HAGANAH• 227expose serious wrongdoing by the U.S. and British governments. In
a statement when she was charged, Gun declared, ‘‘Any disclosures
that may have been made were justified because they exposed serious
illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. government, which
attempted to subvert our own security services. Secondly, they could
have helped prevent wide-scale death and casualties amongst ordi-
nary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.’’
Prosecution potentially would have been hugely embarrassing for
the government and could have opened up GCHQ operations to un-
welcome publicity. Also damaging and politically threatening was
her plan to seek the disclosure of the full advice from the attorney-
general, Lord Goldsmith, on the legality of the war against Iraq. The
government would almost certainly have refused to disclose such ad-
vice, arguing that opinions of its law officers are traditionally privi-
leged, in which case Gun’s lawyers would have argued she could not
get a fair trial without seeing the attorney’s advice on the war and the
disclosure of GCHQ’s activities. Ben Emmerson QC, her counsel,
told London’s Bow Street magistrates court in January that she was
being prevented from saying anything to her lawyers about her work
at GCHQ. Thus, when the case came to trial in February 2004, the
prosecution abandoned it on the advice of the attorney-general on the
basis that there was not a reasonable prospect of obtaining a convic-
tion, thereby prompting a major political controversy.
Senior Mexican and Chilean diplomats at the United Nations have
since claimed their missions were spied on. The former Mexican am-
bassador to the United Nations, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, claimed that
American officials intervened last March—days before the war was
launched against Saddam Hussein—to halt secret UN negotiations
for a compromise resolution that would have given weapons inspec-
tors more time to complete their work. He claimed the intervention
could only have come as a result of secret surveillance of a meeting
where the compromise was being worked on.–H–HAGANAH.The paramilitary branch of the Jewish Agency inPales-
tine, dedicated to the protection of Jewish settlements during the