United Nations, Jan 15 (IPS/Thalif Deen) - The United Nations, a political mix of 185 member states, has occasionally been described as a veritable playing field for intelligence agents from the East and West.

That categorisation came into play once again last week when some of the U.S. arms inspectors assigned to the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Baghdad were accused of using the United Nations as a convenient political cover to spy on Iraq.

The charges helped confirm the long-standing Iraqi accusation that the commission, mandated to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, was "a den of American spies."

According to news reports, the UNSCOM office in Baghdad was plugged-in with eavesdropping equipment to monitor secret communications among military units responsible for the safety of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, whom the United States seeks to overthrow.

Over the years, the United Nations has served as a listening post for intelligence-gathering not only by UN diplomats but also by senior Secretariat officials, military officers in peacekeeping missions and UN personnel whose salaries are paid by their home governments.

Last week, the `New York Times' quoted an unnamed UN official as saying: "The United Nations has been and continues to be a focal point for espionage by everybody". According to the paper, the official said intelligence officers from most of the world's nations used the United Nations as a base of operations.

One of the primary reasons is accessibility. While a host nation can refuse accreditation to a foreign diplomat suspected of being an intelligence agent, the United Nations cannot. The doors of the United Nations are open to everyone, including spies masquerading as diplomats, Secretariat officials or even journalists.
As a result, at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s and 1970s, the world body became a battleground for the United States and the then Soviet Union to spy on each other.

At one time, U.S. and Soviet spooks were crawling all over the United Nations - in committee rooms, in the press gallery, in the Secretariat and even in the UN library, which was known as a drop-  off point for sensitive political documents.

The extent of Cold War espionage in the United Nations was also laid bare by a U.S. Congressional Committee investigating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1975.

The evidence given before the committee revealed that the CIA had planted one of its Russian-speaking, lip-reading experts in a press booth overlooking the Security Council chamber. His assignment: to monitor the lip movements of Russian delegates as they consulted each other in low whispers at some of the open meetings of the Council.

In his 1978 book `A Dangerous Place', Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former U.S. envoy to the United Nations, describes the cat-and-mouse espionage game that went on in the bowels of the world body.

In April 1978, Under-Secretary-General Arkady Shevchenko of the then USSR had the dubious distinction of being the highest-ranking Soviet UN official to defect to the United States. The head of the Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, Shevchenko was accused of being a double agent working for U.S. intelligence while spying for the Soviets inside the United Nations.

According to Moynihan, Shevchenko was considered so important in the Soviet hierarchy - being tipped to succeed Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko - that Moscow had its own KGB agent to keep an eye on him.
Moynihan identifies that agent as Vyacheslav Kuzmin, one of Shevchenko's aides, "believed to be the KGB officer who was assigned to keep him (Shevchenko) under surveillance." Both Shevchenko and Kuzmin were highly paid officials working in the UN Secretariat.
Time magazine reported then that the defection had "caused consternation at the U.N., intense alarm in Moscow, and scarcely concealed elation in Washington".

The widespread charges of espionage against US arms inspectors last week have also spotlighted the myth of the international civil servant who is expected to jettison his loyalty to his home country in favour of the United Nations.

"There is no such animal," says a longtime UN staffer. "The United Nations boasts that its staffers are all international civil servants whose only loyalty is to the Organisation," he says. "But in reality
some of the officials are more loyal to their home countries than to the United Nations."
Some of the United Nations' highest-ranking officials - from countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and France and the Scandinavian nations - have their salaries boosted by their home governments on the grounds that UN pays far less than they do.

Last year, an Under-Secretary-General heading a UN agency outside New York announced he would return some 280,898 dollars granted him by his home government so as to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that any such payments by home governments to UN staffers are illegal and in violation of staff regulations adopted by the General Assembly.

A new Code of Conduct, currently under discussion, specifically says that no UN staff member shall seek or accept instructions from any government or any other source external to the Organisation.

"Staff members are international civil servants, " says the Code, "Their responsibilities as staff members are not national but exclusively international."

The history of spying at the United Nations, however, goes back to the founding fathers of the Organisation. In an 1995 article in `Cryptologia', a scholarly magazine on the science of making and
breaking secret codes, a U.S. academic said that the United States successfully manipulated the form and content of the United Nations because it spied on the signatories to the UN charter over 53 years ago.

"The original UN charter was the creation of the U.S. State Department," said Stephen Schlesinger, a former visiting scholar at New York University. Washington was able to shape the charter to its own liking because U.S. officials intercepted coded cable traffic from various capitals to embassies in Washington DC, London and Paris, he said.

When foreign delegates arrived in San Francisco to create the United Nations, Washington had advance knowledge of the negotiation positions of all 49 countries. As a result, said Schlesinger, the United States was able to "write the U.N. charter mostly according to its own blueprint."