The National Security Agency's (NSA) continued surveillance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli leaders may also have swept up private conversations involving members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday night. 
 
 Although President Obama had promised to curb eavesdropping on world leaders who are U.S. allies after Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing the extent of the surveillance, there were a few leaders the White House wished to continue monitoring, including Netanyahu. 
 
 The original reason for the stepped up surveillance of Netanyahu, according to the WSJ, was the fear that he would "strike Iran without warning." By 2013, that fear had dissipated. The administration then became concerned about the Iran nuclear deal that was being negotiated. U.S. officials believed that the Israelis were spying on the negotiations and would try to scuttle the deal, the report said. 
 
 Further, the Journal reports that intercepted conversations between Israeli leaders confirmed Israel's knowledge of the talks, as well as its intent to undermine any nuclear deal with Iran by leaking its details. When Netanyahu and his top aides came to Washington to talk with Jewish-American groups and members of Congress to lobby against the deal, the NSA was there to pick up the conversations. 
 
 Senior officials told the WSJ that those conversations collected by the NSA raised fears "that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress." The White House wanted the information anyway, however, because it "believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu's campaign." 
 
 So in order to avoid leaving a trail, the White House left it to the NSA to figure out what to share, and the NSA obliged, deleting names of members and any personal attacks on the administration. 
 
 National Security Council Spokesman Ned Price wouldn't comment on the intelligence activities written about in the Wall Street Journal's story, but he said in a statement, "[W]e do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike." 
 
 He added that the U.S. commitment to Israel's security is "sacrosanct" and "backed by concrete actions that demonstrate the depth of U.S. support for Israel." 
 
 The office of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said only that it was looking into the matter. 
 
 Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said the committee would also be looking into the report. 
 
 "The Committee has requested additional information from the [Intelligence Community] to determine which, if any, of these allegations are true, and whether the IC followed all applicable laws, rules, and procedures," Nunes said in a statement Wednesday. 
 
 Before a campaign event in Cisco, Texas, Sen. Ted Cruz said he wasn't surprised that the administration was trying to intercept Netanyahu's communications, or even that conversations including members of Congress may have been swept up by the NSA, "because this administration views Congress, Republicans and sometimes even Democratic members of Congress as their enemy....At times, it seems like they view the American people as their enemy." 
 
 The allegations "are total nonsense," a spokesman for the Embassy of Israel in Washington told the WSJ. 
 
 Before Netanyahu came to address Congress, the NSA had intercepted Israeli messages that said Netanyahu wanted the "the latest U.S. positions in the Iran talks," the Journal wrote, signaling to to the administration that Netanyahu intended to use his address to reveal sensitive details about the negotiations. Secretary of State John Kerry then said as much to reporters on the eve of the speech. 
 
 Kerry justified his accusation by pointing to Israeli media reports, but those reports were a convenient source, given that "Intelligence officials said the media reports allowed the U.S. to put Mr. Netanyahu on notice without revealing they already knew his thinking. The prime minister mentioned no secrets during his speech to Congress," wrote the Journal. 
 
 CBS News' Mark Knoller and Walt Cronkite contributed to this report. ||||| Agency says report in German press that president was briefed on monitoring of chancellor's phone is 'not true' 
 
 The US National Security Agency was forced on Sunday to deny that its director ever discussed a surveillance operation against the German chancellor with President Barack Obama, as the White House tried to contain a full-scale diplomatic crisis over espionage directed at allied countries. 
 
 The Obama administration appeared in disarray as it struggled with the fallout over the disclosure that the National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of at least 35 world leaders, and that the phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had been monitored. 
 
 Early on Sunday, the White House refused to comment on an overnight report in the German tabloid Bild, which alleged that Obama was personally briefed about by the operation to target Merkel's phone by the NSA's director, Keith Alexander, and allowed it to continue. 
 
 That appeared to conflict with a second report, in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. It said that when Obama spoke to Merkel over the phone on Wednesday, he assured the German leader he had not previously known her phone had been monitored. 
 
 Caitlin Hayden, the White House's national security council spokeswoman, declined to comment on the reports, telling the Guardian: "We are not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity." 
 
 However just over three hours later, that position appeared to have been reversed, when the NSA said in a statement that Alexander "did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel, nor has he ever discussed alleged operations involving Chancellor Merkel. News reports claiming otherwise are not true". 
 
 Bild cited "a secret intelligence employee who is familiar with the NSA operation against Merkel" in its story, which was widely-picked up by global media. 
 
 The intervention by the NSA was unusual – the agency rarely comments publicly on specific allegations about its surveillance activities. 
 
 However the White House and NSA are coming under intense pressure to reveal the extent to which Obama and senior administration officials knew about US surveillance operations targeting the leaders of allied countries. 
 
 The agency did not dispute another report in Germany, based on documents disclosed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) had listed Merkel's phone number since 2002. The report, in Der Spiegel, said the phone number was still on the list – marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" – weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June, raising the possibility that the German leader had been under surveillance for more than a decade. 
 
 In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government". 
 
 A delegation of German intelligence officials are due to arrive in the US to meet counterparts in the coming days. They are expected to demand clarity on the nature and scope of NSA activities in their country. 
 
 'A greater focus' 
 
 NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Getty Images 
 
 However in Washington, the first signs are emerging that Obama's administration may seek to distance itself from the NSA, concluding that the spy-agency has strayed beyond its remit and overreached. Many senior figures in Congress have already said the NSA failed to properly inform them of the nature and scope of its surveillance activities. 
 
 Lisa Monaco, a homeland security advisor to the White House, called on Friday for a "greater focus" to ensure the US was balancing "security needs with the privacy concerns all people share". Her op-ed piece in USA Today was widely interpreted as a signal of growing concern within the administration. 
 
 Monaco wrote: "We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can." 
 
 In August, announcing a review of US intelligence activities in the aftermath of the first disclosures based on documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Obama gave the impression that the NSA was solely focused on counter-terrorism measures. 
 
 "I don't have an interest and the people at the NSA don't have an interest in doing anything other than making sure that where we can prevent a terrorist attack, where we can get information ahead of time, that we're able to carry out that critical task," he said. "We do not have an interest in doing anything other than that." 
 
 The Spiegel report said the NSA's Berlin-based surveillance hub, adjacent to the Brandenburg gate, was one of several in Europe, citing a 2010 document that referred to branches existing in about 80 locations across the world, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Geneva and Frankfurt. The article said it was not clear whether the monitoring of Merkel's phone included actual telephone conversations or was restricted to call data, but raised the question over whether a surveillance operation, which began three years before she became chancellor, was initially intended to gather intelligence ahead of the Iraq War, which Germany opposed. 
 
 Merkel, then in opposition, was critical of Germany's anti-war stance. Bild reported that the then-chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, was also the target of surveillance, at the behest of the George Bush administration. 
 
 A new dimension 
 
 The Republican Mike Rogers is the chair of the House intelligence committee. Photograph: AP 
 
 Revelations about the NSA monitoring foreign leaders – particularly allies – have blown open a dimension of the NSA scandal which, until now, has proven relatively uncontroversial in the US: surveillance conducted abroad. 
 
 The US debate over NSA surveillance has focused almost exclusively on operations that may involve US citizens – such as a program to collect the phone records of millions of Americans. Until the recent revelations, there was virtually no concern raised over surveillance involving foreign citizens, even among vocal critics of the NSA on Capitol Hill. 
 
 Legislation to reform the NSA, which is being introduced in both houses of Congress this week, focuses almost entirely upon surveillance activities that might involve US citizens. Few in Washington are challenging the administration's claim that "all nations" engage in similar forms of espionage. 
 
 However diplomatic sources have told the Guardian that the White House's declarations that its practices do not differ from those employed by "all nations" are deeply misleading. 
 
 The sources said that while the US, Russia, China, Britain and France are well-known to engage in aggressive cyber espionage, including against allies, many other countries do not have anywhere near the same surveillance infrastructure – and concentrate their more limited resources on counter-terrorism and serious crime. 
 
 The revelations about NSA activity in Germany were discussed on the US Sunday morning political talkshows. Speaking on Face the Nation, on CBS, the Republican Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee was asked if he thought Obama had known about the surveillance of Merkel's phone. 
 
 He said: "Remember, the NSA works for the president. Through his national security advisers he knew or should have known." 
 
 Asked about the propriety of such surveillance, Issa answered: "If what you do in Germany helps the Germans, then fine. But you don't spy on a head of state." 
 
 Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House intelligence committee, was more bullish in defending surveillance practices, criticising press coverage of the latest NSA revelations and arguing that Europeans were unaware of the extent of surveillance conducted by their own governments and had been misled by incorrect media reports about the nature of NSA activities. 
 
 He told CNN recent reports in France about the NSA's monitoring of millions of phone calls in the country were "100% wrong". 
 
 "I would argue by the way, if the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks," he said. "It's a good thing – it keeps the French safe." 
 
 Going further, Rogers claimed that the emergence of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century could be partly explained by a conscious decision by the US not to monitor its allies. 
 
 "We said: 'We're not going to do any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate," he said. "Look what happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism. We didn't see any of it. And it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people." 
 
 Rogers added: "Remember: sometimes our friends have relationships with our adversaries." 
 
 • This article was amended on 28 October 2013. An earlier version misspelled the Brandenburg Gate as the Brandenberg Gate. ||||| FILE - NSA Deputy Director John C. Inglis testifies at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this Wednesday, July 17, 2013 file photo. "There are checks at multiple levels,"... (Associated Press) 
 
 The surveillance machine grew too big for anyone to understand. 
 
 The National Security Agency set it in motion in 2006 and the vast network of supercomputers, switches and wiretaps began gathering Americans' phone and Internet records by the millions, looking for signs of terrorism. 
 
 But every day, NSA analysts snooped on more American phone records than they were allowed to. Some officials searched databases of phone records without even realizing it. Others shared the results of their searches with people who weren't authorized to see them. 
 
 It took nearly three years before the government figured out that so much had gone wrong. It took even longer to figure out why. 
 
 Newly declassified documents released Tuesday tell a story of a surveillance apparatus so unwieldy and complex that nobody fully comprehended it, even as the government pointed it at the American people in the name of protecting them. 
 
 "There was no single person who had a complete technical understanding," government lawyers explained to a federal judge in 2009. 
 
 During a summer in which former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden released America's surveillance secrets to the world, the Obama administration has repeatedly tried to reassure people that the NSA's powers were kept in check by Congress and the courts. The mistakes discovered in 2009 have been fixed, the president said, a reflection of that oversight. 
 
 But the documents from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court show that, in developing the world's most sophisticated surveillance network, even senior lawyers and officials weren't sure how the system worked and didn't understand what they were told. 
 
 "It appears there was never a complete understanding among the key personnel . regarding what each individual meant by the terminology," lawyers wrote in March 2009 as the scope of the problems came into focus. 
 
 As a result, the judges on the surveillance court, who rely on the NSA to explain the surveillance program, approved a program that was far more intrusive than they believed. 
 
 "Given the executive branch's responsibility for and expertise in determining how best to protect our national security, and in light of the scale of this bulk collection program, the court must rely heavily on the government to monitor this program," Judge Reggie B. Walton wrote in a 2009 order that found the NSA had repeatedly misrepresented its programs. 
 
 In Congress, meanwhile, only some lawmakers fully understand the programs they have repeatedly authorized and are supposed to be overseeing. For instance, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., one of the sponsors of the USA Patriot Act, has said he never intended it to be used to collect and store the phone records of every American. 
 
 And when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked whether the government was doing that, he testified, "No." Yet Snowden's revelations, published in Britain's Guardian newspaper, show that is what happened. 
 
 There is no evidence in the new documents suggesting the NSA used its surveillance powers to spy on Americans for political purposes, a fear of many critics who recall the FBI's intrusive monitoring of civil rights leaders and anti-war protesters in the 1960s. Instead, the documents blame the years of government overreaching on technical mistakes, misunderstandings and lack of training. 
 
 From 2006 through early 2009, for instance, the NSA's computers reached into the database of phone records and compared them with thousands of others without "reasonable, articulable suspicion," the required legal standard. 
 
 By the time the problems were discovered, only about 10 percent of the 17,835 phone numbers on the government's watch list in early 2009 met the legal standard. 
 
 By then, Walton said he'd "lost confidence" in the NSA's ability to legally operate the program. He ordered a full review of the surveillance. 
 
 In its long report to the surveillance court in August 2009, the Obama administration blamed its mistakes on the complexity of the system and "a lack of shared understanding among the key stakeholders" about the scope of the surveillance. 
 
 "The documents released today are a testament to the government's strong commitment to detecting, correcting and reporting mistakes that occur in implementing technologically complex intelligence collection activities, and to continually improving its oversight and compliance processes," Clapper said in a statement Tuesday. 
 
 The surveillance court was satisfied by those improvements; it allowed the NSA to continue collecting phone records every day, a practice that continues today. 
 
 Now, the Obama administration is fending off lawsuits and a push in Congress to rein in the surveillance. 
 
 An unusual coalition of liberal Democrats and Republican civil libertarians has proposed several bills that would either scrap the phone surveillance entirely or require more oversight. 
 
 President Barack Obama has said he's open to more oversight but says the surveillance is essential to keep the country safe. 
 
 Obama and Clapper have said the changes made in 2009 resulted in tightened controls. American data is still collected but only seldom looked at, officials said. And it is kept on secure computer servers equipped with special software to protect it from analysts looking to illegally snoop. 
 
 "There are checks at multiple levels," NSA Deputy Director John Inglis told Congress in July. "There are checks in terms of what an individual might be doing at any moment in time." 
 
 The same checks that protect Americans' personal data were also supposed to protect the NSA's information. Yet Snowden, a 29-year-old contractor, managed to walk out with flash drives full of the nation's most highly classified documents. 
 
 The NSA is still trying to figure out, in such a complex system, exactly how Snowden defeated those checks. 
 
 "I think we can say that they failed," Inglis said. "But we don't yet know where." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Stephan Braun, Adam Goldman, Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan, Ted Bridis, Jim Drinkard and Paul Elias in San Francisco contributed to this report.
– In 2013, after Edward Snowden dropped his NSA bombshell, President Obama called for an end to spying on certain world leaders. But Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli bigwigs remained on the "keep an eye on" list for "compelling national security" reasons, current and ex-US officials tell the Wall Street Journal. Included in the US spying sweep were conversations between Israeli officials and US lawmakers and American-Jewish groups, which, as one senior US official tells the paper, resulted in an "Oh s--- moment" that the executive branch would be nailed for spying on Congress. The White House, though, felt the info necessary to rebut lobbying Netanyahu might do against a US-Iran deal; still, it was "wary of a paper trail stemming from a request." And so "we didn't say, 'Do it' [to the NSA]," a senior US official tells the Journal. "We didn't say, 'Don't do it.'" Instead, the administration more or less let the NSA share whatever info it saw fit, and the NSA did just that, reportedly following tight mandates about spying on communications "to, from, or about" Americans, the paper notes. For example, the agency took out names of individual lawmakers and any personal info in reports it submitted to the White House and also omitted any "trash talk" about the administration, officials tell the Journal. At least one presidential candidate isn't surprised by the revelations. "This administration views Congress, Republicans, and sometimes even Democratic members of Congress as their enemy," Ted Cruz tells CBS News. "At times, it seems like they view the American people as their enemy." A National Security Council spokesman, however, tells CBS, "[W]e do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary citizens and world leaders alike."