Jan 4, 2026, 7:34 p.mJan 4, 2026, 7:36 p.m
Former US President Barack Obama is said to have been wiretapped on Air Force One.Image: EPA/dpa
The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has according to “Zeit” journalist Holger Stark the then US President Barack Obama was wiretapped. In the podcast by Bild deputy Paul Ronzheimer, Stark said that the secret service had taken advantage of the fact that encrypting conversations from the American government plane was much more difficult than on the ground. “That’s why the Americans repeatedly had conversations that were either poorly encrypted, where there were gaps, or that weren’t encrypted at all,” said Stark.
“And the BND knew that, and he knew the dozen or so frequencies that Air Force One used for this type of communication for telephone calls. And he listened to it.” There was no official espionage order for this. The Obama phone calls were properly transcribed and only a copy was passed around to the BND. The internal directive was that one copy should be shredded at the end. That’s what happened in most cases.
“The Chancellery didn’t know anything about this for a long time.”
Investigative journalist Holger Stark
BND says nothing about whether the allegations are true
The BND did not comment specifically on the allegations. At the request of the German Press Agency in Berlin, he said: “The Federal Intelligence Service generally does not comment publicly on matters that concern any intelligence findings or activities.” This does not make any statement as to whether the facts are correct or not. “The Federal Intelligence Service reports on relevant topics, in particular to the Federal Government and the responsible, secretly meeting committees of the German Bundestag,” the message simply said.
Merkel was a victim of wiretapping by the US secret service NSA
The alleged eavesdropping attack on Obama is also interesting because the US secret service NSA had been tapping the cell phone of then Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) for years. This became known in 2013 and led to considerable tension in German-American relations. “Spying on friends is not possible,” Merkel said angrily. Obama was embarrassed at the time – without making it clear how long he had known about the spying. Merkel and Obama then tried to have a better relationship.
According to Stark, the BND did not regularly wiretap Obama. But if the employees had noticed that transmissions were being made on the relevant frequencies, they would have recorded. “It was authorized by the BND president, who could have stopped it,” said the journalist. Conversations of then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were also intercepted by the BND – some of them also by American military officers. “It was simply too tempting for the BND to listen in and thus take a small look into the thoughts of the American leadership,” said Stark. (sda/dpa)