Global News Journal

WikiLeaks Scandal: Is the United Nations a Den of Spies?

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice has dismissed suggestions that her diplomats are part-time spies, as suggested by the latest batch of documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.   “Let me be very clear — our diplomats are just that, they’re diplomats,” Rice told reporters at the United Nations where she was peppered with questions about the latest chapter in the WikiLeaks scandal. “Our diplomats are doing what diplomats do around the world every day, which is build relationships, negotiate, advance our interests and work to find common solutions to complex problems.”   She didn’t exactly deny the charges of espionage. But the top U.S. diplomat in New York did reject the idea that there would be any diplomatic fallout from the release of thousands of documents obtained by WikiLeaks, some of which have been published by The Guardian and other newspapers.   One U.S. diplomatic cable published by The Guardian shows how the State Department instructed diplomats at the United Nations and elsewhere around the world to collect credit card and frequent flyer numbers, work schedules and biometric data for U.N. officials and diplomats. Among the personalities of interest was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as were the ambassadors of the other 14 Security Council member states.    There is nothing new about espionage at the United Nations, but it’s always embarrassing when classified documents proving it happens surface in the media.   Most Security Council envoys declined to comment on the WikiLeaks documents as they headed into the council chambers on Monday for a meeting on North Korea. Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, however, told reporters, “Surprise, surprise.”   Churkin should know. One of the diplomats in his charge was implicated earlier this year in a high-profile Russian espionage case in the United States in which nearly a dozen people were accused of being part of a Russian spy ring that carried out deep-cover work in the United States to recruit political sources and gather information for Moscow. The U.S. Justice Department said that an unnamed diplomat at the Russian mission to the United Nations had delivered payments to the spy ring.      And then there was the man known as “Comrade J”, a Russian spy based in New York from 1995 to 2000. Working out of Russia’s U.N. mission, Comrade J directed Russian espionage activity in New York City and personally oversaw all covert operations against the United States and its allies in the United Nations. According to a book about his exploits, Comrade J eventually became a double agent for the FBI.   Nor does the history of U.N. espionage end there. In 2004, a former British cabinet minister revealed that British intelligence agents had spied on Ban Ki-moon’s predecessor Kofi Annan, who fell afoul of Washington and London by opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq.       Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was also the victim of a phone-bugging operation, according to media reports from 2004. He had also opposed the invasion of Iraq and angered the United States by saying that their intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged revival of his nuclear arms program was not only incorrect but partly based on falsified evidence. U.S. officials pored over transcripts of ElBaradei’s telephone intercepts in an attempt to secure evidence of mistakes that could be used to oust him from his post, the reports said. Not only did they fail to unseat him, he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Did I hear ‘freedom fries’? – France says Iran is no Iraq

February 2003. Anti-French sentiment sweeps across the United States. President George W. Bush and his top aides can barely contain their irritation at the French government for undermining U.S.-led efforts to get the U.N. Security Council to authorize the impending invasion of Iraq. With the aid of Germany and Russia, France torpedoes the drive for a new resolution authorizing war. Frustration erupts into anger. Bottles of French wine and champagne are emptied into toilets and some restaurants rename French fries “freedom fries.”

The rest is history. The United States tells U.N. weapons inspectors to clear out of Iraq and launches an invasion in March 2003 to put an end to Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs. They topple Saddam’s government and execute the deposed Iraqi leader three years later. But U.S. and British intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs turn out to be false.

Seven years later. France and the U.S. are friends again and working on the same side to prevent Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, from developing nuclear weapons. (Interestingly, both France and the United States had supported Iraq during its bloody 1980-88 war with Iran.)

Some people shudder with deja vu at the mention of Iran’s nuclear program. For years, officials at the Vienna-based IAEA warned that the campaign against Iran was Iraq all over again. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, often spoke of the need to avoid the mistakes of Iraq by not jumping to conclusions about Iran’s atomic program, which Tehran insists is a peaceful one that will produce only electricity, not bombs.

Speaking at New York’s Columbia University this week, France’s U.N. ambassador, Gerard Araud, made clear that Iran’s nuclear program couldn’t be more different from Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. The concerns about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, he said, are shared across the globe. He pointed out that five Security Council resolutions — three of them imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic — had passed “without dissent” and that countries like Libya, South Africa, Russia and China had cast their votes in favor of them.

“To be blunt, it’s not Iraq revisited,” he said. “It’s not the West, the North, against Iran. It’s the international community at large which is expressing its concerns.” Araud noted that four of the six countries leading efforts to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program had actively opposed the war in Iraq — France, Germany, Russia and China. Now they’re all in it together, offering Iran the prospect of economic and political incentives if it stops enriching and new sanctions if it continues to refuse.

French-U.S. cooperation on Iran is nothing new. Even while former French President Jacques Chirac and his chief diplomats were working hard to block the U.S.-British push for war in Iraq, French intelligence agents were quietly amassing evidence of covert Iranian nuclear activities and sharing it with their American counterparts. In May 2003, France presented its intelligence assessment of Iran to a closed-door meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an informal club of 46 countries that produce raw materials or technology useful in nuclear programs. “For several years intelligence sources have been collecting evidence of a covert military program (in Iran),” the French presentation said. “France’s assessment is now that this country may obtain a sufficient quantity of fissionable materials to manufacture a nuclear weapon within a few years.” The French presentation, it said, “was coordinated with the American one.”

Obama, Susan Rice and the U.N. — The right approach or too cuddly?

When U.S. President Barack Obama came to power, he announced a “new era of engagement” at the United Nations. He appointed his longtime friend and foreign policy adviser Susan Rice to be his ambassador to the world body. He also raised her post to cabinet level, as some previous Democratic presidents have done, and made her a member of the powerful National Security Council. 

In an August 2009 speech at New York University, Rice outlined the Obama’s administration’s new approach to the United Nations, an organization that was often criticized and occasionally ridiculed by members of the administration of former President George W. Bush. She said that from now on Washington would do away with the “condescension and contempt” that she said had crept into U.S. government attitudes toward the international community. 

“We have seen the costs of disengagement,” Rice told an audience of students, academics, diplomats and policy makers. “We have paid the price of stiff-arming the U.N. and spurning our international partners. The United States will lead in the 21st century — not with hubris, not by hectoring, but through patient diplomacy.”

Relations between the United States and the United Nations have never been easy. For decades there have been the occasional calls from the political right to pull out of the organization or banish its headquarters from U.S. territory. Relations reached a low point in 2003, the year of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan branded the war an illegal act by the Bush administration.

The Obama administration kept its word. It quickly handed over more than $2 billion in new and old contributions owed to the U.N. peacekeeping department. It ended Washington’s confrontational approach to the world body, virtually ceasing all public attacks on it. In an interview with Vogue magazine, for which she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Rice said she believed she had met all of the other 191 U.N. ambassadors in the space of a single month. Envoys from around the world praised Rice, saying her willingness to listen and not dictate to her colleagues is refreshing. One senior Western diplomat referred to her as “Human Rice.” But some in the United States dislike this approach. Security Council diplomats have told Reuters privately that Rice’s frequent absences from council meetings — including votes on resolutions — have not gone unnoticed. U.N. blogger Matthew Lee of Inner City Press has repeatedly suggested that Rice has dropped the U.S. push to root out U.N. corruption and improve its bureaucracy, an issue that was top priority for former U.S. ambassador and outspoken U.N. critic John Bolton. (U.S. officials reject the suggestion that Washington has dropped its anti-corruption drive.) Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, criticized the Obama administration for taking a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, a body Washington had previously shunned for being anti-Israeli. Rice and others defended the decision, saying it was time to change the Human Rights Council from within rather than throwing stones at it from without.

The most severe attack on the new administration’s approach to the U.N. or Rice to date came from Richard Grenell, whom Bush appointed in 2001 as the spokesman to the U.S. mission to the United Nations. In a blog for the Huffington Post, Grenell accused Rice of “hanging out at the White House and not engaging seriously in New York” on important issues like Iran’s nuclear program. He took her to task for spending too much time in Washington (her children go to school there). He called her a “weak negotiator” and declared that “the U.N. and the American people deserve better.”    Rice told reporters she did not read the article by Grenell, who was well known in the U.N. press corps for his unflagging support of the Bush administration, criticism of the European penchant for dialogue and negotiations, and his forthright way of expressing displeasure at articles he disapproved of. But Rice defended her first year as Obama’s U.N. envoy, saying 2009 was “very productive.” Washington and its partners racked up “substantive accomplishments” in 2009, she said, such as the toughening of sanctions against North Korea and adoption of a Security Council resolution on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament at a council meeting that Obama himself chaired.

Grenell cited a recent analysis by Security Council Report, a think-tank affiliated with Columbia University, saying it showed how little the council accomplished last year. That analysis said 2009 saw a “dramatic drop” in the number of Security Council decisions, the lowest since 1991, without a corresponding decline in the number of serious conflicts. However, it pointed out that there were no clear reasons for the decline and noted that “more is not necessarily better.”

United Nations confronts life and death in Haiti

Everybody who knew French Canadian U.N. staffer Alexandra Duguay loved her. She was attractive, energetic and extremely intelligent. I got to know her well when she worked behind the media counter at U.N. headquarters. She was always eager to make sure we reporters had the latest resolutions, U.N. reports and speeches. And in the evening she enjoyed a glass of wine or beer at the Delegates Lounge. But she was bored with her job and wanted more adventure. One morning last spring she had an unusual twinkle in her eye. I asked her if something was up and she said yes. “I’m going to Haiti.” A few months later she had her going-away party at the U.N. Correspondents Association room. She and her boyfriend prepared for their imminent deployment to Haiti, where Alex was to be a spokeswoman and media coordinator for U.N. operations in the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Alex quickly settled into her exciting new job. Late last year she emailed me an update of life in Port-au-Prince: “Even though it’s a bit of a s****y place, I can’t complain. I just spend too much time between my house and my hotel room, a.k.a. office. Yeah, we have peacocks as pets … Haitians are nuts. Lovely but nuts.”

Alex, 31, was one of dozens of U.N. workers who died after the peacekeeping mission’s headquarters in Haiti and other buildings collapsed during an earthquake on January 12. It was the biggest loss of life during a single event in the world body’s 65-year history.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid tribute to the dead U.N. staffers a few days later when he visited the ruins of the 5-story Christopher Hotel, where the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) had its offices, saying that he lacked the words to express his sorrow. Shortly after he left the site, where the stench of death hung thick in the air, a U.S. search-and-rescue team pulled a Danish man out of the rubble, dehydrated after five days without water or food, but alive and conscious.

“I am very glad that it was a great sign of hope,” Ban told reporters later. “Saving lives is our first priority and I hope that we see more such miracles.”

There were a few other stories of miraculous survival. Imran Gardner, the 5-month-old son of U.N staffers in Haiti, Esra and William Gardner, was rescued from under the rubble of their home by unidentified Haitians.

Sadly, such survival stories were the exception. As many as 200,000 people are believed to have died in the earthquake and some of their bodies may never be recovered. A group of containers at the U.N. logistics base at the Port-au-Prince airport, which several U.N. officials insisted was not refrigerated, has become an unofficial U.N. morgue.

Ban Ki-moon, Gaza and the little plane that could…

It’s not easy being the secretary-general of the United Nations.

For three weeks, the South Korean U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon has been urging Israel and Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip to stop their fighting.  He has described himself as “deeply alarmed” and said he “deplores” the latest war to erupt in the Middle East. Ban said it has caused an “unbearable” number of casualties – over 1,000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis have died since the war began on Dec. 27.

But his appeals – backed by a legally binding U.N. Security Council resolution urging an immediate ceasefire – have fallen on deaf ears.  The Israeli offensive has intensified and Hamas militants have continued to fire rockets at southern Israel.

That is not the only problem dogging Ban on his week-long tour of the Middle East, which he described as “a mission of peace”.  The U.N. plane assigned to carry Ban, his aides, and a throng of reporters and their gear is too small.

It was clear that the group needed a bigger plane when we left Cairo for the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday.  The luggage hold was so overwhelmed by suitcases and television gear that the flight crew had to cram luggage under nearly every seat in the narrow aircraft, which seats just over 50 passengers.

Journalists and U.N. officials complained about the lack of leg room, but we survived the flight and landed safely in Jordan.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

China, Pakistan and India

According to Pakistani newspaper the Daily Times, Pakistan's decision to crack down on the Jammat-ud-Dawa, the charity linked to the Laskhar-e-Taiba, came as the result of pressure from China. Jammat-ud-Dawa was blacklisted by a UN Security Council committee this week.

The Daily Times noted that earlier attempts to target the Jamaat-ud-Dawa at the Security Council had been vetoed by China. "It is the Chinese “message” that has changed our mind. The Chinese did not veto the banning of Dawa on Wednesday, and they had reportedly told Islamabad as much beforehand, compelling our permanent representative at the UN to assert that Pakistan would accept the ban if it came," the newspaper said. "One subliminal message was also given to Chief Minister Punjab, Mr Shehbaz Sharif, during his recent visit to China, and the message was that Pakistan had to seek peace with India or face change of policy in Beijing. Once again, it is our friend China whose advice has been well taken..."

This is intriguing, all the more so given how much attention has has been focused on what the United States has been doing to lean on Pakistan to curb militant groups blamed by India for the attacks on Mumbai.  So what has been going on? Has China, with its growing economic power, become a pivotal player in global diplomacy even as the United States continues to hog the limelight?

We've always known that China has had a major role in South Asia. But in the past it was a seen as the ultimate all-weather ally of Pakistan, to be used if necessary against India, with which it has vied for influence in Asia and against which it fought a border war in 1962.  Is this call for peace an example of it taking on a U.S.-style role of regional policeman, as I discussed in a post back in June about India, Pakistan and China?

The Times of India quotes Shashi Tharoor as saying that there was a feeling in China that its opposition to India on the issue of terrorism would "no longer be compatible with its being seen as a responsible player in the system''.