Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in Die Another Day. (AFP)

London, Feb. 26 (Reuters): Remember when you only saw British spies in 007 movies?

Suddenly, you can find James Bonds testifying in courtrooms, leaking documents to the papers, writing their own accounts on the front pages — and now a former British cabinet member says they snooped on Kofi Annan. British spies, it seems, are everywhere, driven out of the shadows by the dispute over the war in Iraq.

And to the chagrin of spy services in both Britain and its wartime ally the US, more skeletons are likely to tumble out of the closets as long as society remains bitterly divided over whether the war was right.

Former British cabinet member Clare Short’s revelation today that she had seen transcripts of apparently bugged conversations of the UN secretary-general was the latest in a series of unprecedented disclosures. In the US, authorities have been investigating the leak of the name of a CIA agent whose husband criticised President George W. Bush’s assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein tried to acquire uranium in Africa. The two allies have both now agreed to expose their spies to unprecedented probes into why their governments thought Iraq possessed large stockpiles of banned weapons.

But in Britain, a trickle of leaks has slowly turned into a flood that would have been unthinkable just months ago. “It is pretty obvious that the British intelligence community is as divided over this war as the British public,” said Tim Ripley, a specialist at University of Lancaster.