President Obama Unaware as US Spied on World Leaders: Officials

The National Security Agency ended a program used to spy on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and a number of other world leaders after an internal Obama Administration review started this summer revealed to the White House the existence of the operation, US officials said.

Officials said the internal review turned up NSA monitoring of some 35 world leaders, in the US government's first public acknowledgment that it tapped the phones of world leaders. European leaders have joined international outrage over revelations of U.S. surveillance of Merkel's phone and of NSA's monitoring of telephone call data in France. The White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, including the one tracking Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior US official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but haven't been phased out completely yet, officials said. The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them. They added that the President was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection "priorities," but that those below him make decisions about specific intelligence targets.