British intelligence agents spied on United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraq war, a former member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet said on Thursday.
Blair refused to say whether the allegation was true, but said the former minister had been ”deeply irresponsible”.
Clare Short, who resigned as international development secretary following the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, said she had read transcripts of Annan’s conversations while she was a member of the government.
”The United Kingdom in this time was also getting, spying on Kofi Annan’s office and getting reports from him about what was going on,” she said in an interview with BBC radio.
The charge dominated Blair’s monthly news conference.
”I’m not going to comment on the operations of our security services,” Blair said.
”But I do say this: we act in accordance with domestic and international law, and we act in the best interests of this country, and our security services are a vital part of the protection of this country.
”So I’m not going to comment on their operations, not directly, not indirectly. That should not be taken, as I say, as an indication about the truth of any particular allegations. And I think the fact that those allegations were made, I think, is deeply irresponsible,” Blair said.
In her interview, Short spoke of seeing evidence of eavesdropping.
”These things are done. And in the case of Kofi’s office, it’s been done for some time,” she said.
Asked whether Britain was involved, she said: ”Well I know, I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan’s conversations. In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run up to war, thinking ‘Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying’.”
Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the UN on people such as Annan, she said: ”Yes, absolutely.”
Short’s comments came as she was interviewed about the decision made on Wednesday to drop legal proceedings against a former intelligence employee who leaked a confidential memo raising concerns about spying in the UN.
Katharine Gun (29), a former Mandarin translator with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters listening station, leaked a memo from United States intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the UN Security Council before the Iraq war.
The memo asked the British listening agency for help bugging delegates’ home and office telephones and e-mails. At the time, the US was seeking to win Security Council backing for war in Iraq.
The Observer newspaper quoted the memo, dated January 31 2003, as asking British and American intelligence staff to step up surveillance operations ”particularly directed at … UN Security Council members (minus US and GBR, of course)”.
The case against Gun was dropped after prosecutors said they would offer no evidence against her. But opposition politicians have questioned whether the decision was politically motivated.
Reacting both to the Gun case and Short’s allegations, Blair told reporters: ”We are going to be in a very dangerous situation as a country if people feel they can simply spill out secrets or details of security operations — whether false or true actually — and get away with it.”
Gun’s lawyers have said they had demanded the government disclose the advice given by Attorney General Lord Goldsmith on the legality of going to war. Blair has said Goldsmith believed the conflict was legal but the government has refused to publish the text. Short and several opposition politicians believe the government intervened to stop the case.
”My own suspicion is that the attorney general has stopped this prosecution because part of her [Gun’s] defence was to question the legality [of the war] and that would have brought his advice into the public domain again and there was something fishy about the way in which he said war was legal,” Short told the BBC.
Goldsmith, speaking in the House of Lords, said the prosecution was not dropped to spare the government any embarrassment. He said he had given permission for the case to proceed, but prosecutors later decided there was no realistic chance of a conviction.
Michael Ancram, foreign affairs spokesperson for the main opposition Conservative Party, said he had asked the government to explain why the case was dropped.
”If it was a question of covering up bad political decisions that were taken in the past … then that does raise very serious questions,” Ancram told BBC radio.
Short was one of two Cabinet members to resign in protest to Britain’s participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, resigned as leader of the House of Commons before the campaign began.
In the past, Short has called for Blair to resign, accusing him of misleading the country about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. — Sapa-AP