BERLIN, March 5. /TASS/. The headline-making conversation among top-ranking German Bundeswehr (armed forces) officers was apparently intercepted and surreptitiously recorded in Singapore, when one of the participants dialed in to the call via an unsecured line, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told journalists in Berlin.
"The reason why an Air Force [officers’] conversation could have been recorded is due to a personal error in using [the equipment]. Not all participants followed the safety rules as prescribed," he said. "According to preliminary data, the information was leaked from a participant who was in Singapore; he got connected via an unauthorized link, that is to say an open channel," Pistorius said.
The minister explained that an air show was underway in Singapore at the time when the Bundeswehr officers' conversation took place, which brought together high-ranking military officers from many countries. "<...> it can be assumed that the wiretap of this Webex conference was incidental within the framework of a large-scale operation," he opined.
Pistorius said that experts are now checking all the technical devices that were used in the intercepted conversation. He ruled out the possibility that a ‘Russian spy’ could have surreptitiously tapped into the call.
Tap RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said on March 1 that on the very day that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was giving public assurances that NATO was not now and would not in the future be directly involved in the Ukraine conflict, Germany’s top brass was in fact mulling how to carry out a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge in a way that would have no repercussions for Berlin by giving it the cover of plausible deniability. Simonyan said she had a corroborating audio recording of the Bundeswehr officers’ conversation in her possession. She later released a transcript of it, which makes it clear that the military officers discussed the Taurus missiles’ capability to hit and destroy the Crimean Bridge and the tactical details involved in preparing such an attack.
On Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned German Ambassador to Moscow Alexander Lambsdorff to deliver a formal demarche and demand clarifications over the leaked conversation among Bundeswehr officers discussing potential attacks on the Crimean Bridge using Taurus missiles.