WASHINGTON, United States. US President Barack Obama has assured his French counterpart Francois Hollande that his administration was not spying on him.
Obama spoke to Hollande over phone following WikiLeaks reports that claimed the US National Security Agency eavesdropped on the last three French presidents from 2006 until 2012.
The US President told Hollande that he was not a spying target and reiterated his commitment to bilateral ties.
“The President reiterated that we have abide by the commitment we made to our French counterparts in late 2013 that we are not targeting and will not target the communications of the French President,” the White House said.
“We’ve been very clear that foreign intelligence activities are only conducted when there is a specific, validated national security interest involved,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters.
He said the US was “substantially” contributing to France’s effort to keep its citizens safe.
“There is obviously a very persistent extremist, terrorist threat inside of France right now. And we are pleased that we can substantially contribute to their effort to keep France and its citizens safe,” Earnest said.
Mistrust between US and France, world’s oldest allies, over spying charges
The United States and France, who constitute one of the oldest alliances in modern history with ties going back to the times of George Washington, Napoleon, and Tipu Sultan, have opened a new chapter in mistrust after it has been revealed that the United States spied on a succession of French Presidents, including incumbent Francois Hollande.
Paris summoned Jane Hartley, the US ambassador to France, an office once represented by Thomas Jefferson, for a dressing down on Wednesday in the wake of reports through Wikileaks that the US National Security Agency spied on Hollande and his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac, between 2006 and 2012.
France won’t tolerate ”any action jeopardizing its security and the protection of its interests,” the country’s Defense Council said in a statement Wednesday, suggesting that it was already well aware of the spying allegations.
”These unacceptable facts already resulted in clarifications between France and the United States” in 2013 and 2014, the Council said, adding, ”Commitments were made by the American authorities. They must be recalled and strictly respected.”
The statement indicated that France disbelieved Washington’s pledge that it had stopped spying, something US officials contested vigorously.
Hollande himself is expected to phone US President Barack Obama to register his protest and seek clarifications, even as the two sides seek to publicly paper over the mistrust and get on with life, as the US and Germany have tried to do.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has similar been a victim of US snooping, but Obama has managed to mollify her, with the US broadly suggesting all this is business as usual, and all countries spy on each other.
The spat was ignited by reports in the French newspaper Liberation and online outlet Mediapart which cited five NSA reports published by WikiLeaks on Tuesday that described intercepted communications of the three French presidents and other public personalities.
According to a WikiLeaks news release, the cache of top secret documents includes ”intelligence summaries of conversations between French government officials concerning some of the most pressing issues facing France and the international community,” including the global financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis, and France-Germany ties.
India too has been a victim of US spying, although New Delhi has preferred to keep the issue low-key, and simply try and address the issue internally.
But the US spying dragnet, which has become bigger, broader, and more sophisticated, and most importantly, unsparing of even friends and allies in recent years, has engendered a deep distrust at the highest echelons of international leadership.
Governments could not be naive about the idea that other countries would pursue their national interests but said there had to be ”reciprocal respect for sovereignty,” the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls complained on Wednesday.
Credit: The Times of India
