A spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the agency had formally lodged a complaint with the American government after alleged Pentagon leaks published by the Washington Post indicated Washington was spying on Guterres’s private communications.
The leaks referring to United Nations operations were part of a much larger alleged trove of confidential documents that both the Washington Post and New York Times claimed surfaced in chat room discussions on the video game social media site Discord, beginning as early as January, and circulated online for months. Last week, law enforcement officials arrested 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, an Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, in relation to the alleged leaks. The media outlets breaking the story claimed Teixeira shared the classified intelligence in a bid to impress friends in the video game chats, citing unnamed individuals who participated in the chats with Teixeira.
Department of Defense Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters on Monday that it does not yet know just how many documents were exposed in the alleged leak.
During a daily press briefing on Tuesday, Guterres spokesman Stéphane Dujarric accepted a question asking for comment on the alleged leaks related to the director-general, particularly regarding Guterres’ attempts to visit the wartorn Tigray region of Ethiopia. In response, Dujarric confirmed that the United Nations had formally rebuked the United States for allegedly spying on Guterres.
“These documents which were basically distorted summaries of the Secretary-General’s conversation. We have now officially expressed to the host country our concern,” Dujarric said, “regarding the recent reports that communications of the Secretary-General and other senior UN officials have been the subject of surveillance and interference by the US Government.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks during the 53rd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2023. (Gian Ehrenzeller/Keystone via AP)
“We have made it clear that such actions are inconsistent with the obligations of the United States as enumerated in the chart of the United Nations and the convention and on the privileges and immunities of the United Nations,” he added, clarifying later that the U.N. sent a “note verbale” to the American mission to the United Nations lodging the complaint.
While calling the information “distorted,” Dujarric did not question the authenticity of the documents where the information came from. In contrast, some of the governments most directly implicated by the alleged leaks – most prominently South Korea – have derided the documents themselves as “forged” or otherwise fabricated.
South Korea, Egypt, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom have all either denied the information in the alleged leaks or questioned the authenticity of the documents.
The United Nations’ protest was in response to alleged revelations in the Washington Post this weekend. The newspaper claimed to have obtained four classified documents believed to be part of the alleged Discord cache regarding Guterres’s private communications. Some documents reportedly described Guterres as, for example, frustrated with the government of Ukraine for demanding he personally visit Kyiv and organizing a “surprise” event upon his arrival.
Others indicated that Guterres was frustrated with the government of Ethiopia for denying him access to Tigray, the northern region that Addis Ababa stands accused of using genocidal tactics against during the civil war that erupted in 2020.
The Ethiopian government has been wary of United Nations involvement in the conflict, currently at a standstill following a truce in November, as the world’s most prominent Tigrayan public official is arguably the head of the U.N.’s World Health Organization (W.H.O.), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The Ethiopia leak alleged Guterres wanted to “convey his outrage” to Ethiopian U.N. representatives regarding not being allowed into Tigray. The documents also claimed that Guterres discussed receiving an apology from Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed personally for the situation.
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is welcomed by China’s President Xi Jinping before their bilateral meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on September 2, 2018. ( ANDY WONG/AFP via Getty Images)
The Guterres leaks involving Ukraine claimed that the secretary-general was “really pissed off” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky organized a “surprise” event featuring Ukrainian soldiers during a Guterres visit to the country, which resulted in photos that made it appear as if Guterres was in the country to support Ukraine’s armed forces against Russia rather than for humanitarian purposes.
That claim was in a document claiming to report a conversation between Guterres and Dujarric, his spokesman.
Prior to the allegations this weekend, another series of alleged leaks tied to the Teixeira investigation revealed that U.S. officials believed that Guterres was willing to help Russian entities undermine Western sanctions to keep Ukrainian grain exports flowing internationally.
Following the initial series of reports implicating Guterres, Dujarric issued a statement condemning the “malfeasance of incompetence” necessary for those leaks to become public.
“The secretary-general has been at this job, and in the public eye, for a long time. He’s not surprised by the fact that people are spying on him and listening in to his private conversations,” Dujarric said last week. “What is surprising is the malfeasance or incompetence that allows such private conversations to be distorted and become public.”