Katherine Teresa Gun in London. (Reuters)

London, Feb. 25 (Reuters): The British government dropped charges today against a translator accused of leaking a top-secret US memo widely reported to have been seeking London’s help in spying on UN members in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Katharine Teresa Gun, a 29-year-old Mandarin Chinese speaker, had been charged with breaching Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Saying they did not anticipate winning, prosecutors at London’s Old Bailey court withdrew their case against Gun, an ex-employee of Britain’s global surveillance centre GCHQ.

After her arrest last March, Gun said she had “followed her conscience” in leaking the e-mail memo, which, she said: “Exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government, who attempted to subvert our own security services”.

Britain’s Observer newspaper saw a copy of the January 31, 2003, e-mail it said was from a senior US National Security Agency official.

The newspaper quoted the memo as saying it sought to gather “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

The newspaper reported that the US intended to bug the offices of delegates from the Security Council’s “swing nations” — Chile, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea and Pakistan — whose votes were crucial to authorise military action against Iraq.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison refused to give detailed reasons in court for the decision to drop charges against Gun, stating only there was “no longer sufficient evidence to support a realistic prospect of conviction”.

However, legal sources — who had predicted the collapse of the case — said the government was unwilling to have a sensitive trial proceed in which the legality of the Iraq war would have come under question.

A lengthy trial may have further embarrassed the British and US governments, still reeling from intelligence failures over Iraq and accusations of lies and bullying in trying to persuade the world to endorse military action against Saddam Hussein.

Earlier this month, Mexican officials asked the US and Britain to respond to reports they also spied on the Mexican mission at the UN.

Gun, who was reported to have seen the top-secret e-mail by accident, said after her court appearance she was “delighted” by the decision to drop the charges but added she “would do it all again”.

“I felt that this was an essential and important issue that needed to get out to the public,” she said.