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Blix suspected U.S. spied on him
As a row over allegations Britain spied on the United Nations flares up, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix says he suspected his home and office were bugged by the United States.
"It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side," Blix told Britain's Guardian newspaper in an interview. Blix's allegation comes after a diplomatic row broke out when former British minister Clare Short said the UK bugged the office of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as the U.S. and Britain tried, but failed, to get U.N. support for the war on Iraq. Short, who was in government before and during the Iraq war, said Thursday she saw transcripts of what she said were bugged accounts of Annan's conversations On Friday, another former U.N. chief weapons inspector Richard Butler said his phone calls were regularly bugged while he was in charge of investigating Iraq's weapons programs in the late 1990s. He added that he was forced to meet his contacts in New York's Central Park because the telephones in his office at U.N. headquarters were insecure. In the newspaper interview, Blix said his concerns were raised when he had trouble with a telephone connection at home. "It might have been something trivial or it might have been something installed somewhere, I don't know," he said, adding that he asked a U.N. counter-surveillance team to check his office and home for listening devices. "If you had something sensitive to talk about you would go out into the restaurant or out into the streets," he told the paper. On one occasion, Blix said, U.S. State Department envoy John Wolf visited him two weeks before the Iraq war with pictures of an Iraqi drone and a cluster bomb. Blix believed the images could have been secured only from within the U.N. weapons office. "He should not have had them. I asked him how he got them and he would not tell me," Blix said. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that sources said British or U.S. intelligence services monitored Blix's mobile phone whenever he was in Iraq. Allegations
Butler: "Silly to think we could have serious conversations in our office." Boutros Boutros-Ghali, U.N. Secretary-General between 1992 and 1996, also said he believed he had been spied on. "From the first day I entered my office they told me: beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged," Boutros-Ghali told the BBC. "It is a tradition that member states that have the technical capacity to bug will do it without hesitation," he said. The United Nations said Thursday that alleged British spying on Annan's office, if true, was illegal and must stop immediately. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has called Short's claims "deeply irresponsible" and said they threatened the security of the country. Blair, speaking to reporters in London, refused to respond directly to Short's charge. Short, who resigned as international development secretary following the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, made her comments in a radio interview. Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Kofi Annan, she said: "Yes, absolutely." Short was one of two Cabinet members to resign in protest against Britain's participation in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, resigned as leader of the House of Commons before the campaign began. Short's comments came a day after charges were dropped against a British government translator accused of leaking a memo on an alleged U.S. "dirty tricks" campaign ahead of the Iraq war. Katharine Gun, 29, allegedly leaked a memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the U.N. Security Council before the Iraq war. |
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