|
Thursday September 30 1:10 AM ET Germans Force Recall Of Three CIA Agents - Report WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has recalled three CIA agents at Germany's insistence after they were accused of using false pretenses to recruit German citizens for unspecified economic espionage, Thursday's Washington Post reported. In a report from Berlin quoting unidentified German officials, the newspaper said the three Americans were described as a married couple and their supervisor working under cover out of the U.S. consulate in Munich. It marked only the second time since the Second World War that Germany has made public that it had sought the removal of American agents, the Post said. Both instances occurred in the past two years. While details of the alleged spying were not made public, German officials told the newspaper the Americans had violated long-standing practice by failing to make their activities known to Germany's domestic intelligence agency. The state television network, ZDF, which first reported the action, said the three agents were not accredited as diplomats and that only one of them actually worked at the Munich consulate. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government agreed not to expel the three agents, but only with the understanding that Washington would order their withdrawal, which was carried out over the past five months, German officials told the Post. The newspaper said the recall was a fresh sign of tension between the two allies over the scale and purpose of U.S. intelligence-gathering in Germany.
|