An intelligence oversight committee in the Belgium parliament is looking into bugs found on the phones of European delegates at a meeting in Brussels last March.
The so-called
R Committee, established in the early 1990s to look into reports of rogue operations by Belgian security agencies, has been seeking documents on the wiretapping discoveries for several months, but have been blocked by Belgian magistrates, according to a report in the current issue of the Paris-based
Intelligence Online newsletter (subscription required).
On March 18, 2008 interception systems were discovered on the telephone lines of the Spanish, German, French and British delegations to the Council of Europe, a gathering of the heads of European Union governments. Ever since that date, the permanent R Committee, which oversees the operations of Belgian intelligence, has been trying in vain to find the eavesdroppers.
The Council of Europe filed a complaint, and Belgian magistrates began looking into the continuing mystery. When R Committee investigators asked to see documents the magistrates had gathered, however, they were "repeatedly rebuffed," the newsletter says.
In a July report just now surfacing, however, the R Committee "indicated it had finally been authorized by the court to conduct an inquiry into the incident this year in the hope of finally clearing up the mystery," the newsletter said.
The spy services of all the major powers commonly wiretap each other's diplomats in search of useful political, military and commercial intelligence.
Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward
revealed last week that U.S. intelligence had been spying on top officials in the Iraqi government, including prime minister
Nouri al-Maliki.
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