LONDON, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Claims by a former British cabinet minister that British intelligence bugged United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has plunged Prime Minister Tony Blair into a new post-Iraq war crisis -- adding to concerns that Britain's Official Secrets Act is in disarray.
The "dirty tricks" claim, 24 hours after the government suddenly dropped a serious charge against an intelligence staffer for leaking a U.S. request for increased spying of six U.N. delegates, came Thursday from Clare Short, who resigned as International Development Secretary last March in protest at the war. Short told BBC radio that she was "absolutely" sure that British spies had bugged private conversations in Annan's New York office because she had seen the transcripts.
The claim, which Blair called "totally irresponsible," was not substantiated by Short. But U.N. officials and other experts say that if true it represents a serious breach of several international conventions, if not laws. Blair, a lawyer by training, refuses to confirm or deny the claim, insisting that British intelligence has broken no laws.
Blair has already called for a review of the Official Secrets Act following Wednesday's freeing of Katherine Gun, a Mandarin-language translator at GCHQ intelligence center in western England. She has leaked an email to the Observer newspaper last March that requested British help in a U.S. operation to find out the voting intentions of U.N. Security Council members who were seen as "waiverers" on supporting a second U.N. resolution authorizing war on Iraq.
The memo, marked as "top secret" from a man identified as Frank Koza of the U.S. National Security Agency, asks for "the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals, or head off surprises."
GCHQ, with some 4,300 employees, has a unique intelligence-sharing relationship with America's National Security Agency and CIA, principally through radio and telephone intercepts of Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. While experts consider it unlikely that GCHQ would focus on the Western hemisphere it has the ability to pick up diplomatic and intelligence signals to embassies in London and elsewhere.
There are no reports that British intelligence responded favorably to Koza's email request, but Gun said she was so shocked at the "illegality" of the request that she decided to put it into the "public domain." She said she acted because she believed the pending war was illegal.
Arrested last fall, she was preparing to make a defense of breaching the Official Secrets Act on the grounds of "necessity" because, legal sources say, there is no defense of "public interest" under the act. English law permits bugging by intelligence and police services. Gun built up considerable American support, including from Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers in 1971; actor Sean Penn; civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson and, in their personal capacities, Linda Foley, president of the American Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston of the American Civil Liberties Union.
But on Wednesday the case against her in London's High Court was dropped without detailed explanation by the Crown Prosecution Service on the advice of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on the grounds that there was no "realistic prospect" of convicting her. With the defense planning to focus heavily on the legality of the war, media reports suggested that Goldsmith's position was weak, and that the Foreign Office was divided on his advice that war against Iraq was legal under the U.N.'s original 1990 resolution involving the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
There was speculation that, given the history of prosecutions under the Official Secrets Act, the government would have to expose too much of its intelligence operations to public scrutiny, and a jury would be unlikely to convict. Gun. Michael Howard, the opposition Conservative leader, said the Official Secrets Act is now a "complete shambles" and called on Blair to "get a grip."
Clare Short appears equally liable to prosecution under the act, since she also revealed information about spying operations. This time, however, there is no specific document or leak for the government to deal with. But Fred Eckhart, Kofi Annan's U.N. spokesman, is certain that if it is true what she said -- then it was illegal, it undermined the confidentiality of Annan's role at the United Nations and must be stopped.
Shashi Tharoor, a close adviser to Annan, told BBC radio Thursday evening that U.N. headquarters were "premises inviolable" under three U.N. conventions: the Vienna Convention involving all global diplomatic activity, the headquarters agreement with the United States, and the U.N.'s own convention involving its members. He said the U.N.'s offices are regularly swept for listening devices, but if Short's claims were true that Annan's office was bugged anyway, the U.N. would have to upgrade its technical defenses.
Why Short should so dramatically undermine the government she served for six years is uncertain. She was always considered a maverick, but a principled Socialist from the left of the Labor Party whose inclusion in Blair's cabinet was regarded as good party politics. Blair tolerated her as International Development Secretary but made his feelings about her clear Thursday when he said her bugging claim was "entirely consistent."
A former Cabinet colleague, Scottish Secretary Helen Liddle, said, "her pattern of behavior has confounded her colleagues and friends."
Perhaps significantly, Short was seen by millions of TV viewers Wednesday night in an hour-long documentary showing her attempt to teach 12-year-old children at an inner-city London school. The acclaimed program showed her idealistic attempt to treat the children as adults over the course of a week -- failing as she came to realize discipline had to come before she could begin to teach.
