By Richard Bernstein and Michael R. Gordon
The New York Times, 02 March 2006
BERLIN, March 1 — Starting in early 2003 and lasting through the American military invasion of Iraq, a German intelligence officer stationed in the office of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the American commander of the invasion, passed on to the United States information being gathered in Baghdad by two German intelligence officers operating there, a classified German review has found.
The German liaison officer made 25 reports to the Americans, answering 18 of 33 specific requests for information made by the United States during the first few months of the Iraq war in what was a systematic exchange between American intelligence officials and the Germans, according to the German report.
The decision to install the officer was planned and approved at the highest levels of the German government, including by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the chief of staff for Gerhard Schröder, then the chancellor, and by the foreign minister at the time, Joschka Fischer. Mr. Steinmeier is now the foreign minister.
This exchange of intelligence information is described in a classified report prepared by a committee of the German Parliament that held closed-door hearings on the role of German intelligence during the Iraq war over the past few weeks.
The German government was a vocal critic of the Bush administration's decision to use military force to topple Saddam Hussein and has long insisted that it provided only limited help to the United States-led coalition. But in recent months, news reports of greater German involvement prompted the parliamentary review, which indicates that German-American cooperation during the war was continuing, systematic and regular.
A public version of the parliamentary committee's report was released but much was left out, including the existence of a German officer in General Franks's office. A copy of the secret version of the parliamentary report was made available for viewing by a journalist in Germany to a New York Times reporter who read the text into a tape recorder so it could be transcribed and translated. The cover page had the seal of the German Parliament.
The report found that the operation was closed down when the American invasion came to an end, at which point all three of the German intelligence officials — the two in Baghdad and the liaison officer with General Franks in Qatar — were given the American Meritorious Service Medals recognizing the "critical information to United States Central Command to support combat operations in Iraq."
Reached by phone Wednesday, the deputy spokesman of the German government, Thomas Steg, said: "I don't know the classified version. I only know the public version, so I'm not able to give any comment."
Much of the information concerned the location of sites where bombing should be avoided, including embassies and the place where it was thought that a missing American pilot was being held. But in eight of the reports, the German intelligence officer provided information on Iraqi police and military units in Baghdad. According to the report, German officials provided the geographic coordinates of some units, but the report asserts that they did not direct airstrikes against Iraqi leaders or forces.
The German report is consistent with many details in a 2005 classified American report by the Joint Forces Command, dated in the middle of last year, which spoke of the German intelligence liaison officer working in coordination with American intelligence in Qatar. But the report does not state that German intelligence provided a copy of a plan devised by Mr. Hussein for the military defense of Baghdad, as was reported on Monday by The New York Times.
In an article largely based on the 2005 Joint Forces command document, The Times reported that German intelligence had provided a sketch of this plan. That part of the report was forcefully denied by German government spokesmen and the German foreign intelligence service, which says that it never knew of any Baghdad defense plan.
"We know from our research that this report, this defense plan and this drawing were never given to any American installation," a spokesman for the German intelligence agency, Stefan Borchert, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "We were unaware of this plan, so how could we have given it to somebody?"
But others contend that the parliamentary report was largely based on incomplete and partially censored information provided by the German Intelligence Agency.
"The files regarding the request for information by U.S. authorities were initially withheld from the committee altogether, and then the incomplete documents were only provided for inspection after the contents had been blackened out for the most part," one member of the parliamentary commission, Hans-Christian Ströbele, wrote in a dissenting comment on the report that is posted on his Web site. "Only the deputy chairman of the committee was permitted unrestricted inspection of these documents."
The report makes it clear that the intelligence-sharing arrangement was approved in late 2002 by both Mr. Steinmeier, Mr. Schröder's aide, and Mr. Fischer. Details, including the placement of a German intelligence officer in General Franks's headquarters, were discussed in Berlin in late 2002 and early 2003, months before the war began. In January 2003, American officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency were brought into the planning.
The German report also includes "conditions" that were "verbally imposed on staff with regard to the exchange of information with the U.S." The German liaison officer was supposed to provide "no support for the strategic air war offensive carried out by the U.S.A.," and he was to give out no "information with direct relevance for the tactical air and land warfare on the part of the U.S.A."
The report says that 25 reports were actually provided to the Central Command. Of these, eight described the mood and provisioning of the population in Baghdad, while eight others described the nature of the military and police presence there. Two reports provided the coordinates of the locations of military forces. As part of their activities, the agents also provided coordinates after an air attack on the assumed whereabouts of Mr. Hussein. But the report asserts that the agents did not facilitate American airstrikes.
The German parliamentary report was released last week after a series of closed-door hearings on earlier disclosures in the press in Germany and the United States concerning the extent to which German-American cooperation during the Iraq war was closer than had been previously acknowledged by either government.
The news reports, which began appearing in the German press in January this year, have caused a political storm here because the information seemed so inconsistent with Germany's public opposition to the war.
Despite their opposition to going to war in Iraq, the Germans felt a continued need for intelligence about the country, including intelligence that they could only get from the United States, the report notes. "While the political consensus was diminishing," the report says, "the exchange of information was becoming a quid-pro-quo arrangement."
With the need for intelligence growing rather than diminishing because of the possibility of war, the Germans recognized that their own sources in Iraq "could be used as extremely valuable barter material for the U.S. agencies." The United States was also scrambling to get good intelligence on Iraq and trying to build a network of agents in the country.
Germany had already decided that if war broke out, it would close its embassy, which led to an interesting sidelight: the Germans also arranged that, once the war broke out and the German Embassy was closed, the two German intelligence agents in Baghdad would take refuge in the French Embassy.
They did exactly that after the beginning of the invasion on March 20, 2003, moving into offices of the French intelligence agency and thereby giving the French, who also vociferously opposed the American war in Iraq, an indirect role in supporting the German-American intelligence exchange.
Meanwhile, in January 2003, the two sides worked out the details of the exchange. For security reasons, it was decided that the two agents in Baghdad would have no direct contact with the liaison at American military headquarters in Qatar. All communications would go through the German intelligence headquarters in Pullach.
Richard Bernstein reported from Berlin for this article, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
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Citation: Richard Bernstein and Michael R. Gordon. "Berlin File Says Germany's Spies Aided U.S. in Iraq," The New York Times, 02 March 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/international/europe/02germany.html
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