U.N. inspector: I also was bugged
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Butler: "Silly to think we could have serious conversations in our office."
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U.N. troubled by accusations that British agents spied on Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
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(CNN) -- A former U.N. chief weapons inspector has fueled the row over allegations Britain spied on the United Nations before the Iraq war by saying his phone calls were routinely bugged.
Richard Butler said Friday that while he was in charge of investigating Iraq's weapons programs in the late 1990s, he was forced to meet his contacts in New York's Central Park because the telephones in his office at U.N. headquarters were insecure.
The initial claims Britain spied on the U.N. were made by former UK Cabinet minister Clare Short, who said she had read transcripts of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's conversations.
"We were brought to a situation where it was plainly silly to think we could have any serious conversations in our office," Butler told The Associated Press.
Butler told Australian radio he believed he was being bugged by at least four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, adding, "I don't know what the Chinese were doing."
"I was utterly confident that in my attempts to have private diplomatic conversations trying to solve the problem of the disarmament of Iraq that I was being listened to by the Americans, the British, the French and the Russians.
"They also had people on my staff who were reporting what I was trying to do privately."
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also reported that sources said British or U.S. intelligence services monitored former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix's mobile phone whenever he was in Iraq.
A spokesman for Australian Prime Minister John Howard refused to comment on the claims.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, U.N. Secretary-General between 1992 and 1996, also said he believed he had been spied on.
"From the first day I entered my office they told me: beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged," Boutros-Ghali told the BBC. "It is a tradition that member states that have the technical capacity to bug will do it without hesitation," he said.
The United Nations said Thursday that alleged British spying on Annan's office, if true, was illegal and must stop immediately.
U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said the world agency "would be disappointed" if claims that British spies listened in on Annan's conversations turned out to be true.
Commenting on allegations by Clare Short, Eckhard said such actions would be "illegal" under international conventions.
Earlier Thursday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called Short's claims "deeply irresponsible" and said they threatened the security of the country. Blair, speaking to reporters in London, refused to respond directly to Short's charge.
Short unleashed a huge row around the world by making spy allegations.
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Short, who resigned as international development secretary following the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein, made her comments in a radio interview.
"The UK in this time was also getting, spying on Kofi Annan's office and getting reports from him about what was going on," she told the BBC.
"I have seen transcripts of Kofi Annan's conversations. In fact I have had conversations with Kofi in the run-up to war thinking 'Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this and people will see what he and I are saying."'
Asked explicitly whether British spies had been instructed to carry out operations within the United Nations on people such as Kofi Annan, she said: "Yes, absolutely."
When asked if such actions were legal, she said: "I don't know. I presume so. It's odd."
Short was one of two Cabinet members to resign in protest against Britain's participation in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, resigned as leader of the House of Commons before the campaign began.
Short's comments came a day after charges were dropped against a British government translator accused of leaking a memo on an alleged U.S. "dirty tricks" campaign ahead of the Iraq war.
Katharine Gun, 29, allegedly leaked a memo from U.S. intelligence officers asking their British counterparts to spy on members of the U.N. Security Council before the Iraq war. (Full story)
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
