NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called for an investigation into a Danish-US spying scandal on Wednesday, after a report that Danish authorities helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap senior European politicians and fellow members of NATO.
"The nations involved in the case are NATO allies and must put all the facts on the table and find out what actually happened," Jens Stoltenberg told Danish public radio broadcaster DR.
He said the case cast Denmark in an unfortunate light, but that trust within NATO remained intact.
Investigative journalists from Danish broadcaster DR, together with German media outlets like NDR, WDR and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, on Sunday revealed that the NSA had allegedly wiretapped leading politicians' phones with the help of software created by the Danish military intelligence service FE.
The research was based on anonymous sources and an internal analysis of the FE, from 2012 and 2014.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also demanded a full explanation from the government in Copenhagen.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said there had not been systematic surveillance of allies. She said she did not believe Denmark's relations with Germany and France, for example, had been harmed.
Washington was also conciliatory. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that much had been addressed since the incident in 2014, in comments on Wednesday.
"The United States issued a full review of our approach to overseas surveillance; president Obama at that time issued a presidential directive that changed our approach in significant ways."
"We will continue to work with our European allies and partners to address any questions through the appropriate national security channels," she said.
