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Bugging the UN: an institution as old as time itself

From the moment news reached UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the British government had been conducting electronic surveillance of him, he was intent on presenting a calm and knowing outward reaction.

He told aides who urged him to say he was "dismayed" at the news to say instead that he was just "disappointed." And his official statement added the condition he would be disappointed only "if this were true."

Avoiding confrontation is central to a secretary-general's job, which may account for his low-key public response. If, as is likely, he has harsher private judgments, they are ones he will save for Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador, who, calling from London on Thursday on behalf of Prime Minister Tony Blair, alerted him to the disclosure.

Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said on Friday that Annan was very concerned with how the reported eavesdropping would affect his work and was expecting another talk with Emyr shortly.

The British spying was revealed in a BBC interview on Thursday with Clare Short, an outspoken former member of the Blair Cabinet who resigned last summer -- and has called on Blair to do the same. Short said that Britain regularly spied on Annan and that transcripts of conversations with him had circulated freely in the Cabinet.

Blair rebuked Short and said she had endangered national security with her outburst. The incident has produced a political furor, with Blair's opponents challenging him to "come clean" and arguing that the case further erodes his post-war credibility.

If the reaction at the UN is more subdued, it may reflect the recognition that wiretapping at the UN is as old as the institution itself.

"The UN has been monitored by bugging or surveillance from day one," said Stephen Schlesinger, author of Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, an account of the 1945 San Francisco Charter conference that created the body.

John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a non-profit security policy group in Alexandria, Virginia, was even blunter.

"You could say that there are more spooks in that building than any other on the planet," he said.
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