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U.S. Says France, Spain Aided NSA Spying - WSJ.com

WASHINGTON—Widespread electronic spying that ignited a political firestorm in France and Spain recently was carried out by their own intelligence services and not by the National Security Agency, U.S. officials say.

The phone records collected by the Europeans—in war zones and other areas outside their borders—then were shared with the NSA, U.S. officials said, as part of efforts to help protect American and allied troops and civilians.

The new disclosure upends the version of events as reported in Europe in recent days, and puts a spotlight on the role of European intelligence services that work closely with the NSA, suggesting a greater level of European involvement in global surveillance.

The U.S. has so far been silent about the role of European partners in these collection efforts so as to protect relationships. These efforts are separate, however, from the U.S. spying programs that targeted dozens of foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose phones were tapped for years by the NSA.

The NSA declined to comment, as did the Spanish foreign ministry and a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington. A spokesman for Spain's intelligence service said: "Spanish law impedes us from talking about our procedures, methods and relationships with other intelligence services."

In recent days, leading newspapers in France and Spain have cited documents provided by the fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in reports that alleged that the NSA was sweeping up massive quantities of phone records in those countries.

Le Monde said the documents showed that more than 70 million French phone records between early December 2012 and early January 2013 were collected by the NSA, prompting Paris to lodge a protest with the U.S.

In Spain, the El Mundo newspaper reported that it had seen NSA documents that showed the U.S. spy agency had intercepted 60.5 million phone calls in Spain during the same time period.

After publication of the report in Le Monde last week, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that it contained "inaccurate and misleading information regarding U.S. foreign intelligence activities."

He said the allegation that the NSA collected more than 70 million "recordings of French citizens' telephone data" is false, but he provided no further explanation of what the data in the documents showed.

Officials privately have said the disclosures in the European press put the U.S. in a difficult bind.

The U.S. wants to correct the record about the extent of NSA spying but doing so in this case would require it to expose its allies' intelligence operations, the officials say, which could compromise cooperation in the future as well as ongoing intelligence efforts.

U.S. officials said the Snowden-provided documents had been misinterpreted and actually show phone records that were collected by French and Spanish intelligence agencies, and then shared with the NSA, according to officials briefed on those discussions.

U.S. intelligence officials studied the document published by Le Monde earlier this month and have determined that it wasn't assembled by the NSA.

Rather, the document appears to be a slide that was assembled based on NSA data received from French intelligence, a U.S. official said.

Based on an analysis of the document, the U.S. concluded that the phone records the French had collected were actually from outside of France, and then were shared with the U.S. The data don't show that the French spied on their own people inside France.

U.S. intelligence officials haven't seen the documents cited by El Mundo but the data appear to come from similar information the NSA obtained from Spanish intelligence agencies documenting their collection efforts abroad, officials said.

The U.S. hasn't made public the role of European spy agencies in the collection efforts because of the diplomatic sensitivities of outing partner services, which the NSA relies on for a considerable amount of intelligence.

Public disclosure of European complicity in the collection efforts would likely spark domestic outrage in those countries against their own governments, and could threaten cooperation with the U.S.

U.S. officials said the European collection programs were part of long-standing intelligence sharing arrangements between the U.S. and its closest allies. Officials said the figures may not reflect the entirety of the phone records collected by France and Spain.