ATHENS, Greece (AP) A former foreign minister of Greece revealed Tuesday that his country's intelligence services had eavesdropped on the phone conversations of U.S. ambassadors to Athens and Ankara in the 1990s.
Theodoros Pangalos, who held the foreign minister post from 1996-1999, made the comments on Vima FM radio in a discussion about the latest revelations in the American NSA surveillance affair. The German magazine Der Spiegel has published a slide purportedly from the NSA showing Athens as one of the locations where the NSA had monitoring capabilities.
"At some point the (National Intelligence Service) had managed to monitor not only the American ambassador in Athens, but also to monitor the American ambassador in Ankara," Panaglos said.
Pangalos didn't give a specific timeframe for the monitoring but said it didn't last long. He claimed he didn't learn anything particularly significant from it.
"But sometimes it was very entertaining to hear the American ambassador telling his colleague in Ankara, or someone in the State Department, 'what is this (expletive) Pangalos doing?'" he said.
