A decade before Watergate taught us to add “gate” to every scandal under the sun, President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, who served as US attorney-general, were up to some dubious antics of their own. Apart from monitoring White House officials and guests by means of a secret taping system, the Kennedys conducted extensive electronic surveillance against political opponents, critical journalists and even their own staff. After the details became public, Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post editor and friend of the Kennedys who helped uncover Watergate, exclaimed: “My God, they wiretapped practically everybody . . . in this town.”
Sixty years after the Kennedy administration merrily bugged its way around Washington, Spanish politics is in turmoil after revelations that its intelligence service spied on Catalan separatist leaders. To add fuel to the flames, someone — it’s not yet clear who — used the same Israeli-made spyware to get inside the phones of Pedro Sánchez, prime minister, and Margarita Robles, defence minister. The government this week sacked Paz Esteban as director of the National Intelligence Centre, Spain’s espionage agency, presumably in connection with spying on Catalan politicians, to which she admitted.
These disclosures are serious. Democracies depend on trust, accountability and respect for the law. Still, it is an established fact that domestic political espionage has carried on, in democracies as in authoritarian states, ever since the invention of recording systems. It is reprehensible but new examples keep popping up.
Perhaps the best that can be said is that democracies do not, on the whole, let their spy services have a free run. Surveillance of a government’s opponents does not end up with them poisoned and murdered, as in Russia. Even so, democracies are glass houses from which their representatives would be advised not to throw too many stones.
France is a case in point. In the early years of his 1981-1995 presidency, François Mitterrand ran a so-called anti-terrorist cell from the Elysée Palace. Agents tapped the phones of 150 people, including political rivals, lawyers, journalists and even the actress Carole Bouquet.
A decade earlier, Raymond Marcellin was removed as France’s interior minister in a scandal that had echoes of Watergate. Posing as plumbers, agents working for the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, a domestic intelligence service, were caught installing a wiretapping system at the offices of Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical newspaper.
Another interior minister of that era, Werner Maihofer of the former West Germany, resigned for similar reasons. His agents planted bugs in the home of Klaus Traube, a nuclear industry expert falsely suspected of links to Red Army Faction terrorists. Even Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first postwar chancellor, who symbolised the restoration of democracy, used the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the state’s foreign intelligence service, to monitor his Social Democratic political opponents, according to new research.
Are these just scandals from a misty past with no modern relevance? Hardly. “Spying on friends is not acceptable,” said an indignant Angela Merkel after it emerged that the US National Security Agency had listened to the former German chancellor’s mobile phone conversations.
Yet the ethical distinction between unscrupulous Americans and innocent Europeans became blurred with the news that Denmark’s intelligence service had worked hand in glove with the NSA. To Berlin’s embarrassment, it then came to light that the BND — the agency that helped Adenauer — had probably spied on Germany’s EU partners and the US.
These were, of course, examples of states conducting espionage on other states. Still, if EU leaders are serious about building a closer political union, they may want to have a word with their intelligence services about who it is appropriate to spy on.
There is every sign that the Spanish scandal is only the tip of the iceberg. Pegasus, the spyware installed in the phones of Sánchez, Robles and the Catalan separatists, has been used by the authorities in Poland, Hungary and other countries.
NSO Group, the Israeli company that developed Pegasus, says it “complies with very strict legal and regulatory frameworks in every relevant area of operation”. But the fundamental responsibility to use spyware lawfully rests with governments and intelligence agencies. Unless the public and the courts apply pressure, the historical record suggests that people in power like getting away with as much as they can.
