GERMANY:German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is only two months in the job, but has come under pressure to explain whether German spies in Baghdad aided the US during the Iraq war.
Mr Steinmeier, of the Social Democrats (SPD), was the last government's direct contact to the secret service and the closest adviser to chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who said Berlin would have no part, direct or indirect, in the US war on Iraq. Now it has emerged that two agents from the German secret service (BND) remained in Baghdad and were authorised by Berlin to exchange intelligence with the US.
A government spokesman said yesterday that the information exchange was to prevent air strikes on hospitals and other civilian targets. But an unnamed Pentagon official told German television that the work also had a military aspect.
He said one of the agents was asked by US officials to verify the position of a convoy of armoured cars in Baghdad, one of which was reported to carry Saddam Hussein. When the German spy confirmed the location of the convoy, a US bomber obliterated the area and killed at least 12 civilians.
Opposition politicians have accused the SPD of hypocrisy: the party owes its 2002 election victory largely to Mr Schröder's repeated speech promising "no military misadventures" in Iraq.
A leading member of the Free Democrats, the largest opposition party, said the allegations meant the SPD and Greens could "no longer walk around like the dove of peace".
But Mr Steinmeier hit back at "absurd", "schizophrenic" suggestions that the SPD-Green government supported the US-led war in Iraq through the back door.
"You can be sure that I, and my party, will not allow any attempts I see to rewrite history," said Mr Steinmeier, saying the last administration had, to the end, pushed for a diplomatic solution to the stand-off with Saddam Hussein.
At first, Mr Steinmeier said he knew nothing of the BND's activities but changed his position, saying the two agents had stayed in Baghdad to gather intelligence and were "naturally" bound by the government's anti-war stance.
Now Mr Steinmeier will have to answer some awkward questions about the episode in front of a parliamentary inquiry.
Another commission that meets in private to discuss secret service work said yesterday, after a four-hour meeting, that it could find no proof that the BND agents breached their mission.
Christian Democrat Norbert Röttgen, the committee's chair- man, warned of "hysterical speculation" and called for a "factual debate".
The head of the BND denied its agents had "delivered war targets" to the US. In Washington, chancellor Angela Merkel said: "One will have to deal with the fact that not everything will become public."