Martin Bright, Ed
Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont
Sunday March 9, 2003
The Observer
The United Nations has begun a top-level investigation into the
bugging of its delegations by the United States, first revealed in
The Observer last week.
Sources in the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed
last night that the spying operation had already been discussed at the
UN's counter-terrorism committee and will be further investigated.
The news comes as British police confirmed the arrest of a
28-year-old woman working at the top secret Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets
Act.
Last week The Observer published details of a memo sent by Frank Koza,
Defence Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) at the US National Security
Agency, which monitors international communications. The memo ordered an
intelligence 'surge' directed against Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria
and Guinea with 'extra focus on Pakistan UN matters'. The 'dirty tricks'
operation was designed to win votes in favour of intervention in Iraq.
The Observer reported that the memo was sent to a friendly foreign
intelligence agency asking for help in the operation. It has been known
for some time that elements within the British security services were
unhappy with the Government's use of intelligence information.
The leak was described as 'more timely and potentially more important
than the Pentagon Papers' by Daniel Ellsberg, the most celebrated
whistleblower in recent American history.
In 1971, Ellsberg was responsible for leaking a secret history of US
involvement in Vietnam, which became known as 'the Pentagon Papers',
while working as a Defence Department analyst. The papers fed the
American public's hostility to the war.
The revelations of the spying operation have caused deep
embarrassment to the Bush administration at a key point in the sensitive
diplomatic negotiations to gain support for a second UN resolution
authorising intervention in Iraq.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld were both challenged about the operation last week, but said
they could not comment on security matters.
The operation is thought to have been authorised by US National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, but American intelligence experts
told The Observer that a decision of this kind would also have involved
Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael
Hayden.
President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily
intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House.
Attention has now turned to the foreign intelligence agency
responsible for the leak. It is now believed the memo was sent out via
Echelon, an international surveillance network set up by the NSA with
the cooperation of GCHQ in Britain and similar organisations in
Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Wayne Madsen, of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre and
himself a former NSA intelligence officer, said the leak demonstrated
that there was deep unhappiness in the intelligence world over attempts
to link Iraq to the terrorist network al-Qaeda.
'My feeling is that this was an authorised leak. I've been hearing
for months of people in the US and British intelligence community who
are deeply concerned about their governments "cooking"
intelligence to link Iraq to al-Qaeda.'
The Observer story caused a political furore in Chile, where
President Ricardo Lagos demanded an immediate explanation of the spying
operation. The Chilean public is extremely sensitive to reports of US
'dirty tricks' after decades of American secret service involvement in
the country's internal affairs. In 1973 the CIA supported a coup that
toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador
Allende and installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
President Lagos spoke on the telephone with Prime Minister Tony Blair
about the memo last Sunday, immediately after the publication of the
story, and twice again on Wednesday. Chile's Foreign Minister Soledad
Alvear also raised the matter with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Chile's ambassador to Britain Mariano Fernández told The Observer:
'We cannot understand why the United States was spying on Chile. We were
very surprised. Relations have been good with America since the time of
George Bush Snr.' He said that the position of the Chilean mission to
the UN was published in regular diplomatic bulletins, which were public
documents openly available.
While the bugging of foreign diplomats at the UN is permissible under
the US Foreign Intelligence Services Act, it is a breach of the Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations, according to one of America's
leading experts on international law, Professor John Quigley of Ohio
University.
He says the convention stipulates that: 'The receiving state shall
permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all
official purposes... The official correspondence of the mission shall be
inviolable.'
