No One Told Obama About the Alleged Double Agent in Germany

President Barack Obama was, apparently,
completely out of the loop last week when an alleged double agent
working for the CIA was caught in Germany’s intelligence
agency.

The claim raises some eyebrows, and if true, is pretty
embarrassing for the commander-in-chief. He was on an
already-scheduled phone call with Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel
last Thursday, just hours after suspect was arrested. The New
York Times
reports:

Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call. …

What is particularly baffling to [White House] officials is that
the CIA did not inform the White House that its agent — a
31-year-old employee of Germany’s federal intelligence service, the
BND — had been compromised, given his arrest the day before the two
leaders spoke. According to German news media reports, the agency
may have been aware three weeks before the arrest that the German
authorities were monitoring the man.

A central question, one American official said, is how high the
information about the agent went in the CIA’s command — whether it
was bottled up at the level of the station chief in Berlin or
transmitted to senior officials, including the director, John O.
Brennan, who is responsible for briefing the White House.

The 31-year-old suspect was, apparently, gathering information
on a German committee that was investigating American surveillance
on Germans. German officials
say he sold 218 secret documents for 25,000 euro ($34,000).

A second alleged spy, whose case according to
BBC is “more serious” but believed to be “not connected” to the
first, was also discovered recently and was being investigated
yesterday. Whether or not Obama was informed about this one is
unknown.

The Associated Press
reported earlier that the German government today asked the
latter suspect to leave the country.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, who has been
outspoken about the two-part spy scandal took a jab at the U.S. “If
the situation remains what we know now, the information reaped by
this suspected espionage is laughable. However, the political
damage is already disproportionate and serious.”

German officials have expressed indignation about the
revelations and many reports have emphasized the tension this puts
on U.S.-German relations, but given how much the two nations
collaborate with each other on spying, it’s hard to know how much
of an impact this scandal will ultimately have. 

For more Reason coverage of this scandal, click

here and
here.