(Spiegel) German intelligence sends massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA, according to documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, which SPIEGEL has seen. The trans-Atlantic cooperation on technical matters is also much closer than first thought.
Agents with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) sometimes wax lyrical when they look back on their time in Germany -- to the idyllic Chiemsee lake and the picturesque Bavarian town of Bad Aibling. Anyone who has received "a free beer at the club email" and knows "that leberkäse is made of neither liver, nor cheese" can claim to be a real Bavaria veteran, former NSA employees write in a document called the "A Little Bad Aibling Nostalgia."
The profession of love for the Bavarian lifestyle and the large surveillance base southeast of Munich is among the documents in the possession of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, some of which SPIEGEL has seen. The surveillance facility is known for its large "radomes," giant golf ball-like structures which contain state-of-the-art surveillance technology. They were officially closed in September 2004.
The Americans, though, were quietly replaced by telecommunications experts from the German military, part of the Fernmeldeweitverkehrsstelle der Bundeswehr. They moved into the Mangfall barracks, only a few hundred meters from the abandoned NSA structures, laid cables to the radomes and secretly took over the NSA's large-scale surveillance of radio and satellite communications.
The supposed military site is in fact a secret facility operated by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency. NSA surveillance specialists also moved onto the grounds of the barracks, into a windowless building that had been erected within just a few months. Because of its metal shell, German BND agents refer to the building, with a mixture of affection and derision, as the "Tin Can."
The tête-à-tête between the two intelligence agencies at the Mangfall barracks was given various code names in the ensuing years and became one of their most extensive cooperative projects in Germany.
Day After Day
And the site in Bad Aibling could very well provide the answer to a question that has been on the minds of German politicians and the public in recent weeks.
The Snowden documents mention two data collection sites known as signals intelligence activity designators (SIGADs), through which the controversial US intelligence agency gathered about 500 million pieces of metadata in December 2012 alone. The code names cited in the documents are "US-987LA" and "US-987LB." The BND now believes that the first code name stands for Bad Aibling.
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