[lbo-talk] 'The Americans can afford to be much more flippant,'

[Ian Murray]

When spies meet spin...

Claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction are at the heart of a
ferocious political debate. Were we misled?

Peter Beaumont in London and Gaby Hinsliff in St Petersburg
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

In the stifling heat of the Chinook helicopter, Tony Blair was
uncharacteristically quiet during Thursday's 20-minute trip from the
outskirts of Basra to the port of Umm Qasr: but then, he had much to think
about.

Less than an hour before, the Prime Minister had told an audience of
British soldiers that they had achieved a 'momentous and mighty' act of
which all Britain could be proud.

But as the jeans-clad Prime Minister began shaking soldiers' hands,
journalists were besieging his director of communications, Alastair
Campbell. They wanted the answer to a single question that had come to
obsess the media, military, politicians and intelligence community on both
sides of the Atlantic: where were the weapons of mass destruction over
which those soldiers risked their lives? And was it true that intelligence
reports had been made up?

The media were not alone. Squinting into the sun, one long-serving officer
who had listened to the speech in respectful silence summed it up: 'I
believed him in January when he said they had WMD and we'd find it. It
seemed we knew exactly where it was and we'd find it in two weeks. Now,
it's been two months...' The officer tailed off.

Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, is a stocky figure, a little under
average height, and a career spy to his bones. When he sat down at the
table of the Cabinet Office's Joint Intelligence Committee early last
autumn to discuss the Government's dossier on Iraq's WMDs, the sometimes
heated conversations would lay the foundations of a feud between the
intelligence community and senior officials at Number 10 that would
continue through the Iraq war and finally explode last week.

Also around the table of the ad hoc committee were the head of MI5; Jack
Straw, the Foreign Secretary; John Scarlett, chairman of the committee and
himself a former head of MI6; Blair; and Campbell.

It was a difficult moment for Dearlove. For the first time in MI6's
history, it had been asked to supply its product not just for the eyes of
the Prime Minister and senior Ministers and the military, but also for a
dossier that would be made public.

It was a move that Dearlove knew was deeply unpopular with some of his
most senior officers, who feared that the publication of such information
would not only endanger sources but might also lead to a profound
misunderstanding of the analysis they generated.

As the members of the committee sat down to go through the dossier line by
line to argue for inclusion in the published version, they would make a
decision that would have profound reverberations for the Government and
its case for going to war against Iraq: the allegation that Iraq not only
retained WMDs, but also that Saddam's regime was capable of launching them
at 45 minutes' notice - an allegation that would be repeated by the Prime
Minister more than once and would provide the underpinning for a war.

And what bothered some of those present, as intelligence sources admit,
was the fact that the information, gleaned from an Iraqi scientist, was
from a single source - it was therefore 'uncorroborated' intelligence.

But it wasn't the only issue to come up. As the argument came to an end
another controversy emerged. Campbell insisted that the information in the
dossier was still too diffuse and argued for the inclusion of a passage
that the rest of the JIC felt stretched the evidence too far. When the
dossier was finally signed off - with the agreement of all present -- that
passage had been excised.

Nervous as they were, the senior MI6 men felt comfortable that, despite
the very public airing of their material, it reflected their analysis.

The spooks thought they had a deal and that the Government would brief in
line with the carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle of the dossier - a
shadowy world of best guesses, cautious conclusions and circumstantial
evidence.

They had not, however, counted on Number 10's formidable spin machine.
Campbell's offence, in the eyes of the spooks, would be to allow the
Government to brief the cautious conclusions as hardened fact.

'Basically, it was over-sold,' said a well-placed source last week. 'He
[Campbell] did not understand the basic nature of intelligence material.
It is almost never a set of facts; it's a set of indicators from which you
can make judgments.'

For example, the '45 minutes' allegation was based on one defecting
scientist, say sources , not corroborated elsewhere: not necessarily
untrue, but not a concrete fact either. But it was sold as 'true'.

It was a point that Dearlove himself would insist on, even in the
immediate run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when he would let it be
discreetly known that intelligence, in his view, far from being hard facts
and rocket science, was instead a far more nuanced affair; that the
intelligence on Iraq's WMD in particular was more equivocal than had been
sold to MPs and the electorate.

It was not the way that it would appear in the British media, briefed by
Number 10 - and it was the beginning of a falling out between MI6 and
Campbell that crashed into the open last week.

For if Campbell had oversold the '45-minute allegation' and the
Government's second dossier, he would embarrass the Secret Intelligence
Services and Dearlove - a man with whom he was on on 'Sunday lunch
terms' - by his 'appalling behaviour' in stuffing extracts from a
plagiarised student thesis between two wedges of MI6 material to beef it
up and claiming it as intelligence.

All of which might well have been quietly forgotten if the allied forces
had turned up the WMD promised in the first September dossier, spun to the
media by Number 10. But those weapons - the British casus belli - have not
turned up. And on both sides of the Atlantic, it has turned the spotlight
both on the intelligence produced by MI6 and the CIA and on how their
political masters span that intelligence to both their own legislatures
and their publics to accelerate the trajectory to war.

They were questions that would would overshadow Blair's visit to thank
British troops for their actions in Iraq. It was designed as a triumphal
visit, but instead it served merely to underline the growing suggestion
that the very basis of the war itself had been flammed up.

It is a suspicion that has grown daily while the Prime Minister has been
away, fed both by stories in the British media and by a series of
statements by senior US officials that have cut the rug from under the
British case for invasion.

First, the hawkish US Secretary for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said last
week that he believed weapons would 'never be found'. This directly
contradicting Blair's position - a stance he was forced to reverse by the
week's end.

Then Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was quoted in an interview in
Vanity Fair as saying that the whole issue of pushing the argument over
WMD was simply a 'bureaucratic' device that would allow an invasion of
Iraq and the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia.

As if to pour petrol on the fire, Under-Secretary of State John Bolton has
also been quoted as saying that the war was not about real weapons of mass
destruction, but breaking up the 'intellectual property' - the scientists
with the knowledge to produce them.

'The Americans can afford to be much more flippant,' said one British
intelligence source last week. 'But Iraq's retention of weapons of mass
destruction is why we went to war.'

None of which has been very helpful for a British Government that won
shaky approval for war on the grounds that the weapons really did exist.

It was against this background of a split between Washington and London
over WMD that Blair set off on his whirlwind tour of six countries in five
days, supposedly to highlight Britain's brave new role in the world.

And it was against this background of 'unhelpful comments' from Blair's
allies in the US that Tom Kelly, the Prime Minister's press secretary
warned him of another bombshell that threatened to undermine Blair's case
for war - the news that Radio Four's Today programme was reporting a much
more damaging split - between the Government and its intelligence
services, a division striking to the heart of the fabric of the state.

Defence reporter Andrew Gilligan was claiming that key elements of the
dossier on Iraq published last September - specifically the suggestion
that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to use within 45 minutes - were
thrown in to 'sex up' painfully thin material - against the wishes of
intelligence officers.

Gilligan was right in the broad brush, if not in the detail. The material
had been 'sexed up' - as the spooks alleged - but by more subtle and more
pernicious means. The consequence, however, would be the same.

In a hurried conference call with London from the airport lounge in Kuwait
City, the decision was taken to wait and hope the story faded. The plane
took off only a little behind schedule: within hours, the combative
Defence Minister Adam Ingram and Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell were
deployed in London to insist that Downing Street had not applied undue
pressure.

If Blair had hoped that would put an end to it, he was mistaken. By the
time his Chinook landed in Umm Qasr, the travelling press had largely lost
interest in his tour of a minesweeper in favour of asking questions about
weapons of mass destruction.

When his third flight of a gruelling day touched down into a brilliant
orange Warsaw sunset, the message of his tour - national pride, the skill
of British troops, a new model of patriotism that embraced both being a
good European and resisting a federal superstate - was unravelling.

And so, when the Prime Minister's party reached his suite on the sixth
floor of the Hotel Sheraton in Warsaw, the secure phone lines to London
were swiftly activated. The man in demand was Sir David Omand, known
publicly as Britain's head of homeland security, charged with
co-ordinating the security services with the political machine. It was
clear by now that nothing would be resolved until the intelligence
services denied they were unhappy with the dossier.

The deal hammered out late into the night was for Blair to come out
fighting - and drag the complaining security services with him.

It may already be too late to repair the damage both to the reputation of
MI6 and to relationships between key figures in the present Government and
the intelligence community.

For even as Gilligan was being briefed, other media organisations were
having conversations with intelligence sources about the failings of the
government's use of intelligence material to justify the war - and in
particular about the involvement of Alastair Campbell in overselling the
story.

And if a shadow war has been declared between officers in the Secret
Intelligence Service and Campbell and Number 10, then the front line has
been the capital's coffee bars, the more chi-chi restaurants of the West
End.

It has been a curious sort of punch-up. For while few who will talk can
hide their contempt for the way they believe Campbell has behaved, which
they argue has undermined a still strong case for going to war against
Iraq, there are none who seriously believe that Campbell's scalp is up for
grabs.

'What we are seeing,' said one source, 'is something very new, and very
strange. MI6 is sticking its head over the parapet as much as it ever will
and saying that it is unhappy with the way its intelligence has been used
and its reputation damaged.

'MI6 feels totally discredited and used. That is behind the reason to
brief [against Campbell].

'It has been bubbling under for a long time, since October at least. So
they feel they are taking out the opposition, as that is what they are
trained to do.'

Another source added: 'The focus is on Campbell at the moment. MI6 feels
as though it has been pushed rather unwillingly into the limelight by the
Government. It is a shot across the bows saying: "If you want us to be
public property, then, when we feel you have misused our material, we'll
brief against you."'

By yesterday, the spooks' point seemed to have prevailed on the Prime
Minister, as he insisted to journalists travelling with him that whatever
the outcome on finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the
intelligence services certainly 'would not be blamed'.