German Chancellor Olaf Scholz may have breached security protocols during a conference call with world leaders from a hotel room in China. According to German publication Apollo News, Scholz was on a visit to China when news of Iran’s attack on Israel broke. Leaders of the G7 nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union—held a group video call on Sunday, April 14th, to discuss the events, but on official photos of the call, all the leaders except Olaf Scholz were visible.
Apollo News reached out to the chancellor’s office who said that Scholz was only taking part in the conference call via audio, not video, as he was making a call from his hotel room in the city of Chongqing, China. A photo of Scholz making the call was posted on his Instagram account.
Reporters assert that the hotel room was potentially bugged, even if the phone line during the call to G7 leaders may have been secure. The photo of the Chancellor indicates that he was not sitting in a fully shielded room, as lights flickering in the city can be seen from the window. Although Scholz’s security staff had apparently scoured the room for bugs, Apollo News believes that in a police state like China, it is highly likely that the Chinese secret service had filled the chancellor’s room with state-of-the-art, undetectable spying devices long before the politician entered the hotel.
“In China, you have to assume that all hotel rooms in which exposed foreign persons-of-interest stay, are monitored. Telephone conversations or video conferences must be conducted in or from the German embassy. There are tap-proofed rooms there,” Hans-Georg Maaßen, former head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesverfassungsschutz (BfV) said. By Scholz opting for his hotel room, China may have overheard everything said about the conflict in the Middle East, and may have even shared some of the information with Iran.
In contrast to Germany, the U.S. secret service has so-called “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities,” portable tent-like structures which can be set up anytime the U.S. President needs to make an emergency phone call or divulge classified information.
This is not the first time the left-liberal German government has been found to be reckless when handling sensitive information. As we previously reported, a German general recently took part in a video conference call with other high-ranking military officers using an unsecured phone line at a Singapore hotel. The conversation, which discussed potentially sending German cruise missiles to Ukraine, was hacked by Russian spies and leaked by Russian media. The scandal caused a political stir in Germany and raised eyebrows in the capitals of allied nations, questioning whether Berlin can be trusted with handling sensitive information.
