It all started when Edward Snowden started leaking classified information in June 2013 from the National Security Agency (NSA), revealing that the US surveillance scheme was not only targeting the bad guys. He leaked in October 2013 that the cell phone of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel was tapped. The German government sharply reacted. Merkel said repeatedly that US espionage against a close ally was unacceptable, but that there was no alternative to close ties with Washington. Yet, Germany expelled the CIA Berlin bureau chief without publicizing his name, making a point that they were not going to put up with everything that the United States does.

With all that tough posturing, though, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Aug. 18 that Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), had inadvertently spied on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and had also deliberately targeted Turkey since 2009. “Turkey is one of the BND focuses included in the BND order profile, making the country an official target for the foreign intelligence agency’s espionage efforts,” Der Spiegel wrote, stressing that the German government, too, has targeted a NATO ally in its espionage.

On Aug. 31, Der Spiegel took the news to new heights by reporting that spying against Turkey was not limited to Germany. “Documents from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal wide-scale spying against Turkey by America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters],” Der Spiegel wrote, noting that the United States significantly helped Turkey in its fight against Kurdish separatists.

Although Turkey’s reaction to Germany was limited, there was no split voice in the government response. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan played down the news that the US and British intelligence services spied against Turkey. “Let me say this very openly. There is no such thing for countries with strong intelligence capability not to wiretap other countries. We should all know about this. All of them are doing it,” Erdogan said Sept. 1 at a news conference before departing for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus for his first foreign travel as president. “Therefore, what is important is how they do what they do, and how they make that knowledge public. The NATO summit and the UN General Assembly [annual] meetings are coming up. We will talk about these issues during our meetings with the leaders. I believe they will probably bring a tighter control to the leakage of such information threatening world peace.”