BERLIN, 5 March 2006 — When historians write about the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Germany’s participation on the ground will likely merit an asterisk: Two spies in Baghdad, both of whom sought refuge in the French Embassy when the bombing started.
But recent disclosures that the German government may have played a small but active role in the war, have stirred a political tempest here. Next week, the German Parliament will consider whether to open an investigation into how much help German intelligence officers gave the US military and whether officials in Berlin covered up their actions.
The government of then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder adamantly opposed the war from the start and promised it would not aid the invading forces. The stance reflected German public opinion but chilled relations between Washington and Berlin. Three years later, polls show that a majority of Germans continue to oppose involvement in Iraq.
So it came as a shock to the country — and an embarrassment to the government — when German media reported last month that agents from the Federal Intelligence Service were in Baghdad during the invasion and passed a stream of information to the US Central Command, which was overseeing the war. In response, the German government last week gave a closed-door presentation to a parliamentary committee, acknowledging that two spies had been in Baghdad. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was then Schroeder’s chief of staff, said the agents were there to gather intelligence for German purposes and also helped US forces avoid civilian and humanitarian targets during the air campaign. They gave the United States “no support for the pursuit of war,” Steinmeier told Parliament.
The government has denied that the agents tried to tip off the US military to then-President Saddam Hussein’s possible whereabouts.
The issue resurfaced days later, however, when the New York Times reported that a classified US military study said that the German agents had acquired Saddam’s Baghdad defense plans and shared them with the Americans, along with other information. A German government spokesman denied the report, but the revelations prompted opposition lawmakers to call for an inquiry. “It realigns the hardly flattering picture that is currently being painted in ever so bold colors: There was a great deal of deception in Schroeder’s government’s ‘no’ to the war in Iraq,” the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel wrote in an editorial Friday.
From the beginning, some analysts have called Germany’s opposition to the war less than total.
As the invasion approached, Germany provided Patriot missiles to Turkey to defend against any Iraqi air attack on the fellow member of the NATO alliance. It allowed US planes supporting the invasion to fly though German airspace and provided extra security at US bases in Germany. Werner Hoyer, a parliamentary leader of the Free Democrats, one of three opposition parties in the parliament, said the new allegations are shattering public assumptions about Schroeder’s government. If the reports are confirmed, he told German reporters, they would represent a “historical mega-lie” by the former government.
Schroeder lost a bid for re-election last September, but his Social Democrats remain in power as part of a coalition government.
