More dirty tricks come tumbling out

The Blair Government is being rocked yet again, this time over 
allegations that British intelligence agents spied on UN 
Secretary General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Blair refused to say whether the allegation was true but attacked 
Clair Short, a former cabinet minister who made the allegations 
in an interview with BBC radio, as "deeply irresponsible".

A UN spokesman said any such espionage would be illegal. This is 
not the first allegation of spying on the UN. Mexico's former 
ambassador to the UN said it was common knowledge that the US 
spied on UN delegations in the lead-up to war. Chile also alleged 
its UN mission telephones were tapped as the Security Council 
considered a resolution backed by Washington, Britain and Spain 
authorising the war. 

In a restrained comment, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: 
"We would be disappointed if this were true".

Clair Short said she had read transcripts of Annan's 
conversations while she was a cabinet member. "The UK was spying 
on Kofi Annan's office and getting reports from him about what 
was going on. These things are done. And in the case of Kofi's 
office, it's been done for some time", she said. Asked explicitly 
whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations 
within the United Nations on people such as Annan, she said: 
"Yes, absolutely".

As these allegations are surfacing, the prosecution of Katharine 
Gun, a former translator with the British Government's 
Communications Headquarters listening station, has been dropped. 
She is alleged to have leaked a memo from US intelligence 
officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of 
the UN Security Council. The fact that Katharine Gun was a 
translator of Mandarin suggests that the British Government was 
also spying on China.

Was the case against Katharine Gun dropped because the 
continuation of this prosecution would have led to even more 
damaging disclosures?