ISLAMABAD, 12 November 2003 — Pakistan’s foreign minister said yesterday that his country has begun the expensive process of debugging its embassy in London, since the British government has refused to confirm or deny media reports that its intelligence agents were involved in a bungled spy operation there.
“We have to take all steps for debugging,” Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri told a nationally televised news conference in Islamabad. “That’s the first step we will take, we have taken. We have already dispatched people. They are already in Britain.”
Kasuri, who was in England on a state visit shortly after the alleged undercover operation was first reported in the British press, said he was confident that whatever happens, Pakistan and Britain will maintain their close relations.
But he also said he is determined to find a way around the excuse that British officials are giving for their no-comment approach: That British law prevents the government from ever commenting on intelligence matters.
“Our relationship with Britain is excellent, but we want Britain to give us a positive explanation,” he said.
On Nov. 2, Britain’s Sunday Times reported that MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence service, had botched an effort to spy on the London embassy of one of its allies in the global war on terrorism.
The original report did not identify the embassy.
However, the newspaper later quoted an unidentified Pakistani Foreign Ministry official as saying: “We know it was our embassy, although we are not in a position to confirm or deny the content of the story at this stage.”
During his visit to England on Nov. 3-4, Kasuri met with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and other officials.
“We arrived at some sort of agreement that...some method will hopefully be found out whereby without breaking British law our confidence in this thing can be restored and we can hopefully feel that this report was not correct,” Kasuri said.
“We would like to believe it’s not correct and it will mean a lot of expenditure for the government of Pakistan.”
The Sunday Times said a construction worker renovating the building volunteered to bug the offices for MI5, then arranged for agents to have unrestricted access to the embassy. Afterward, MI5 infiltrated the embassy, stole codes staff used for sending secret messages and began planning to plant listening devices and remove documents, the report claimed.
The construction worker reportedly confessed about his role to embassy staff because he feared that MI5 missteps had put him in danger.
The Sunday Times said he has since written about the alleged operation to the chairman of Britain’s House of Commons intelligence and security committee, the US Embassy in London and the embassy that was the target of the spying.
The paper did not say when the alleged spying occurred but reported that the renovation work at the embassy began in 2001. Construction there is still under way.
