but the appropriate analogy is the Spanish Civil War. 

Recall, first, that there was a democratically elected government in Ukraine, headed by Viktor Yanukovych, the democratically elected president.  He was overthrown in a February coup that was engineered by the United States and carried out by its hired fascist thugs, including those from the Svoboda and Right Sektor parties.  It is indelicate to mention these facts, but they are not in dispute. 

How is this analogous to the Spanish Civil War? 

In 1930, Spain was ruled by an autocratic Bourbon monarch, Alphonso XIII.  The economy was retrograde, income was concentrated in very few hands, and the mass of people were desperately poor.  However, elections in 1931 placed the country’s first-ever representative government into power.  It proceeded with a program of public education, public health, and land reform. 

The new government was immediately attacked by a coalition of ultra-conservative monarchists, the Catholic Church, and the landed aristocracy.  The government survived the attack, but by 1936 was forced by its right-wing opponents to hold new elections.  Again, a majority of the Spanish people voted for the Republicans, thwartingthe rightists’ ambitions of takeover.  This time, however, the opposition, which called itself “Nationalists,” attacked with weapons, starting a civil war that waged for the next three years.

The right wing, led by fascist general Francisco Franco, received extensive help from fascist Italy and Germany.  Italy provided some 700 aircraft, 2,000 cannons, 250,000 rifles and 50,000 men.  Germany sent tanks, aircraft, men, and munitions and used the war as a testing ground for the weapons and battlefield tactics it would soon use in the larger World War to come.

The democratically elected Spanish government appealed for help to Britain, France, and the United States.  France promised aid but sent little.  Britain and the United States sent nothing.  Against the vastly better-armed forces of the opposition, the Republican government was eventually defeated.  Over 600,000 people were killed.  The War was commemorated by George Orwell in his cult classic, Homage to Catalonia.  Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975. 

The fact that democratic governments would not defend democracy in Spain, while fascist governments helped their allies, created an ominous precedent for Europe.  It emboldened Hitler as he, time and again, challenged the passivity of democratic governments on the way to World War II. 

This precedent of fascists overthrowing a democratically elected government while supposedly “democratic” countries stand idly by, is the proper historical parallel to the events in Ukraine.  Putin is simply responding to this larger provocation, protecting a strategic interest which the Western aggressors have tried to pry away using their fascist thugs as the henchmen.  Western powers and the Western media can pretend that it’s the Russians who are the aggressors, but nobody who is both knowledgeable of history and honest will be fooled.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Robert Freeman is the author of The Best One-Hour History series which includes World War I and The Vietnam War. He is the founder of the national non-profit One Dollar For Life which helps American students build schools in the developing world from their contributions of one dollar.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/30-4

Why did Israel fail to back US-supported UN resolution on Crimea?

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Thu, 03/27/2014 - 17:39

The United States often stands virtually alone, save for the company of its colonies like Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, as well as other settler-colonial states like Canada, in opposing UN resolutions critical of Israel.

Israel did not return the favor today by backing a resolution the US feels very strongly about.

The UN General Assembly passed resolution A/68/L.39 condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

As the final tally shows, 100 countries voted in favor, 11 against and 58 abstained on the resolution, which was sponsored by Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.

The United States, predictably, voted in favor, Russia against, and China abstained.

But Israel was a no-show, not voting at all. Perhaps it was becauseIsraeli diplomats are on strike.

That would be a convenient excuse. But surely even the Israeli diplomats’ union would make an exception for a vote that Israel’s strongest backer – the Obama administration – feels is absolutely critical, as these fervent tweets by US ambassador Samantha Powerindicate:

Samantha Power        ✔ @AmbassadorPower

Follow

Today's UN resolution made it clear: the world won't accept #Russia’s illegal annexation of #Crimea. #UnitedforUkraine

3:00 AM - 28 Mar 2014

195 RETWEETS 76 FAVORITE

Samantha Power        ✔ @AmbassadorPower

Follow

#Russia’s actions endanger not just the people of #Ukraine, but the international system as a whole. The U.S. stands #UnitedforUkraine.

11:16 AM - 27 Mar 2014

Uncomfortable precedent

Perhaps Israel was disturbed by the language of today’s resolution, which “Calls upon all States, international organizations and specialized agencies not to recognize any alteration of the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol” and to “refrain from any action or dealing that might be interpreted as recognizing any such altered status.”

Israel, of course, remains in flagrant violation of dozens of similarly worded UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions includingSecurity Council Resolution 465 of 1980, deeming Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and its settlements on occupied land to be illegal.

That resolution declared that “all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel’s policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.”

It also called “upon all States not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connexion with settlements in the occupied territories.”

Israel lying low

Today’s no-show at the UN is only the latest instance of Israel, a serial annexer of other countries’ lands, trying to evade having to give a position on Crimea.

Earlier this month, a Jewish-Ukrainian MP expressed frustration at Israel’s “silence on Crimea.”

The MP, Oleksandr Feldman, said he was disappointed at what The Times of Israel termed “a rather toothless statement the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem released …. reportedly after American pressure.”

Israel expressed “great concern” and urged “diplomacy” but said absolutely nothing supporting the Obama administration’s strident denunciations of Russia’s move.

Israel, apparently, has a enough of a sense of irony not to condemn Russia – and perhaps set a precedent for itself.

The US, by constrast, continues to shamelessly impose sanctions and issue threats regarding Russia’s absorption of Crimea, while at the same time financing and shielding Israel’s continued annexation, occupation and colonization of Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian land.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-did-israel-fail-back-us-supported-un-resolution-crimea

censhorshp ? How Reader's Digest became a Chinese stooge

How Reader's Digest became a Chinese stooge

Reader's Digest is alleged to have censored stories in its publication to maintain a cheap publishing deal in China

Nick Cohen

The notion that the formerly mighty American publisher Reader's Digestwould allow the Chinese Communist party to censor its novels would once have appeared so outrageous as to be unimaginable. In the globalised world, what was once unimaginable is becoming commonplace, however. The Australian novelist LA (Louisa) Larkin has learned the hard way that old certainties no longer apply as the globalisation of trade leads to the globalisation of authoritarian power.

The fate of her book is more than a lesson in modern cynicism. It is the most resonant example of collaboration between the old enemies of communism and capitalism I have encountered.

Larkin published Thirst in 2012. She set her thriller in an Antarctic research station, where mercenaries besiege a team of scientists.

Larkin was delighted when Reader's Digest said it would take her work for one of its anthologies of condensed novels. Thirst would reach a global audience and – who knows? – take off. Reader's Digest promised "to ensure that neither the purpose nor the opinion of the author is distorted or misrepresented", and all seemed well.

One of Larkin's characters trapped in the station is Wendy Woo, a Chinese-Australian. Woo fled to Australia because the Chinese authorities arrested her mother for being a member of the banned religious group Falun Gong. Larkin has her saying that she had not "learned until much later of the horrific torture her mother had endured because she refused to recant".

State oppression in China is not a major theme of a novel set in Antarctica. But Larkin needed to provide a back story for Woo and a link between her and the villains of her drama. In any case, she was a free author living in a free country and was free to express her abhorrence of torture and the denial of freedom of conscience. Or so she thought, until she discovered last week that she was not as free as she thought.

The cost of printing makes up the largest part of the price of book production. Publishers have outsourced manufacturing to China, like so many other industries have done. The printing firm noticed the heretical passages in Larkin's novel. All references to Falun Gong had to go, it said, as did all references to agents of the Chinese state engaging in torture.

They demanded censorship, even though the book was a Reader's Digest "worldwide English edition" for the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore – not, you will note, for China.

Phil Patterson from Larkin's London agents, Marjacq Scripts, tried to explain the basics for a free society to Reader's Digest. To allow China to engage in "extraterritorial censorship" of an Australian novelist writing for an American publisher would set a "very dangerous precedent", he told its editors. Larkin told me she would have found it unconscionable to change her book to please a dictatorship.

When she made the same point to Reader's Digest, it replied that if it insisted on defending freedom of publication, it would have to move the printing from China to Hong Kong at a cost of US$30,000.

People ask: "What price liberty?" Reader's Digest has an answer that is precise to the last cent: the price of liberty is US$30,000. The publisher, from the home of Jefferson, Madison and the first amendment, decided last week to accept the ban and scrap the book.

Globalisation has turned the world upside down. Reader's Digest was so anti-communist in the cold war that its enemies muttered that the CIA might as well have been funding it. They sneered at its middlebrow manners as much as its politics – "I mean condensed novels for Christ's sake."

In 1982, the sight of Solidarity, a genuinely working-class movement, rising against the Soviet occupation of Poland, disoriented the western left. Susan Sontag, who knew how to hurt when she had to, wiped the smiles from a few lips by raising the despised Digest. At a meeting at New York town hall attended by the publisher of the Nation, and many another eminent figures from the American left, she told her listeners that they had been so keen to defend the victims of McCarthyism and American capitalism that they had forgotten about the victims of Soviet communism.

Imagine if you will, she continued, "someone who read only theReader's Digest between 1950 and 1970 and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''

The audience booed her. But although you can find many on the left as indifferent to universal human rights today, I'll say one thing for them: no one can smack them over the head with Reader's Digest now.

During the cold war, business had to be anti-communist. The communists wanted to take capitalists' money and, on occasion, to kill them too. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the state capitalist dictatorships in Russia and China, defending free speech, defending even the right of an author to criticise torture in passing, may risk the chance to profit. For if China offers the cheapest printers and a huge market, who wants to alienate its leaders? No one, if the grotesque spectacle of the "market focus on China" at last year'sLondon Book Fair was a guide. The British Council and the British book trade kept the Communist party sweet by refusing to invite any Chinese "visiting authors" whose work had upset the regime.

When the Chinese Communist party was Maoist, Reader's Digest denounced it. Now it guarantees profits, Reader's Digest censors on its behalf. When Putin was in the KGB, bankers, lawyers and industrialists deplored the old Soviet Union. Now Putin is in the Kremlin, they ensure that the first aim of David Cameron's advisers in the Ukraine crisis is to do nothing that might "close London's financial centre to Russians".

Everyone knows LP Hartley's line: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." If that were ever true, it isn't now. For most people, the present is foreign and frightening. The intellectual left that Sontag so magnificently upbraided in 1982 had little real power. You only had to look at it to see that.

By contrast, the publishers, banks and corporations, who have taken over the role of deferring to Moscow and Beijing, have power and money and the ability to use both.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/29/readers-digest-chinese-stooge-censorship

No opposition ! "we would give spies more tools to fight domestic terror"

Tanya Plibersek: we would give spies more tools to fight domestic terror

Deputy leader is happy to see telcos collect metadata for the intelligence community, who 'do a good job' protecting Australia

Katharine Murphy, deputy political editor

Labor’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, has signalled she is open to giving intelligence agencies more tools to deal with a possible increase in domestic security threats from Australians being radicalised in the Syrian conflict.

Plibersek on Sunday gave a strong signal she was comfortable with telecommunications companies collecting and storing intercepted data for longer periods in order to assist intelligence agencies in their domestic anti-terror investigations.

The shadow foreign minister said the collection of metadata – the information we all generate whenever we use technology, from the date and time of a phone call to the location from which an email is sent – had aided the disruption of terror plots in Australia.

Plibersek played down the invasions of privacy posed by metadata sweeps, reasoning the intercepted material was the “envelope”, not the contents. “People describe it as keeping the haystack so you can go back and look for the needle afterwards,” she said.

She said metadata collections had been an important tool in safeguarding Australia’s national security. “We have disrupted some very serious terrorist plots in Australia,” Plibersek told Sky News on Sunday. “We’ve done it because we’ve got a strong intelligence community here. They do a good job.”

She was asked whether strengthening of the interceptions regime was justified in the wake of new threats posed by radicalised fighters returning from the Syrian conflict – an issue the Abbott government and intelligence agencies have expressed concern about.

“There continue to be threats. Those threats may increase,” Plibersek said. “I want to give (intelligence) agencies the maximum ability to do their job well, within the bounds that people would expect.”

Plibersek suggested she was comfortable in-principle with telecommunications companies collecting metadata and storing it for a mandatory retention period.

She said the community had a right to privacy, and to expectations of living in an open and democratic society – but her view was government needed to make it as “easy as we can” for intelligence agencies to protect against established and emerging threats.

The comments Sunday suggest Plibersek would be happy to revive a controversial plan shelved by the former Gillard government. That proposal would force Australian telecommunications companies, internet service providers and social media sites to collect metadata from Australian users and store it for two years.

Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, Asio, wants telecommunications data to be collected by companies and stored for two years – longer in some cases – for law enforcement agencies to access during their investigations.

A series of disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden revealing the extent of coordinated online surveillance by the US, the UK and its allies, including Australia, have generated significant debate about whether governments are achieving the right balance between national security and privacy.

The Snowden disclosures prompted a significant rift in the Abbott government’s relationship with Indonesia (when it was revealed that Australia in 2009 attempted to tap the phone of the president and his inner circle); and also prompted the Greens and Labor to combine in the senate to establish a new inquiry into Australia’s telecommunications interception regime.

In submissions to that inquiry, the privacy commissioner and Australia’s intelligence watchdog, the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, have flagged potential adjustments to the interception regime to ensure agencies strike the correct balance between protecting consumer privacy and conducting necessary investigations to prevent crimes.

Those agencies suggest more can be done to safeguard community privacy.

But while accepting the need for some adjustments, Asio has used the same inquiry to defend the central importance of a broad interception regime and the mandatory storage of private communications data for lengthy periods.

“Telecommunications interception of content is a key tool in preventing harm because people engaged in activities of security concern must communicate to progress their intentions,” Asio says in its submission to the senate.

“Access to telecommunications content provides essential details of activities of security concern and enables Asio to provide advice and take action to protect Australia,” it says.

“In terms of data retention periods required for Asio to effectively discharge its functions, at least two years is required in some cases, whether by carriers, carriage service providers, or ancillary service providers. Due to the nature of activity by clandestine foreign actors, retention for longer than two years would be ideal.”

The government has been signalling for months it is exploring steps to increase protections for Australians given the Syrian situation.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/30/labor-spies-tools-terror-plibersek

Crimea Russia sets tough conditions for diplomatic solution

Russia sets tough conditions for diplomatic solution in Crimea

Russian foreign minister and US secretary of state enter talks again as 40,000 Russian troops mass on Ukraine border

Simon Tisdall

Russia set out a series of tough conditions on Sunday night for agreeing a diplomatic solution to the crisis over its annexation ofCrimea, demanding that the US and its European partners accept its proposal that ethnic Russian regions of eastern and southern Ukrainebe given extensive autonomous powers independent of Kiev.

Emergency talks between Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, andJohn Kerry, the US secretary of state, got under way at the Russian ambassador's residence in Paris after a day in which tensions over Ukraine deepened appreciably. Neither man made any substantive comment before the talks began. Suggesting it might be a long session, Lavrov told reporters: "Good luck and good night."

The meeting took place against an ominous backdrop of the massing of an estimated 40,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's eastern border and warnings from Nato and the Pentagon that the Russian military activity, ostensibly relating to routine exercises, was abnormal and could be a prelude to an invasion.

General Philip Breedlove, Nato supreme allied commander Europe and the head of the US military's European Command, was ordered back to his post in Brussels during a visit to Washington after Chuck Hagel, the US defence secretary, pointed to "a lack of transparency" from Russia about the troop movements. Unlike Moscow, Washington has said it will not resort to force to resolve the crisis.

The US has called on Russia to disarm irregular forces in Crimea, admit international observers and pull its troops back from the eastern border. But speaking to Russian state television before the talks, Lavrov laid out Moscow's own quite different terms for a deal. Primarily, he said, Russia was seeking a federal solution for Ukraine as part of "deep constitutional reform".

"Frankly speaking, we don't see any other way for the steady development of the Ukrainian state apart from as a federation," he added. Under the Russian plan, which Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin reportedly discussed in a phone call initiated by Moscow on Friday, each region would have control of its economy, taxes, culture, language, education and "external economic and cultural connections with neighbouring countries or regions," Lavrov said.

"Given the proportion of native Russians [in Ukraine], we propose this and we are sure there is no other way."

The Russian proposal to radically alter the way Ukraine is governed and administered is certain to arouse strong opposition in Kiev, where it will be viewed by critics of Moscow's intervention in Crimea as a roundabout way of breaking up or partitioning the country.

In an apparent attempt to assuage concerns in Kiev and western capitals about Russian intentions, Lavrov said there were no plans to invade eastern Ukraine.

Latest US intelligence estimates based on satellite data indicate that Russia has amassed 40,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, including a wide range of special units, elite forces and equipment.

"We have absolutely no intention of, or interest in, crossing Ukraine's borders," Lavrov said. "We [Russia and the west] are getting closer in our positions."

He said Moscow's terms for defusing the crisis, the worst between the west and Russia since the end of the cold war, also included a pledge by Kiev's government that Ukraine would not seek to join Nato.

The eastward expansion of Nato since the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the main grievances Putin expressed in a speech in Moscow earlier this month when Crimea joined the Russian Federation.

Lavrov said Russia remained determined to protect the rights of Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine and implied that it reserved the right to take appropriate action if its proposals for a federation and other settlement terms were not accepted.

Apparently seeking to exploit western unease to achieve long-standing policy aims beyond Ukraine, Putin reportedly told Obama that Moscow also wanted guarantees about the future of the Russian-backed separatist territory of Transnistria in Moldova, on Ukraine's south-west border.

Putin told Obama the fate of the breakaway region should be solved not by force but by talks in the 5+2 format of Moldova, Transnistria, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia and Ukraine, with the EU and US as observers.

The Kremlin said Putin had suggested "examining possible steps the global community can take to help stabilise the situation" in the region.

It was unclear what response the US and its EU partners would make to the Russian demands as the Kerry-Lavrov meeting in Paris got under way.

The Obama administration has insisted Russia withdraw its forces from Crimea, reduce its military build-up on the eastern border, respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine and support national polls due in May to elect a new president and government.

The US and EU imposed limited sanctions on Russia following the annexation of Crimea. Lavrov said the measures had had little impact. "I don't want to say that sanctions are ridiculous and that we couldn't care less, these are not pleasant things … We find little joy in that, but there are no painful sensations. We have lived through tougher times."

Lavrov made no mention of the Ukraine elections or any possible withdrawal from Crimea. Many analysts now predict that in any deal, the US and its western allies, and thus Kiev, will be forced to accept the annexation as a fait accompli.

In another sign of a possible compromise, Lavrov has offered to talk to representatives of Ukraine's interim government under certain conditions. Russia does not recognise the current leadership in Kiev, which it says mounted a "fascist coup" in February to oust Ukraine's elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.

In other developments, the Tatar assembly meeting in the historic capital of Bakhchisaray voted in favour of seeking "ethnic and territorial autonomy" within Crimea.

The 300,000-strong minority make up less than 15% of Crimea's population of 2 million and has strongly opposed the Russian annexation. The proposal to seek autonomy was seen as a sign that the group is now ready to accept the new status quo and negotiate their place in it with Russia.

In Kiev, the presidential election effectively became a two-horse race at the weekend when the boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko pulled out and threw his weight behind the billionaire confectionery oligarch Petro Poroshenko, known as the Chocolate King. He will now face the former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, on 25 May.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/30/russia-ukraine-john-kerry-sergei-lavrov-paris

GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies

'A' for Angela Merkel: GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies

By Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark

Documents show that Britain's GCHQ intelligence service infiltrated German Internet firms and America's NSA obtained a court order to spy on Germany and collected information about the chancellor in a special database. Is it time for the country to open a formal espionage investigation?

The headquarters of Stellar, a company based in the town of Hürth near Cologne, are visible from a distance. Seventy-five white antennas dominate the landscape. The biggest are 16 meters (52 feet) tall and kept in place by steel anchors. It is an impressive sight and serves as a popular backdrop for scenes in TV shows, including the German action series "Cobra 11."

Stellar operates a satellite ground station in Hürth, a so-called "teleport." Its services are used by companies and institutions; Stellar's customers include Internet providers, telecommunications companies and even a few governments. "The world is our market," is the high-tech company's slogan.

Using their ground stations and leased capacities from satellites, firms like Stellar -- or competitors like Cetel in the nearby village of Ruppichteroth or IABG, which is headquartered in Ottobrunn near Munich -- can provide Internet and telephone services in even the most remote areas. They provide communications links to places like oil drilling platforms, diamond mines, refugee camps and foreign outposts of multinational corporations and international organizations.

Super high-speed Internet connections are required at the ground stations in Germany in order to ensure the highest levels of service possible. Most are connected to major European Internet backbones that offer particularly high bandwidth.

Probing German Internet Traffic

The service they offer isn't just attractive to customers who want to improve their connectivity. It is also of interest to Britain's GCHQ intelligence service, which has targeted the German companies. Top secret documents from the archive of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden viewed by SPIEGEL show that the British spies surveilled employees of several German companies, and have also infiltrated their networks.

One top-secret GCHQ paper claims the agency sought "development of in-depth knowledge of key satellite IP service providers in Germany."

The document, which is undated, states that the goal of the effort was developing wider knowledge of Internet traffic flowing through Germany. The 26-page document explicitly names three of the German companies targeted for surveillance: Stellar, Cetel and IABG.

The operation, carried out at listening stations operated jointly by GCHQ with the NSA in Bude, in Britain's Cornwall region, is largely directed at Internet exchange points used by the ground station to feed the communications of their large customers into the broadband Internet. In addition to spying on the Internet traffic passing through these nodes, the GCHQ workers state they are also seeking to identify important customers of the German teleport providers, their technology suppliers as well as future technical trends in their business sector.

The document also states that company employees are targets -- particularly engineers -- saying that they should be detected and "tasked," intelligence jargon for monitoring. In the case of Stellar, the top secret GCHQ paper includes the names and email addresses of 16 employees, including CEO Christian Steffen. In addition, it also provides a list of the most-important customers and partners. Contacted by SPIEGEL, Stellar CEO Steffen said he had not been aware of any attempts by intelligence services to infiltrate or hack his company. "I am shocked," he said.

'Servers of Interest'

Intelligence workers in Bude also appear to have succeeded in infiltrating competitor Cetel. The document states that workers came across four "servers of interest" and were able to create a comprehensive list of customers. According to Cetel CEO Guido Neumann, the company primarily serves customers in Africa and the Middle East and its clients include non-governmental organizations as well as a northern European country that uses Cetel to connect its diplomatic outposts to the Internet. Neumann also says he was surprised when he learned his firm had been a target.

The firm IABG in Ottobrunn appears to have been of particular interest to the intelligence service -- at least going by a short notation that only appears next to the Bavarian company's name. It notes, "this may have already been looked at by NSA NAC," a reference to the NSA's network analysis center.

IABG's history goes back to the 1970s. The company was established as a test laboratory for aerospace and space technologies. The German Defense Ministry was an important client as well. Although the company has been privately held since 1993, it has continued to play a role in a number of major projects connected at least in part to the government. For example, it operated the testing facility for Germany's Transrapid super high-speed maglev train and also conducted testing on the Airbus A380 super jumbo jet and the Ariane rocket, the satellite launcher at the heart of the European space program.

IABG also does considerable business with the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces. The company states that its "defense and security" unit is "committed to the armed forces and their procurement projects." These include solutions for "security issues, for prevention and reactions against dangers like terrorism and attacks against critical infrastructure."

Like Stellar and Cetel, the company also operates a satellite ground station -- one that apparently got hacked, according to the GCHQ document. It includes a list of IABG routers and includes their network addresses. In addition, it contains the email addresses of 16 employees at the company named as possible targets. IABG did not respond to a request for comment from SPIEGEL. In a statement, GCHQ said it does not comment on intelligence-related issues but "all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate."

Classic Acts of Espionage

Monitoring companies and their employees along with the theft of customer lists are classic acts of economic espionage. Indeed, such revelations ought be a case for the German federal public prosecutors' office, which in the past has initiated investigations into comparable cases involving Russia or China.

So far, however, German Federal Public Prosecutor Harald Range has been struggling with the NSA issue. Some experienced investigators have had a problem applying the same criteria used to assess intelligence services like Russia's to those of the United States and Britain. Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe have provided a preliminary assessment, but so far no decision has been made about whether the agency will move forward with legal proceedings.

Under review at the moment are allegations that the NSA monitored the chancellor's mobile phone and also conducted mass surveillance on the communications of millions of Germans. Range recently told the Berlin-based daily Die Tageszeitung the affair was "an extremely complicated issue."

"I am currently reviewing whether reasonable suspicion even exists for an actionable criminal offense," he told the newspaper. "Only if I can affirm that can I then address the question of whether a judiciary inquiry would run contrary to the general public interest -- a review required for any espionage-related crime" in Germany. A decision is expected soon.

The launch of legal proceedings against GCHQ agents or NSA employees would quickly become a major political issue that would further burden already tense trans-Atlantic relations. An additional problem is the fact that Range is in possession of very few original documents, particularly those pertaining to the NSA's monitoring of Chancellor Merkel.

A secret NSA document dealing with high-ranking targets has provided further indications that Merkel was a target. The document is a presentation from the NSA's Center for Content Extraction, whose multiple tasks include the automated analysis of all types of text data. The lists appear to contain 122 country leaders. Twelve names are listed as an example, including Merkel's.

The list begins with "A," as in Abdullah Badawi, the former Malaysian prime minister, and continues with the presidents of Peru, Somalia, Guatemala and Colombia right up to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. The final name on the list, No. 122, is Yulia Tymoshenko, who was Ukrainian prime minister at the time. The NSA listed the international leaders alphabetically by their first name, with Tymoshenko listed under "Y". Merkel is listed under "A" as the ninth leader, right behind Malawian President Amadou Toumani Touré, but before Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Graphic: Chief of State Citations

The document indicates that Angela Merkel has been placed in the so-called "Target Knowledge Database" (TKB), the central database of individual targets. An internal NSA description states that employees can use it to analyze "complete profiles" of target persons. The responsible NSA unit praises the automated machine-driven administration of collected information about high-value targets.

The searchable sources cited in the document include, among others, the signals intelligence database "Marina," which contains metadata ingested from sources around the world. The unit also gives special attention to promoting a system for automated name recognition called "Nymrod". The document states that some 300 automatically generated "cites," or citations, are provided for Angela Merkel alone. The citations in "Nymrod" are derived from intelligence agencies, transcripts of intercepted fax, voice and computer-to-computer communication. According to internal NSA documents, it is used to "find information relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down." Each of the names contained in Nymrod is considered a "SIGINT target."

The manual maintenance of the database with high-ranking targets is a slow and painstaking process, the document notes, and fewer than 200,000 targets are managed through the system. Automated capture, by contrast, simplifies the saving of the data and makes it possible to manage more than 3 million entries, including names and the citations connected to them.

The table included in the document indicates the capture and maintenance of records pertaining to Merkel already appears to have been automated. In any case, the document indicates that a manual update was not available in May 2009. The document could be another piece of the puzzle for investigators in Karlsruhe because it shows that Chancellor Merkel was an official target for spying.

In addition to surveillance of the chancellor, the Federal Prosecutor's Office is also exploring the question of whether the NSA conducted mass espionage against the German people. The internal NSA material also includes a weekly report dating from March 2013 from the Special Sources Operations (SSO) division, the unit responsible for securing NSA access to major Internet backbone structures, like fiber optic cables.

In the document, the team that handles contact with US telecommunications providers like AT&T or Verizon reports on the legal foundations with which it monitors the data of certain countries. According to the SSO report, FISA, the special court responsible for intelligence agency requests, provided the NSA with authorization to monitor "Germany" on March 7, 2013. The case number provided in the ruling is 13-319.

A License to Spy

The documents do not provide sufficient information to precisely determine the types of data included in the order, and the NSA has said it will not comment on the matter. However, lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union believe it provides the NSA with permission to access the communications of all German citizens, regardless whether those affected are suspected of having committed an offense or not. Under the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA is permitted to conduct blanket surveillance in foreign countries without any requirement to submit individual cases for review by the court, whose deliberations and rulings are top secret.

According to the partial list in the document, the court has provided similar authorization for countries including, China, Mexico, Japan, Venezuela, Yemen, Brazil, Sudan, Guatemala, Bosnia and Russia. In practice, the NSA uses this permission in diverse ways -- sometimes it uses it to monitor telecommunications companies, and at others it surveils individuals.

"So far, we have no knowledge that Internet nodes in Germany have been spied on by the NSA," Hans-Georg Maassen, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which is also responsible for counterintelligence measures, said last summer.

It's also possible the Americans don't even have to do that, at least not directly. It's quite feasible they have better access through major US providers like AT&T or Verizon whose infrastructure is used to process a major share of global Internet traffic. The NSA could use that infrastructure to access data from Germany. This would be totally legal from the American perspective -- at least according to the FISA court.

Editor's note: You can read an additional report on spying by the NSA and GCHQ on Germany and Chancellor Merkel on The Intercept.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/gchq-and-nsa-targeted-private-german-companies-a-961444.html