BRITAIN: Tinker Bell Lives

And she is still eavesdropping

The curtain of the fairy chamber opens slightly, and Tink, who has doubtless been eavesdropping, tinkles a laugh of scorn.

The Tinker Bell in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan was an impishly playful pixie.

Last week Britons were shocked and titillated by tales of a far more ominous "Tinker Bell": an innocuous-looking five-story post office building, aptly code-named after the eavesdropping fairy, that reportedly houses an extensive government telephone-tapping operation behind its tightly drawn white curtains.

The Tinker Bell story first appeared in the leftist weekly New Statesman, which two weeks ago began publishing a serialized expose by Journalist Duncan Campbell, 27. His most startling claim was that the government tapped phones, bugged hotel rooms and even monitored diplomatic communications of delegates to last fall's Lancaster House Conference on Zimbabwe Rhodesia; this surveillance, he contended, was "authorized directly" by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who won wide acclaim for his deft performance as conference chairman. Though all delegations were monitored, Campbell wrote, particular attention was paid to Patriotic Front Co-Leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe; Rhodesian security personnel were even employed to interpret African languages and dialects. Campbell further claimed that U.S. agents had bugged "critical meetings" attended by the Front's delegates to last September's Nonaligned Conference in Havana and passed the information on to Britain.

The Sunday Times, one of many London papers that printed subsequent stories about the buggings, quoted an "impeccable source" as saying: "That was why Lord Carrington could conduct the conference on the basis of brinkmanship. The intelligence sources told him where all the brinks were." A spokesman for the Prime Minister refused to confirm or deny the report.

According to Campbell, the eavesdropping center, located in London's fashionable Chelsea district, can monitor at least 1,000 telephone lines simultaneously. It is crammed with highly sophisticated electronic gadgetry, including a computer that allegedly can transcribe spoken words into printout. Backed up by separate operations specializing in planting bugs, Tinker Bell supplies information to Scotland Yard and two intelligence agencies. The targets of such surveillance, according to a former intelligence official quoted by Campbell, include not only suspected criminals but members of Parliament, trade union leaders, journalists, shipping companies and foreign embassies—"including the American."

Given Britain's seemingly inexhaustible appetite for stories about spies and public scandal, these allegations inevitably touched off a lively debate—not all of it ill-humored. Scores of people rushed forward with stories of suspicious clicks on their telephone lines, or of their own conversations being inadvertently played back to them by bumbling snoops. Some politicians and newsmen jokingly complained that they had been slighted by not having their phones tapped. The Guardian suggested a new variation on an old parlor game: "Tap. Tap. Who's there?"