Pressure mounts on Blair in UN bugging row

TONY Blair was last night under mounting pressure to reveal if Clare Short's United Nations bugging claims were true after fresh revelations of spying.

The phones of former UN chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Richard Butler were tapped while they were on missions abroad, it was claimed.

Labour backbenchers joined Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy in demanding the Prime Minister comes clean on the row.

Former International Development Secretary Ms Short claimed on Thursday agents had bugged UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Mr Blair did not mention the matter in a speech to the Labour Party's Scottish Conference in Inverness.

Australian radio followed this by reporting that the mobile phone of UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix was tapped whenever he was in Iraq and the information shared between the US, Britain and their allies.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation said a source at Australian intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, claimed Blix's mobile phone was monitored and his conversations recorded while he was in Iraq before the war last year.

"That's what I'm told, specifically each time he entered Iraq, his phone was targeted and recorded and the transcripts were then made available to the United States, Australia, Canada, the UK and also New Zealand," ABC investigative reporter Andrew Fowler said, citing his intelligence contacts. He did not say who tapped Blix's phone.

Australia is a close ally of Britain and the US and the three countries shared intelligence in the run-up to last year's invasion of Iraq. Canberra also dispatched troops to take part in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Blix, 75, who headed the UN inspectors from 2000 to mid-2003, was in Iraq for months before the war looking for evidence Saddam Hussein was developing a weapons programme.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Transcripts of conversations Blix had in Iraq were made available to the Australian intelligence agency, the source told the ABC.

In another revelation, former UN chief weapons inspector Richard Butler said he was "well aware" his calls were being monitored during his tenure.

Butler said while he was in charge of investigating Iraq's weapons programmes he was forced to go for walks in New York's Central Park for confidential discussions with his contacts, because the phones in his UN office were bugged.

"Of course I was bugged," he said, "I was well aware of it. How did I know? Because those who did it would come to me and show me the recordings that they had made on others to help me do my job disarming Iraq."