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

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Council. Gun was going to plead in defense that her leak was necessary to stop casualties in a war — and try to put the shaky legal case for war on trial with her. Prosecutors calculated they couldn't persuade every member of a jury that her leak wasn't an act of conscience they should excuse — and now the government must review its obviously ineffective Official Secrets Act, whose draconian provisions against divulging classified information are not doing much good.

As investigations proceed on both sides of the Atlantic about intelligence that was faulty and perhaps deliberately skewed, both European and American leaders know they need to make sure their spies don't become laws unto themselves, fixated on their own orthodoxies, or get too intimate with their political masters. But tinkering with secrecy laws or government machinery cannot cure the problem revealed when people are willing to disregard their secrecy pledges to become whistle-blowers. In democracies, at least, intelligence agencies depend on a shared public belief that their cause is just, even if their methods are sometimes unsavory. Blair never convinced a lot of people in Britain that the Iraq war was just — and those who resent him for it now form an archipelago of the disaffected. Inside the spy agencies, on the Labour backbenches and among potential juries trying government leakers, they can exercise power, too — a crude, perhaps self-absorbed, form of democracy, but effective.

• J.F.O. McALLISTER | London
• Britain is accused of bugging the U.N., and Russian agents are charged with murder.