Ewen MacAskill, Richard Norton-Taylor and Julian Borger in WashingtonThursday February 26, 2004 Katharine Gun, the former British intelligence officer, walked free from the Old Bailey yesterday and rekindled the debate over the war in Iraq. Her arrest for disclosing an unethical - and potentially illegal - US-British bugging operation against friendly countries raises new questions about the events running up to the Iraq war, the behaviour of the intelligence services, and the validity of the legal advice given by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to the government.
Ms Gun's appearance in the Old Bailey had its origin in New York more than a year ago. In the final fortnight before war in Iraq, six members of the UN security council - Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Pakistan, Mexico and Chile - found themselves caught up in a swirl of US-British diplomacy.
The British government desperately wanted them to swing behind a resolution on Iraq. But the six were proving difficult to persuade, and the US and British governments urgently wanted any snippets about their likely voting intentions.
The US government opted for underhand methods and asked the British government - and its intelligence services, including its listening agency, GCHQ - to help out. Frank Koza, of the US national security agency, sent out a memo and included in the recipients was GCHQ. The memo, marked top secret, asked for information about the voting intentions of security council members, jokingly adding "minus US and GBR of course". He asked for "the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises".
He asked agents to focus on what had been dubbed at the UN the U6: the undecided six security council members.
The memo seems to have been distributed widely within GCHQ. But it is not known whether the agency itself acted on the NSA request. Had it done so, its role would have been to eavesdrop on foreign embassies in London.
It is commonplace, though never admitted, for the US and British governments to listen in on friendly states. There is an ongoing row between Britain and Pakistan, one of the six swing states, over an MI5 officer, codenamed Notation, who posed as a builder in the refurbishment of the Pakistan high commission building in 2001 in London in order to bug it.
Intelligence analysts said yesterday that it was not surprising that the offices and even homes of the UN swing states were bugged - indeed, some of them have said they assumed that was the case. It only becomes a scandal when the eavesdroppers are found out.
The 1994 Intelligence Services Act allows GCHQ to eavesdrop "in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the defence and foreign policies of Her Majesty's government in the United Kingdom". The wording can be interpreted extremely broadly.
During the fevered diplomacy in New York, the role of the six countries was pivotal. The US public assessment was that they could be brought round. The Foreign Office was privately more pessimistic, especially in regards to Mexico and Chile.
James Welch, a solicitor for Liberty, the civil rights group, and Ms Gun's lawyer, said yesterday: "Clearly what was being sought was an edge at a time when they were trying to secure a second UN resolution to the war in Iraq. What the US was asking Britain to do was clearly unlawful in international law. It was a clear breach of the Vienna convention and it is also very arguably unlawful in domestic law."
This diplomatic manoeuvring was taking place while another related row was brewing behind closed doors in Britain over whether existing UN resolutions provided a legal basis for going to war.
Clare Short, who was in the cabinet at the time, yesterday praised Ms Gun for her bravery. Ms Short, then the international development secretary, said there had been "something smelly, fishy" about the legal advice from the attorney general. She said she suspected the case against Ms Gun had been dropped "because they do not want the light shone on the attorney general's advice".
At the time, Ms Short said, cabinet members had been given only two A4 pages of advice, and no discussion was allowed in cabinet. Those pages have been made public but, she said, lots of crucial information related to the advice remained confidential.
She wanted to know, for instance, what Lord Goldsmith's brief had been: had he, for instance, been misinformed by No 10 about the threat posed by Iraq?
While Ms Gun is fast becoming a cause celebre in Britain, the case has not yet resonated in the US, where the trial has attracted scant attention.
It has been a bigger issue in Latin America. Mexico sent diplomatic notes to the US and British government this month seeking information about Ms Gun's allegations. A Chilean government spokesman, Patricio Santamaria, confirmed that in early 2003 wiretaps had been found in most of the phones at Chile's UN mission.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1156363,00.html
