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Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Former minister Clare Short claims Britain has been bugging the United Nations. But doesn’t everyone? Jonathon Carr-Brown and Jack Grimston investigate
TONY BLAIR was facing a busy schedule last Thursday morning and didn’t hear the bombshell dropped by Clare Short on Radio 4’s Today programme. He had a cabinet meeting to chair, and after that a press conference to announce a new initiative in Africa. Spying was not on his mind.
True, David Hill, his communications director, mentioned Short, a renegade former minister, in his morning briefing but time was pressing and Blair moved swiftly on. The cabinet, at which Patricia Hewitt droned on about free trade, ran to mid-morning. Only then, when the “murder board” went to work on Blair, did Short’s latest outburst hit home.
The murder board, nicknamed after American lawyers who drill homicide suspects for trial, is the group of Blairs trusted advisers who prepare him for public grillings. They began to pepper him with awkward questions likely to arise at the looming press briefing.
Are you facing a pensioners revolt on council tax? one aide asked. Isnt this announcement on Africa just a rehash of an old conference speech? posed another. Then: What are you going to do about Clare Short?
This last test stumped Blair and his advisers. The seasoned spinners, including Jonathan Powell, Blairs chief of staff, Baroness Morgan, his political adviser, and Godric Smith, his press spokesman, exchanged awkward glances.
That morning Short had accused the government of spying on Kofi Annan, the head of the United Nations, during crucial negotiations ahead of the Iraq war. She had read transcripts of his conversations, she said, implying that Britain had bugged Annans office or tapped his phone calls. These things are done, she said. And in the case of Kofis office, it has been done for a long time.
It was deeply embarrassing, possibly illegal and a clear breach of ministerial confidentiality.
What should Blair do, wondered his advisers: arrest crazy Clare for breaking the Official Secrets Act? It would look absurd, especially since a high-profile trial based on the act had collapsed the previous day. Withdraw the Labour whip? Downing Street had no desire to make Short, an MP popular in her constituency, any more of a martyr than she already pretended to be.
Deny the story? Tricky, if only because spying was meant to be a secret business never discussed by ministers.
As Blair faced a barrage of questions about the affair at the press conference that morning, his anger and impotence were almost palpable. Short, he declared, was deeply and completely irresponsible. She was also entirely consistent, he said apparently in behaving disgracefully yet again. But he did not say she was wrong.
While there was confusion and plenty of misinformation over exactly what transcripts she had seen and where they had come from, there was no doubt among politicians, diplomats and former spooks that the UN was a hotbed of spies and eavesdropping.
One British former agent told The Sunday Times that MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, has five people in New York dedicated to the UN. It is their entire job, he said. They bug places and they have been doing it for years.
UN officials lined up to agree. Rolf Ekeus, a former chairman of the UN weapons inspectors, said he had routinely expected to be spied on and took precautions by sweeping offices for bugs and discussing sensitive matters only in parks or gardens.
If you take telephone calls there are dozens of governments monitoring, he said, adding wryly: You should be flattered that someone is interested in your conversations.
Hans Blix and Richard Butler, both also former weapons inspectors, said they thought their conversations had been bugged. Blix, while resigned to the reality of politics in the electronic age, said that bugging between supposed allies was disgusting.
Even Hans von Sponeck, a former assistant secretary-general of the UN, said that in Baghdad the UN had been bugged by everybody the Iraqis and the other intelligence services, both in the region and overseas. The same went for UN headquarters in New York, he said. But surely Annan, the head of the whole UN, was spared? The diplomats dont think so.
Everybody spies on everybody, said Inocencio Arias, Spains ambassador to the UN. And when theres a big crisis, big countries spy a lot. If your mission is not bugged, then youre really worth nothing.
Despite the realpolitik, Shorts allegations remained damaging. Sir Emyr Jones Parry, Britains UN representative, tried to smooth matters over personally with Annan that day. But the UN leader was affronted and his spokesman demanded an explanation.
Worse, the affair reopened Blairs festering wound from the Iraq war: had the invasion been legal in the first place?
MI6 operatives in New York cultivate numerous sources within the UN, from diplomats to secretaries and clerks. The information they feed back is sifted and analysed, and might find its way to ministers. But politicians are unlikely to see a raw transcript of a conversation. Instead they receive reports and analysis, though these may contain some direct quotes.
Short has yet to reveal exactly what she saw. If it really was information gathered by spying, there would have been clues to its origin. Reports from informants or human intelligence sources can usually be identified because they tend to be described as coming from a source who has reliably reported in the past . . . or some such similar phrase.
But a report that is described, for example, as from a totally reliable source with direct access is a different matter. This indicates it has come from an intercept of a telephone call or an e-mail or other form of electronic communication.
This is by far the greatest source of secret information and it comes through two closely linked organisations: the US National Security Agency and GCHQ, the British eavesdropping agency based in Cheltenham.
With 6,500 staff and a bigger budget than any other British intelligence outfit, GCHQ can track communications across the world.
These days it likes to give an impression of openness. It has a swanky new building known as the doughnut; its discreet recruitment drives boast of plentiful staff benefits; it even has a press officer.
Dont be fooled. Secrecy is still its lifeblood. Staff are bound by the Official Secrets Act and can say little or nothing about their tasks. They tend to work and socialise together, and often even their families do not know exactly what they do.
GCHQ is like a university campus, said one former member of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Some people there are linguists, some technologists, quite a lot come from a mathematics background. But its a bit incestuous. They tend to feel they are outsiders.
The secret world, however, is no longer mapped out in the black and white of the cold war, and for some more recent recruits loyalties are not so clear. So it proved early last year for Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old translator in Mandarin.
In January 2003 Frank Koza, an official in Americas National Security Agency, sent an e-mail to GCHQ calling for a surveillance surge against key members of the UN security council. Koza wanted the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge.
His message was marked Top Secret/COMINT/X1. According to one British security expert the X1 coding signifies that it was to be exempt from declassification in the future. It was meant to be secret and stay secret. Somehow Gun obtained a copy of the e-mail. Was she a recipient or did a more senior figure, also disaffected, pass it to her?
Either way, Gun passed the e-mail to an intermediary who passed it to a journalist. Days after it was published in newspapers, Gun was identified as the source of the leak. She cried on the shoulder of her manager and was then hauled off to a police station and later charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. Few, if any, intelligence observers have any sympathy for her.
What the hell did she think she was joining at GCHQ if she didnt think she would be listening to other peoples phone calls? asked the former JIC member. Professor Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, said: GCHQ officers have been appalled. The idea that this is in the national interest is just nonsense.
As her trial approached, Guns lawyers sought out Whitehall insiders. According to sources at the pressure group Liberty, which helped to defend her, the lawyers spoke to several civil servants who told them that the original advice of the attorney-general to Blair was that a pre-emptive war against Iraq would be illegal.
Certainly some experts thought an invasion would be illegal. Yesterday Elizabeth Wilmhurst, former deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Office, issued a brief statement explaining why she had quit her post, after 30 years in the civil service, on the eve of the war. I left my job because I did not agree that the use of force against Iraq was lawful, she said.
The lawyers were constructing a potential defence for Gun. If they could obtain the attorney-generals original advice, Gun could argue she had justifiably leaked information to prevent people being killed in an illegal war.
The defence planned to demand the disclosure of sensitive government documents. It was potentially explosive.
Those Whitehall sources who claim the original advice was that the war was illegal have not been identified. But Guns submission to the court, says Liberty, was going to be specific about where the information could be found.
Prosecution lawyers spin a different line. They say they dropped the case because of technical difficulties: Gun had not leaked the information directly to a newspaper. Whatever the truth, the case collapsed and in its wake Short, asked to comment on it, made her own revelations about spying on the UN.
Blair and other ministers swiftly turned on their former cabinet colleague. David Blunkett, home secretary, sniffed that he had higher security clearance than Short and he had no knowledge of any such intelligence.
One Downing Street source claimed Short was almost driven to be destructive after her confused emotions over the war. She had contemplated resignation on principle, but, seduced by power, had quit government only after the war was over.
George Foulkes, her deputy for many years at the Department of International Development, was scathing: There were always tensions between her and No 10. We were having a drink in the Strangers Bar about two years ago. She told me even then she was going to bring Tony Blair down.
Yesterday Short hit back and upped the stakes. She suggested that the attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, who is an old friend of Blairs, had been leant on to sanction the war as legal. She insisted that Blunkett was wrong, deliberately or otherwise: she had seen transcripts of Annans telephone conversations. Is it just another Short shambles, or could she be right?
THE technology is certainly there to bug almost anyone. At the shipyard of the Electric Boat Company in Groton, Connecticut, for example, they are putting the finishing touches to a radical submarine. The USS Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf class nuclear vessel, has had a 60ft section added in its centre. This new ocean interface is designed to allow the crew to transport and work with large items much bigger than can be released through a torpedo tube deep on the seabed.
It is, according to one surveillance expert, designed for spying: the sub will be used to put in place electronic labs that can tap into the increasing number of undersea fibreoptic cables carrying international communications.
Other countries are trying to keep pace. A Dutch listening base near Groningen is being expanded from two to 20 satellite dishes. Spain and Denmark are enlarging satellite spy bases; even Switzerland operates seven listening stations and Sweden is building one near Gothenburg.
At the heart of the US-British eavesdropping system known as Echelon is a system called the Dictionary: massive computers that can target communications using specific telephone numbers, words or even voice-prints.
Is this James Bond wizardry for real? James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, is one of the few who has spoken out. After allegations that eavesdropping had helped American firms to win, ahead of European companies, a $6 billion contract to sell aircraft to Saudi Arabia, Woolsey said: Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And its true we use computers to sort through data using keywords.
Voiceprinting technology is also thought to have tracked down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks, after he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera television.
And according to a new book by Philip Stephens, a political journalist, the British have spied on Jacques Chirac, the French president, who was opposed to the war in Iraq. Blair apparently received snippets of the French presidents private conversations. Labour MPs are expected to press Blair on it this week.
So technically it is possible Annan was spied on. But until Short is more specific about what transcripts she saw, it remains difficult to assess exactly what happened or its import. What she saw could just have been routine material from open sources.
The next instalment of the affair will come at lunchtime today, when Short appears on ITVs Jonathan Dimbleby programme. Shell either calm down or blow up, said a Downing Street insider. Theres just no way of knowing which way she might go.
Within the Labour party there is increasing incredulity at her actions. Even a close friend of Short, an anti-war MP, described her credibility as battered.
Unlike Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who has won the respect of the left and his cabinet colleagues for his measured opposition to the governments policy, Short is rapidly alienating the wider party and factions within her constituency.
The friend said: Even I dont think she should have made the revelation. It damages cabinet government and destroys trust between the security services and Labour.
The friend added: Clare is now going on about the way the legal case for war was presented to the cabinet on two sides of A4 without any debate. Didnt she read it carefully at the time? Didnt she complain at the time at the lack of scrutiny? Why did she stay in the cabinet and vote for the war if it wasnt to stop things like this? And if she couldnt do anything, why didnt she resign at the time?
Although the cabinet has been cautioned not to attack Short, former ministers such as Brian Wilson, now Blairs envoy for the reconstruction of Iraq, have not been so reticent. Wilson described Short yesterday as one of the biggest political frauds of her generation who had based her entire career on disloyalty and self-indulgence.
With such animosity erupting, those close to Short fear she may now try to bring her grievances against Blair to a head. If so, she had better plot quietly because all sorts of people may be listening.
Additional reporting:
Joe Lauria, Nick Fielding, Adam Nathan and Duncan Campbell
CLARES CLANGERS
They say 10,000, double, treble and then think of another number. It will be golden elephants next
chiding the islanders of volcano-stricken Montserrat for requesting more aid, August 1997
There were people who opposed action being taken against Hitler
rebuking opponents of the Kosovo war, April 1999. She earned the nickname Bomber Short
I think a politician that has done that much, told that many lies, isnt really fit to be a leader
on Bill Clinton, Tony Blairs closest ally, October 1998
He is in danger of destroying his legacy as he becomes increasingly obsessed with his place in history
on Blair, resignation speech in the Commons, May 2003
These things are done. And in the case of Kofis office, it has been done for some time . . . I have seen transcripts
accusing British intelligence of spying on the UN, February 2004
February 29, 2004 at 11:57 PM in UK | Permalink | TrackBack (99) | Top of page | Blog Home