The United States spies on Germany like Great Britain spies on the United States, or Israel spying on America. This is nothing new under the sun in the intelligence community, nor a scandal of any sort.
The only noteworthy point to make is that this is intentionally leaked all over the media as a propaganda piece. The means to what end this should achieve in particular is the only mystery at the moment.
A German intelligence officer, who was arrested last summer for spying for the United States, may have given his American handlers information on the real identities, as well as operational aliases, of nearly 3,500 German intelligence operatives.
In July, Germany expelled the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Berlin, following the arrest of Marcus R., a 31-year-old, low-level clerk at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, Germany’s external intelligence agency.
He was believed at the time to have spied for the CIA for approximately two years, and to have supplied the American spy agency with around 200 classified German government documents in exchange for around €25,000 —approximately $30,000.
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The department is tasked with stationing intelligence operatives abroad in German embassies and consulates, as well as with embedding them with German military missions in places such as Sudan, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Mali. German investigators say they are not yet certain whether Markus R. passed the names of the BND operatives on to his CIA handlers.
Full article: German who spied for CIA stole list of 3,500 German spies’ names (Intel News)