PARIS: The United States has branded reports it spied on millions of French citizens as inaccurate but the newspaper behind them said yesterday it was sticking by a story which has caused a diplomatic ruckus between the allies.
The latest revelations to emerge from leaks by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden have also strained US relations with its neighbour Mexico, which said it would investigate allegations US intelligence had hacked into the emails of President Enrique Pena Nieto and his predecessor.
French daily Le Monde said it stood by its report that millions of phone calls in France were monitored by the NSA and published what it described as an NSA document showing a daily breakdown of the alleged snooping.
The paper was responding to a statement by James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence.
Clapper said Le Monde’s report contained “inaccurate and misleading” information about America’s foreign intelligence activities and that a specific claim 70 million phone calls had been monitored between December 10, 2012 and January 8 of this year was false.
Clapper made no mention of Le Monde’s report that the US spied on several French embassies around the world, most notably its missions in Washington and at the United Nations in New York.
“While we are not going to discuss the details of our activities, we have repeatedly made it clear that the United States gathers intelligence of the type gathered by all nations,” Clapper said.
“The US collects intelligence to protect the nation, its interests, and its allies from, among other things, threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
As part of the efforts to appease angry allies, Obama has already initiated a review of how America gathers intelligence with a view to addressing concerns over citizens’ right to privacy, US officials say.
Le Monde, however, has claimed that the monitoring of phone calls in France extended beyond possible terrorism suspects to include business and political figures.
French President Francois Hollande’s spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said yesterday that Paris and Washington had agreed to work on new “bilateral cooperation between the French and American intelligence agencies” in the wake of the scandal.
Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta also discussed claims of US snooping on Italian communications with US Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday during talks in Rome, a government
spokeswoman said. AFP
