An insult to British intelligence

Ministers doctored secret service briefings to get their way over Iraq

Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday April 30, 2003
The Guardian

Members of parliament returning to Westminster after their Easter break, and congressmen in America for that matter, may well be asking if they have been duped.

Saddam Hussein, they were repeatedly told, posed a threat not just to his own people, but to the national security of the US and Britain. But where is the evidence that he possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological material, and the ability to use them as weapons?

Ministers and intelligence agencies say they are confident that these will turn up and that they were dismantled and hidden well before Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors started looking for them at the end of last year.

It will take weeks, perhaps months, to track them down, we are warned. Yet isn't this precisely what Blix told the UN security council, only to be met with the response that London and Washington could not wait?

What is now clear, and admitted by all sides, is that whatever weapons of mass destruction Iraq did possess, they were not a threat, not even to British and American forces, from the time the UN inspectors went in.

Iraq, say London and Washington, duped Blix. Only the US and Britain could be trusted to search for the putative weapons.

Yet these are the same governments that have been engaged in the most outrageous abuse of information supplied by their security and intelligence services. "In my experience," Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, said last week, "the intelligence services are scrupulous in spelling out the limitations of their knowledge. Frankly, I doubt whether there is a single senior figure in the intelligence services who is surprised at the difficulty in finding a weapon of mass destruction in working order. If the threat from Saddam does turn out to have been overstated, the responsibility must rest with those who made the public statements."

Saddam's "military planning", said Tony Blair in last September's government dossier on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction", "allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".

Blair and his ministers made much of the discovery of Iraq importing aluminium tubes - evidence, they claimed, of Saddam's nuclear weapons programme. Further evidence, they insisted, was Iraq's attempt to procure uranium from Niger. Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the documents on which the claims were made as forgeries.

Britain's intelligence services now admit they were forged. Have ministers come clean? No - and by failing to do so they have further undermined their credibility.

Ministers may be rubbing their hands with glee at journalists in Baghdad turning up documents allegedly implicating George Galloway, the anti-war Labour MP, in the use of funds from Saddam's regime, and suggesting there were links between the regime and al-Qaida, and that France told Baghdad about its private diplomatic conversations with the US.

All very convenient. There must be doubts about the documents' authenticity. But even if they are genuine, intelligence services are notorious for hoarding tittle-tattle, exaggerating and distorting, not least to stress the importance of their own role in their bids for more funds. Heaven knows what we would find if the archives of MI5 and MI6 - and the CIA and FBI - were plundered.

Yet, significantly, it is not ministers who are warning of the dangers of jumping to conclusions. It is the intelligence agencies themselves. "They do not take things further forward," said an intelligence source about the Sunday Telegraph's publication of Iraqi documents appearing to show that Baghdad was keen to meet an "al-Qaida envoy" in 1998.

Tony Blair, we learn, was constantly asking the intelligence services if Saddam would fall like Ceausescu, or if British and US forces would be mired in a new Vietnam. He wanted assurances. Yet intelligence is an imprecise art. Snippets are picked up from communications traffic, informants pass on information that cannot be verified. Saddam and his entourage were notoriously difficult to penetrate.

Of course, questions should be asked about the information Blair and his ministers were given by the intelligence agencies, including about what military commanders were told to expect when they invaded Iraq. (One said he anticipated the Republican Guard coming over to help British and US forces to keep law and order.)

But as important, perhaps more so, is what ministers did with the information. There is sufficient evidence that they and their political advisers doctored it for the consumption of MPs and the public to warrant a parliamentary investigation.

· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor