WASHINGTON — When President Obama placed a call to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany last Thursday, he had a busy agenda: to consult with a close ally and to mobilize wavering Europeans to put more pressure on Russia to end its covert incursions in Ukraine.
What Mr. Obama did not know was that a day earlier, a young German intelligence operative had been arrested and had admitted that he had been passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency.
While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case — and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.
The details of this spying case remain murky. Intelligence officials have declined to comment, and it is still not clear what the German operative has told the authorities.
But the episode sheds light on the tensions that arise from the colliding cultures of spycraft and statecraft — one driven by the need to vacuum as much secret material as possible; the other giving primacy to diplomatic objectives.
It also reinforces the problem that surfaced a year ago in the wake of revelations about National Security Agency surveillance practices from the rogue contractor Edward J. Snowden: whether the costs of spying on close allies outweigh the gains.
At the White House, senior officials have expressed concern that the latest allegations could set back relations with Germany just as Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel are struggling to move past the distrust generated by the Snowden disclosures, including the revelation that the N.S.A. had tapped Ms. Merkel’s cellphone.
What is particularly baffling to these officials is that the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A.’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.
For all his concerns, Mr. Obama does not plan any extraordinary outreach to Ms. Merkel, an official said, noting that some in the administration also feel that Germany should not overreact to the case or conflate it with the privacy issues raised by the N.S.A.’s surveillance.
Some experts say the recent tensions betray a lack of attention in Washington to its relationship with Berlin. “Bush and especially Obama have treated it as a ‘solved problem’ requiring no further American involvement,” said John C. Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany. “Recent events have demonstrated that just the opposite is the case. Germany is still deeply conflicted about itself and about the world around it.”
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The Nazis too proclaimed they were destined by God to global “Full Spectrum Dominance” and even wore “God is with Us” on their belt buckles as they let lose the worst carnage and death the world had ever known. And the wars that followed, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted longer than WWII. and even the whole “Rise and Fall” of the Third Reich.