Germany has been spying and eavesdropping on its closest partners in the EU and passing the information to the US for more than a decade, a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin has found, triggering allegations of lying and coverups reaching to the very top of Angela Merkel's administration. Under a 2002 pact between German intelligence (BND) and the NSA, Berlin used its largest electronic eavesdropping facility in Bavaria to monitor email and telephone traffic at the lyse Palace, the offices of the French president, and of key EU institutions in Brussels including the European commission. The BND's biggest listening post at Bad Aibling in Bavaria was abused for years for NSA spying on European states. The core is the political spying on our European neighbours and EU institutions," an unnamed source said to be familiar with the evidence told the Sddeutsche. As well as the political intelligence activities, the NSA also got the BND to spy on European aerospace and defence firms. German and American individuals and companies were not monitored. The Bad Aibling complex of listening posts was an NSA facility for years. Under an agreement in 2002, it was handed over to the Germans in 2004. Since then, much of the information gleaned was routinely passed to the Americans. According to the Sddeutsche, the Americans supplied search terms on a weekly basis to the Germans - totalling 690,000 phone numbers and 7.8m IP addresses up until 2013.