"Britain and US Shared Transcripts After Bugging Blix's Mobile Phone"

Kim Sengupta and Kathy Marks

The controversy over alleged British and American "dirty tricks" at the
United Nations deepened yesterday with claims that two chiefs of Iraq arms
inspection missions had been victims of spying. Hans Blix and Richard Butler were said to have been subjected to routine
bugging while they led teams searching for Saddam Hussein's supposed
weapons of mass destruction.In an interview published today, Dr Blix said he suspected his UN office
and New York home had been bugged by the United States in the run-up to
war. He said bugging was to be expected between enemies, but "here it is
between people who co-operate and it is an unpleasant feeling".

The new charges came within 24 hours of the former cabinet minister Clare
Short stating British intelligence had taped the telephone calls of the UN
secretary general, Kofi Annan.

As demands grew at home and abroad for Tony Blair to confirm or deny Ms
Short's allegations, the British ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones-Parry,
telephoned Mr Annan on Thursday evening. The UN said Mr Jones-Parry's call
has not shed any fresh light on the matter. Edward Mortimer, Mr Annan's
director of communications, said: "There was a telephone call which was
apologetic in tone but did not really amount to an admission of substance.
Basically, the answer we got was the same as the Prime Minister gave at
his press conference [on Thursday]. We are not complete innocents, we do
realize these things happen but it was rather a shock to hear that the
British government had been spying on the secretary general."

Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Mr Blair should
make a statement to MPs on the affair.He will table a Commons motion next
week demanding to know if there was an "eavesdropping operation", and if
so, how extensive it was. Mr Kennedy said: "We need to know whether
British intelligence took part in spying on the United Nations secretary
general. This is a serious allegation, made by a member of Mr Blair's
Cabinet, which cannot go unanswered. The United Kingdom was one of the
founding members of the UN ... the suggestion that our security services
were involved in some kind of illegal operation damages our national
standing."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mr Annan's predecessor as secretary general, said:
"This is a violation of the United Nations charter. It complicates the
work of the secretary general, of the diplomats, because they need a
minimum of secrecy to reach a solution." Mr Butler, who led the UN
disarmament team in Iraq in the 1990s, UNSCOM, said he was "well aware"
that he was being bugged. But he said spying on the UN was illegal and
harmed the peace-making process. "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 said.

The alleged bugging of Dr Blix, in charge of the last UN mission before
the war, seen as the last chance to avoid war, is being viewed in
diplomatic circles as part of a concerted effort to sabotage attempts at a
peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis. Dr Blix, who retired in June, is
highly critical of George Bush and Tony Blair for the claims they made
about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Washington and London,
he said, had aborted the search for weapons to pave the way for an
invasion.

In an interview that appears in The Guardian today, he said he had
expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but the possibility that he was spied
on by someone "on the same side" was "disgusting". Dr Blix said his
suspicions were aroused by repeated trouble with his telephone at his New
York home. His fears worsened when a member of the US administration
showed him photographs that could only have come from the UN weapons
office. He met John Wolf, the US assistant secretary of state for
non-proliferation, two weeks before war started and was shown two pictures
of Iraqi weapons. "He should not have had them. I asked him how he got
them and he would not tell me and I said I resented that," he said.

Dr Blix said it was unlikely one of his staff had handed over the pictures
and thought it might be that spies broke into a secure fax. In his reports
to the UN, Dr Blix, and his fellow inspection team leader, Dr Mohamed
ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had asked
for more time to investigate Iraq's arsenal, a plea rejected by Washington
and London.

The claims of espionage against Dr Blix emerged in the Australian media,
sourced to a member of the country's intelligence service. Yesterday a
senior UN source confirmed to The Independent that the Iraq mission,
UNMOVIC, were convinced they were victims of spying operations. Reports
say Dr Blix's mobile telephone was monitored every time he went to Iraq,
and the transcripts shared between the US, Britain and their allies,
Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Yesterday, a UN official said: "While in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad [the
UNMOVIC headquarters at the time], we never used to talk about anything
sensitive in our rooms because we thought the Iraqis might be bugging us.
We used to go outside to the garden.

"It is one of the ironies of life that back in New York we would sometimes
take similar measures, discuss things we thought should be confidential,
out of the office, in public places, sometimes the sidewalk.

"The only saving grace is that neither Dr Blix or anyone else among us
would speak about sensitive matters on mobile telephones, so they would
not have heard anything earth-shattering just by that. But I suspect there
were other, more widespread interceptions. There were plenty of attempts
to undermine us."

Dr Blix's predecessor, Mr Butler, now the governor of Tasmania, said he
was shown transcripts of bugged conversations. "Those who did it would
come to me and show me the recordings that they made on others. 'To try to
help me to do my job in disarming Iraq', they would say. 'We're just here
to help you'," Mr Butler said. But the former UN chief inspector
maintained that it was not only Britain which was spying. He said: "I was
utterly confident that in my attempts to have private conversations,
trying to solve the problem of disarmament of Iraq, I was being listened
to by the Americans, British, the French and the Russians. They also had
people on my staff reporting what I was trying to do privately. Do you
think that was paranoia? Absolutely not. There was abundant evidence that
we were being constantly monitored."

Mr Butler said that he too had to hold sensitive conversations in the
noisy cafeteria in the basement of the UN building in New York or in
Central Park.

"We were brought to a situation where it was plain silly to think we could
have any serious conversation in our office. No one was being paranoid,
everyone had a black sense of humor about it.

"I would take a walk with the person in the park and speak in a low voice
and keep moving so we could avoid directional microphones and maybe just
have a private conversation."

Mr Boutros-Ghali also described the vulnerability of the organization to
espionage. "From the first day I entered my office they said, 'Beware,
your office is bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a tradition
that the member states who have the technical capacity to bug will do it
without any hesitation.' That would involve members of the Security
Council," he said. "The perception is that you must know in advance that
your office, your residence, your car, your phone is bugged."