Blair could refute this claim without reference to whether or not such transcripts existed. Short made the specific claim that she had seen transcripts of Annan’s conversations. His claim that he can neither confirm nor deny it for security reasons doesn’t hold up. I’ve treated Clare Short’s allegation as fact, since Blair hasn’t denied it. He’s often been dismissed as hopelessly naive, but US Secretary of State Henry Stimson was right when he shut down the State Department’s cryptanalytic office saying “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” In an environment where bugging is routine, everyone learns to communicate in various forms of code, and decoding is costly and prone to error. On the other hand, the costs of the activity are substantial. As with all game theoretic reasoning, you can iterate this as many times as you like, but the end result is that the net value of information derived from bugging is zero. But if you suspect me, and I don’t suspect that you suspect, you can use my bugs to mislead me. If I bug your office and you don’t suspect me, I can gain potentially valuable information that you don’t want me to have. Standard game-theoretic reasoning shows that, outside the zero-sum case of war, there’s unlikely to be a net benefit from actions like bugging offices.
This isn’t a matter of bad luck, or even incompetence. On the other hand, there’s no evidence that they’ve ever found out anything that was both useful and sufficiently reliable to act on (in this context, I’m excluding wartime codebreaking, which is always useful since, at a minimum, it disrupts enemy communications). From Burgess and McLean to the present day, the spies have been a constant cause of embarrassment and worse. More than any other democratic country, Britain is addicted to spies and their natural counterpart, Official Secrets. The main point I want to make is that it’s time for Britain to get out of the spy game. I won’t argue this in detail – no doubt a lot of people already thought he should go, and others still won’t be convinced. The whole idea of going to the UN for authority to invade Iraq was his, not Bush’s, and now it’s clear that it was corrupt from the beginning. First, for me, this is the point at which Tony Blair should go. The news that British spies bugged the office of Kofi Annan during the Iraq debate has a number of implications. Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail (repost from 2004) That’s all a preamble for a repost of a piece I wrote in 2004, in relation to an earlier revelation along similar lines, with a link to an even earlier piece from 2001, making the general case that secret intelligence is useless. I think I’ve been paying more attention than most, and I still learned a lot from the latest news.
But, sad to say, that’s not the case for most of us. And, of course, it’s true that, if you’ve been paying careful attention to all the news on this topic, disregarding both official assurances and the wilder conspiracy theories, and thinking through the implications, the material leaked by Snowden is more confirmation than revelation. One of the more tiresome points being made in relation to the revelations from Edward Snowden is that there is nothing really new here.
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