Spies, Lies, and Little Bombshells
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t Correspondent in Europe
Wednesday 03 March 2004
Two strong women created havoc in Britain last week, exposing the sad disarray
of Washington's War on Terror and its misuse of electronic intelligence.
The two women also provoked yet another crisis for Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Clare Short, 58, is a maverick Labour MP and former government minister, while Katherine Gun, 29,
worked as a Mandarin translator for Britain's super-secret Government Communications Headquarters.
Whatever their mix of motives - a huge debate in Britain - the unlikely duo packed a punch no one had
predicted.
Ms. Gun's story begins last winter, when the United Nations was debating whether to give the
United States and Britain the go-ahead to invade Iraq. Along with several of her colleagues, Gun
received a secure email from GCHQ's American counterpart, the National Security Agency, asking for
help in stepping up electronic surveillance on several UN delegations.
The targets included Pakistan and five undecided Security Council members - Angola, Bulgaria,
Cameroon, Chile, and Guinea.
Washington wanted to know how the delegates planned to vote, their alliances and negotiating
positions, and "the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge" and help
them "to head off surprises."
Clearly, the Americans would use the information in their effort to buy votes with promises of aid
and trade - or with old-fashioned threats and bribes.
The two spy shops - NSA and GCHQ - regularly work together, using ground-based antenna farms
to pull down signals from satellite transmissions that carry the world's electronic communications.
High-speed computers sort through the emails, faxes, and telephone calls, looking for key words,
suspicious patterns, voiceprints, telephone numbers, and addresses.
The British and Americans also share the gleanings of more conventional bugs and wiretaps.
The electronic alliance - known, at least until recently, as Echelon - also includes Canada, New
Zealand, and Australia, creating what the French condemn as a "privileged Anglo-Saxon" club. Given
Canada and New Zealand's official opposition to American war plans, did their listening stations help
with the UN spying - and did their governments know?
Opposed to going to war without UN approval, and outraged by the idea of spying on UN diplomats
who were trying to preserve the peace, Gun gave a copy of the NSA email to a friend, who passed it to
one of London's Sunday papers, The Observer. Gun later admitted the leak, and prosecutors charged
her with what seemed an open-and-shut breach of Britain's Official Secrets Act.
Far from it. Last Wednesday, prosecutors dropped the case. They had no "realistic prospect" of
convicting the anti-war whistleblower, they explained. They had no way to disprove her defense - that
she felt duty bound to save lives that would be lost in an unlawful pre-emptive war.
Dropping the case helped the government politically. In the run-up to the war, senior Foreign Office
and Defense Ministry lawyers repeatedly advised the government that without an explicit Security
Council go-ahead, invading Iraq might well be illegal under international law. Military commanders were
reportedly unhappy about sending troops into battle without legal justification. And even Lord
Goldsmith, the Attorney General, who later gave the war his blessing, is said to have shared these
concerns.
Many Brits like the idea of international law, and the government did not relish having it discussed in
a highly publicized trial, especially after Ms. Gun's lawyers threatened to reveal more government
officials who had doubted the war's legality.
With Ms. Gun walking free, Mr. Blair's government is now looking at whether to strengthen the
Official Secrets Act, denying whistleblowers the right to argue that they were acting out of "necessity"
or in the public interest.
Enter Clare Short, who resigned from Mr. Blair's government last May to become his fiercest critic
over the war in Iraq. What did she think about the collapsed prosecution, asked BBC 4 radio. She told
them, and then dropped an even more embarrassing bombshell.
"The UK," she said, "was also spying on Kofi Annan's office."
Twice the interviewer pushed her. Was she saying that British spies had been "instructed to carry
out operations inside the United Nations on people like Kofi Annan?"
"Yes, absolutely," she declared.
"Did you know about this when you were in government?" he pressed.
"Absolutely," she said. "I read some of the transcripts of the accounts of his conversations."
Ms. Short might have gotten some of her facts wrong. The transcripts she says she saw would not
likely have told her who did the spying - Americans, Brits, or Australians - or whether the intercepts
came from satellite transmissions or a well-placed bug. This is one of the joys of Echelon. They divide
the snooping and share whatever information they get, allowing their governments to claim clean hands.
Someone else did the dirty.
Once Ms. Short loosened her lips, the story took flight.
Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, told the Guardian that he suspected the US and UK
were overhearing him in both Baghdad and New York, while the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
claimed it saw transcripts of his mobile phone conversations.
In a separate interview with Australian Broadcasting, his predecessor Richard Butler accused the
US, UK, Russians, and French of recording him. He also suggested why the allies might want to
overhear the UN Secretary General.
"What if Kofi Annan had been bringing people together last February in a genuine attempt to prevent
the invasion of Iraq, and the people bugging him did not want that to happen, what do you think they
would do with that information?" he asked.
Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's UN Ambassador at the time, knew the answer. He and several
fellow diplomats were trying to launch a last-minute peace initiative, when the allies overheard them and
put an end to their efforts. Peace was the kind of surprise Washington wanted to "head off."
Right or wrong in what they did, Clare Short and Katherine Gun let the whole world see what only a
few of us suspected: that this is how George Bush and Tony Blair wage their War on Terror. At best,
the President and Prime Minister squander scarce spies, analysts, and time that, all of which they
need to break up terrorist networks. At worst, they play Big Brother on a global scale.
But no one should be surprised by all the spying. Most nations that can spy, do spy, as they have
as far back as anyone knows What's new is how much the rest of us know about what the spies are
doing, and how quickly we've come to know it.
The reasons are complex, but one stands out - disgust at how our political leaders and their
spymasters lied to us about Iraq, its "Weapons of Mass Destruction," and its "ties to Osama bin
Laden."
Until those in power speak more truth, they will get more whistleblowers, leaks, and little
bombshells. Call it collateral damage. |
