It felt like a cold war flashback: Britain was riveted by not one but two spy flaps last week, while Russian agents were arrested in Qatar and charged with involvement in an alleged political assassination. First, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government caught flack when prosecutors dropped charges against a former intelligence analyst who had exposed U.S. and British plans to spy on U.N. Security Council members opposed to the Iraq war. Then former Cabinet Minister Clare Short, who resigned in protest after the fall of Baghdad and has been a thorn in Blair's side ever since, declared on a bbc radio program that British spies had bugged the office of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. She said that she had read transcripts of conversations conducted there. Various politicians and commentators were predictably shocked. A Blair press conference was dominated by questions about whether this had happened and, if so, whether it was legal and/or wise. He wouldn't confirm or deny the charge, but he denounced Short and defended the work of intelligence agencies apparently the same ones who told him Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction as "even more necessary than ever before … in an era of global terrorism."
At the U.N., most diplomats were unruffled. They all know the place is bugged; Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, called it "a kind of tradition." With only about 200 security personnel, the U.N. can't compete with widget-wielding spooks. But U.N. sources tell Time that the world body is now stepping up "sweeps" of Annan's office and considering bringing in private security contractors to make its headquarters more resistant to espionage.
British officials, meanwhile, have been quietly trying to undermine Short's story: casting doubt that a Minister would be shown whole transcripts rather than summaries of purloined conversations; or that what she read really came from a British bug or a human spy, as she seemed to imply, rather than electronic surveillance vacuumed up by the Americans (it was, after all, their turf), then shared with London.
The most remarkable thing about the flap might have been its timing; it was one of three sightings in a week of the secret corps of covert operators who try to steer world affairs from the engine room as diplomats and politicians talk on the bridge. In Qatar, two Russian security agents lost their cloak of invisibility when they were charged with helping to assassinate Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, a former Chechen President with alleged links to al-Qaeda. The Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, denounced their arrest as "unsubstantiated" and blasted Qatar for "virtually becoming Yandarbiyev's patron" but at the same time defended the agents as "members of the Russian special services … linked to the battle against international terrorism." Which is almost like saying they didn't do it and if they did he wouldn't admit it.
The day before Short made her charge, the British government dropped its prosecution of Katharine Gun, a former translator at its ultrasecret electronic-eavesdropping agency, gchq. She had leaked to a newspaper a memo written by Frank Koza, an official at gchq's American cousin, the National Security Agency, as Washington and London were pushing for a second resolution authorizing war in Iraq. Koza asked for help intercepting the phone calls and e-mails of diplomats from possible "swing vote" countries on the Security