It should be no surprise that the Bush administration, which despises the UN and flaunts most international law, would spy on UN members in clear violation of international law. It should be no surprise, while Republican staffers are spying on Democrats in Congress, that the US would spy in the UN. One might say the spies are out of control, but, in fact, they are too much in control of the White House. mjh
The Observer | Special reports | US plan to bug Security Council: the text
[From the full text of the NSA (National Security Agency) memo:]
As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq …. [a] surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters. …
[P]ay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes….
The Observer | Special reports | British spy op wrecked peace move Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Jo Tuckman, The Observer
Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.
The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.
Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. ‘When they [the US] found out, they said, “You should know that we don’t like the idea and we don’t like you to promote it.”‘
The revelations follow claims by Chile’s former ambassador to the UN, Juan Valdes, that he found hard evidence of bugging at his mission in New York last March.
The Observer | Politics | Spying games on the road to war Peter Beaumont and Martin Bright in London and Jo Tuckman, The Observer
The extraordinary story of the diplomacy of those two weeks – which saw the abandonment of any attempt to secure that elusive second resolution, as The Observer can now reveal – was also the story of an intelligence operation that, at every step, attempted to undermine the independent deliberations of the Security Council as it stood on the brink of war.
It would be the spies, not the diplomats, who would carry the day.
For even as Middle Six diplomats sat down in private to draw up a resolution that bridged the gap between France, Germany and Russia on the anti-war side, and the US and UK – a compromise that would set a final deadline to Saddam and delay the outbreak of war – someone was listening in and anticipating their every step. …
On Friday [Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico’s representative to the UN,] gave his fullest version of what he believed was happening in the UN in that fortnight, and in a crucial meeting that history may decide made war against Iraq inevitable. …
What he is absolutely certain of is that the US was bugging the meeting.
‘It was very obvious to the countries involved in the discussion on Iraq that we were being observed and that our communications were probably being tapped. The information was being gathered to benefit the United States.’ …
On Tuesday, … Chile charged publicly for the first time that its UN mission telephones were tapped as the Security Council considered a resolution authorising war against Saddam Hussein. …
What the new revelations suggest is that despite the US agreeing to more time to find a resolution, it secretly used intelligence from spying on those negotiations to kill the last hope of a UN resolution.