In the past, diplomatic security has been particularly critical in countries where there is no official diplomatic representation. The very presence of what are known as “gray embassies” is classified and the compromise of dispatches from these unofficial missions can result in major physical threats to “official cover” and “non-official cover” diplomatic personnel. After the Arab-Israeli war on 1967, the US, Britain, and West Germany maintained such “gray embassies” in certain Arab nations – Egypt (United Arab Republic), Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Yemen – that severed relations over perceived US, British, and West German support for Israel. There are suggestions that Israel maintains such gray embassies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Iraq (the latter used as a conduit for contact with Iran).

In 1917, during World War I, a breakdown in diplomatic security resulted in a major rupture in relations between Sweden, Argentina, and Germany. It was discovered by US Secretary of State Robert Lansing that Count Luxburg, the German chargé d’affaires in the Argentine capital, was using telegraphs sent to Stockholm by the Swedish Legation and Minister Baron Löwes to embed covert messages to Berlin related to the German U-boat campaign against Allied shipping. The revelation about the Swedish role also infuriated the Argentine government since part of the German campaign was to sink Argentine ships, leaving no traces of German involvement with the hope that the Argentines would blame the British and Americans.

Another diplomatic leak in 1917, prior to US entry into World War I, was that of the telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German Legation in Mexico City proposing a German-Mexican military alliance that would seek to recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico for Mexico. Publication of the contents of the diplomatic cable enraged Americans and helped President Woodrow Wilson to propel the US into World War I on the side of the Allies. It was later discovered that the encrypted telegram had been decrypted by British cipher analysts.

The most recent example of a breakdown in diplomatic security was the release to the British press of classified and personal cables from Sir Kim Darroch, the career diplomat ambassador to the United States, and the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Such diplomatic dispatches are expected to provide select government leaders with honest assessments of the political leadership in the countries to which they are accredited. In Darroch’s case, he did what countless ambassadors and ministers have done throughout the long history of ambassadors, ministers, plenipotentiaries, and diplomatic envoys. In his diplomatic dispatches to the Foreign Office in London, Darroch correctly summed up the Trump administration as “clumsy and inept.” However, the leak of Darroch’s cables resulted in his resigning his position, an event that further worsened relations between London and Washington.

British Foreign Office official Sir Alan Duncan told the House of Commons that the compromise of Darroch’s cables were not the result of computer hacking. In 2011, the US ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, resigned after WikiLeaks revealed one of Pascual’s classified cables to Washington that bluntly assessed the in-fighting between the Mexican Army and Navy regarding the military crackdown on Mexican narcotics lords. The leaked cables described the lack of faith the US embassy in Mexico City had for not only the Mexican Army, but also the National Action Party (PAN) administration of President Felipe Calderón, in the war on drug trafficking and the Mexican drugs cartels.

Calderón’s lashing out at Pascual was similar, but not as crude as Donald Trump’s criticism of Darroch. Calderón said of Pascual: “That man’s ignorance translates into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico and affects things and creates ill feeling within our own team.” In the case of Darroch, Trump called the ambassador “wacky,” a “very stupid guy” and a “pompous fool.” Trump also called Prime Minister Theresa May “foolish” for ignoring his advice on the implementation of Brexit.

Regardless of the speculation about who leaked Darroch’s cables or how they were compromised to the press, there should be a re-thinking about how such communications are protected during transmittal and the classification and need-to-know requirements that accompany them. There were suspicions in London that it was former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who leaked the cables as a way to give him a leg up on becoming Britain’s next Prime Minister. The political intrigue had Johnson working secretly with Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage in a conspiracy that would see Farage pressing Brexiteers in the Conservative Party backing Johnson against his chief rival, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt. In return, a Prime Minister Johnson would nominate Farage as the British ambassador in Washington. During the 2016 presidential election, Farage actively campaigned in the United States for Trump.

If Johnson – as a former Foreign Secretary – still had access to Darroch’s cable traffic, it would represent a catastrophic failure in security. The United States saw a similar compromise of classified documents in October 2003 when former Bill Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger used his past position to remove from the National Archives classified National Security Council documents by hiding them in his socks and underpants. The original, uncopied, and non-inventoried documents Berger removed were critical to the work of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission.

One of the most-effective cryptographic methods that have long been employed by diplomats and their security advisers to ensure maximum security for classified and sensitive diplomatic messages is the use of the One-Time Pad (OTP), a virtually unbreakable cipher. The plain text stream of a single message is paired with random key stream characters. The One-Time Pad existed before the computer. One-Time Pads contained the key streams, usually blocks of five numbers, for example, “02685,” “41087,” “24061,” and so on. In some cases, blocks of random letters were used. Soviet and other intelligence agencies relied on such OTP booklets to encrypt specific messages to their higher operational commands. After an OTP key stream page was used, it was completely destroyed to ensure that the encrypted message could not be decrypted by adversary signals intelligence agencies intercepting the coded number radio traffic or telephonic voice messages. The OTP booklets used by espionage agencies and diplomats arrived at foreign embassies and legations via inviolable diplomatic pouches, always carried by a foreign ministry official possessing diplomatic passports.

With the advent of email, text messaging, and other convenient means of communications, the security protocols assigned to the transmittal and storage of diplomatic dispatches has waned. Mils Electronic of Austria, the only major company that manufactured One-Time Tape, or OTT, encryption machines used to convert plaintext into 5-bit digital codes – a technological improvement on the old One-Time Pad systems, went out of business in 2018 after undergoing a management “restructuring” in 2017. MILS Electronic, which began operations in Trier, Germany in 1947 and moved to Austria in 1967 to escape pressure to weaken its products for Western surveillance from NATO, was always a bugbear for the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its counterpart, the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND). MILS was founded as Reichert-Elektronik in Trier by Willi Reichert, a cryptographer for the German Wehrmacht during World War II. Reichert helped invent the famous Enigma-1 portable encryption machine that utilized three coding wheels that, while providing strong encryption, were ultimately vulnerable to Allied cryptanalysis attacks.

It may be more than coincidental that in 2018, the year that MILS, along with its cryptographic maintenance support for its customers ended, the European Commission’s headquarters in Brussels also suffered a breach for thousands of its diplomatic cables. Many were classified as confidential, secret and “tres secret” (top secret). Among other things, the compromise revealed that Chinese President Xi Jinping referred to Trump’s “bullying” that was reminiscent of a “no-rules freestyle boxing match.”

Regardless of the demise of MILS Electronic, diplomats should realize that one-time pad technology remains the safest means to protect sensitive cables or messages during transmittal. As for personnel security, which was clearly compromised in the case of Wikileaks by US Army Private Chelsea Manning and in Darroch’s case by friends of Johnson and Farage, a system of strict need-to-know and access controls for former officials is paramount.

The security of diplomatic communications can make the difference between war and peace. As long as it is given low priority, there will be future ambassadors like Darroch and Pascual.

German lawmakers are investigating the case. Media rights group Reporters Without Borders labelled the alleged surveillance «a monstrous attack on press freedom», and said it was planning legal action. The BBC has voiced dismay over alleged German spying on foreign journalists. «Our journalists should be able to operate freely and safely, with full protection for their sources. We call upon all governments to respect the operation of a free press», a BBC spokesperson said.

Under the legislation passed in October, the BND is permitted to direct espionage operations on foreign nationals as well as EU institutions if they aim to gather «information of significance for foreign policy and security». The legislation is widely criticized for not providing specific safeguards for journalists.

Since 2015, the BND has been under widespread criticism for its mass surveillance which has reportedly also targeted embassies of several of its EU partners and NATO allies, including the ministries of interior of Poland, Austria, Denmark and Croatia; US diplomatic missions at the EU and UN, as well as the US Treasury Department and Department of the Interior in Washington. Inside Germany, the embassies and consulates of France, Great Britain, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and even the Vatican, were tapped.

Back then, German Chancellor Angela Merkel came under harsh criticism over a proposed no-spy agreement with the US, including allegations that Germany’s BND spy service co-operated with the US the American National Security Agency (NSA) in the surveillance of European targets.

German media have reported that the BND spied on the NSA’s behalf in Europe and elsewhere – accepting from the US millions of so-called selectors or internet contact details, such as email addresses.

Last December, Wikileaks made public over 2,400 documents related to the German parliamentary inquiry into the surveillance activities of BND and its cooperation with the NSA.

Germany's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have both recruited refugees as informers on security issues. Between 2000 and 2013, 850 asylum-seekers were asked by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to provide security-related information, according to the report from Der Spiegel.

It’s not Germany only. The same year, another snooping scandal hit media headlines. According to the Guardian, the documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) bulk surveillance of electronic communications had scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organizations. Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency. The disclosure came as the British government faces intense pressure to protect the confidential communications of reporters, MPs and lawyers from snooping.

The United States’ NSA has been involved in the scandals while applying efforts to control each and every electronic communication. The British GCHQ is doing the same thing. Commercial spy software FinFisher (also called FinSpy) monitors citizens in at least 20 other countries. Global Information Society Watch's global report indicates that communications surveillance is a global trend.

It all takes place in the countries where leaders the leaders routinely deliver highfalutin speeches on human rights and freedom of press. Article 10 of the European convention on human rights gives journalists a strong right to protect their confidential sources of information. Snooping by intelligence agencies is a sure way to deprive people of their right to have aces to the stories governments and big business may not want them to know.

Surveillance practices are strongly resisted. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) has joined an international alliance of human-rights organizations, journalists’ associations and media, to protect foreign journalists from surveillance by the BND. The campaign, launched last August by Reporters Without Borders, aims to include in the revised BND law a clause protecting journalists. The signatories of the appeal consider the global mass surveillance by the BND to be a violation of human rights and they regard the surveillance of foreign journalists in particular as a serious encroachment on press freedom worldwide. The initiative is joined by Amnesty International, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), German Federation of Journalists (DJV), German Union of Journalists, Netzwerk Recherche, Weltreporter, Freelens, Journalistinnenbund.

Despite all the spy stories and scandals surrounding the intelligence agencies activities, the German government has not done anything to address the issue. 2017 is the election year in Germany it the vote scheduled on September 24. No doubt, the Der Spiegel revelations will prompt many questions the government will have to answer. Looks like the migration policy is not the only issue Chancellor has failed to address.

It’s difficult to say how the conversation between Angela Merkel and François Hollande actually unfolded. Perhaps the German chancellor put him off with an evasive answer, claiming that no information had been reported about Fabius’s negotiations. Although in that case why did the BND spies need all those tape recordings? Or maybe she said that she learned to spy from American President Barack Obama, who is spying on her.

The victim, Laurent Fabius, made a rather strange comment, saying that Merkel had explained that it had been a case of «incidental eavesdropping». This means that the BND was only eavesdropping on the people who were speaking with the French minister, but absolutely not listening to him at all. So one must assume that Fabius’s words were redacted from the conversations that were taped, but the words of his companions were recorded and reported to Madam Chancellor. Actually, that was precisely the whole reason the scandal erupted. The German radio station RBB reported that in addition to foreigners, the BND also spied on its own citizens, which is something that agency is expressly forbidden to do (that’s the job of the BfV counterintelligence service), but such news would hardly have prompted a big outcry. Except that these weren’t your average German citizens. For example, the BND was snooping on a senior diplomat, Hansjörg Haber, who from 2008 to 2011 headed the EU mission in Georgia, and afterwards directed the EU Civilian Planning and Conduct Capability of the European External Action Service in Brussels. Currently Haber is the head of the Delegation of the European Union in Turkey.

Martin Schaefer, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, commented, «German diplomats know that their activities might be watched by foreign intelligence services, and so they take appropriate precautions, but no one in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could have expected spying by the BND».

So he commented… But what’s next?

A picture of unremitting lawlessness of this very law-abiding European country can appear, if the entire mosaic is pieced together of the many scandals involving Germany’s intelligence services, starting with the American wiretapping of Angela Merkel herself back in 2013. That was a huge scandal, but instead of lodging a formal protest, the federal chancellor announced that «our partnership with America takes precedence, and this is how it should be for other European countries as well». In fact, that was also the position of Germany’s intelligence services, which have long worked with the CIA, violating Germany’s constitution and laws. So while the press was making such a fuss about the surveillance of the chancellor, the Germans were busy successfully staking out their European partners.

As a result, a scandal erupted last spring over the BND’s role in spying on Germany’s allies. According to the magazine Der Spiegel, the BND intelligence service spied both at home and in Europe, at the order of the CIA, which is in violation of the rules established in the BND’s own charter. Among the BND’s espionage targets were major corporations such as the EADS Group and Eurocopter, EU functionaries with access to classified information, and prominent politicians. The BND was responsible for illegal activity, carried out at the order of the CIA, in a total of approximately 40,000 cases. And there was no proper oversight of these actions. Even from the federal chancellor’s office.

It would seem high time to look into what was going on, but Berlin had no reaction. The German government has begun to soft-pedal the matter, ignoring the opposition protests and apparently satisfied with the explanation offered by the head of the BND, Gerhard Schindler, who «didn’t know anything about it».

Opposition politicians have some strong opinions about this. They have called the BND a «criminal organization» that should be shut down ASAP and have labeled its actions treasonous. Bundestag deputy Ulla Jelpke declared that «if private hackers had been caught doing what the BND has now been caught doing, they would have been put behind bars long ago. This proves that Germany is not a victim of CIA spying, but is a partner in this spying, violating both the law as well as human rights».

Gregor Gysi, the leader of an influential faction within the Die Linke party in the Bundestag, demanded an immediate investigation, based on suspicions that high treason might have been committed in the form of intelligence work conducted against the interests of Germany, or against German companies or companies with German stake, or against friendly politicians. The government could not ignore this demand. An official commission has been set up to study the BND documents.

However, the string of scandals continued. The next scandal was dubbed «Murder in Ramstein». Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian has published materials revealing that US military operations are being conducted from within Germany. Drones are flown remotely from America’s Ramstein Air Base to attack so-called terrorists in the other countries. US drone attacks «against terrorists» have previously drawn the ire of the German public, due to the fact that they cause large numbers of casualties and violate the sovereignty of other countries (such as Pakistan and Yemen). Now it turns out that such operations are being directed from inside Germany. The German public demanded a new investigation, but authorities managed to hush up the matter. They were apparently satisfied by the statement from a Pentagon spokesman, claiming that Ramstein Air Base «does not directly fly or control any manned or remotely piloted aircraft».

And now the wiretapping of Laurent Fabius… Poor German democracy that was so proud of itself proud of its democracy! What’s next?

Three Bundestag deputies from the CDU, the SPD, and the Green Party were supposed to present a report about the BND’s activities in Europe before a Parliamentary Control Panel (PKGr) on Nov. 11. Earlier, the deputies had been given 900 pages of evidence, detailing which of their allies, in addition to French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, the German intelligence service had under surveillance. Only it’s hardly likely that a parliamentary hearing will produce anything. Germany’s intelligence services are like a camel train led by an American camel-puller. The Bundestag deputies have a job to do – they provide a clamorous accompaniment along the caravan’s journey.

This is a democracy, ladies and gentlemen.