DHAKA: The head of US intelligence has told lawmakers that discerning foreign leaders` intentions is a key goal of the nation`s spying operations.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said such efforts were a "top tenet" of US intelligence policy.

But he told the intelligence panel of the House of Representatives the US did not "indiscriminately" spy on nations.

Mr Clapper was reacting to a growing international row over reports the US eavesdropped on foreign allies.

"Leadership intentions is kind of a basic tenet of what we collect and analyse," Mr Clapper said, adding that foreign allies spy on US officials and intelligence agencies as a matter of routine.

He said that what he called the torrent of disclosures about American surveillance had been extremely damaging and that he anticipated more.

But he said there was no other country that had the magnitude of oversight that the US had, and that any mistakes that had been made were human or technical.

The BBC`s Jonny Dymond in Washington says if anyone was expecting apologies or embarrassment from the leaders of America`s intelligence community they were in for a disappointment.

Also testifying before the House intelligence committee was National Security Agency (NSA) director Gen Keith Alexander, who called media reports in France, Spain and Italy that the NSA gathered data on millions of telephone calls "completely false".

The information "that led people to believe that the NSA or United States collected that information is false, and it`s false that it was collected on European citizens," he added. "It was neither."

Gen Alexander said much of the data cited by non-US news outlets was actually collected by European intelligence services and later shared with the NSA.

Gen Alexander added: "It is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a programme that would result in this nation being attacked."

Source: BBC
BDST: 0854 HRS, OCT 30, 2013
AKA/BSK