In the Cheltenham headquarters of Britain’s secret global listening facility, GCHQ, analysts have access to one of the world’s most powerful pieces of computer software.
They call it Dictionary, and its job is to screen the massive flows of intercepted data and look for groups of words of significance to whatever the analysts are seeking.
When those groups come up, the software alerts the analysts who then begin a review of all the intercepted communication in their search for hard intelligence.
It is a painstaking and rigorous procedure that is these day shared among experts across the globe: from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
On 31 January a memo was sent from the National Security Agency in Maryland from one Frank Koza at GCHQ’s American sister listening operation.
The memo was blunt. It asked the recipients at GCHQ to help with an American mission: to analyse US intercepts of the homes and offices of certain UN delegations to the Security Council.
It singled out key members of the UNSC (Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Bulgaria, Chile and Pakistan) for special attention, but said the operation should stretch to all delegations (except Britain and America, of course) if that proved necessary to give the US an edge.
The United States was looking for any information that could help Koza’s government put pressure on these countries to vote for a US and UK-sponsored resolution that would authorise a war against Iraq.
What Koza never suspected was that someone outside the NSA would be so shocked by his request to help with a dirty tricks campaign that they would leak his memo, or that it would end up in the hands of The Observer. But by last week that memo had led to the biggest spy-hunt since the David Shayler affair.
In the Maryland headquarters of the NSA, incredulity at the leak — and the knowledge that someone in one of its partner intelligence organisations had deliberately disclosed evidence of the operation at a time designed to cause severe damage to America’s attempts to secure a second Security Council resolution authorising war against Iraq — turned to fury.
The leak, however, raises as many questions as the number of secrets it reveals. The most pressing of these remains: why would a career intelligence officer risk discovery, ignominy and imprisonment to leak it in the first place?
The answer to that question is to be found not simply in the conscience of the individual intelligence officer, but in a wider conflict between the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic and their political masters.
In the imposing glass-fronted riverside headquarters of MI6 in London, as in the Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ, the several thousand employees of the Secret Intelligence Service stick to a view that some may regard as arcane in the individualism of the modern world.
They hold fast to a credo that they are the real guardians of the UK, that while politicians may come and go, their work is eternal. ‘The intelligence professionals feel that they stand somewhat above the vagaries of politics,’ said one close observer familiar with their work.
‘But what has happened is that they have come into conflict with the politicians over Iraq. They feel that their long history is in danger of being undermined by the uses made of the intelligence product by Number 10, and that the way information has been spun has corroded the public’s belief in what they do.’
This tension has been visible beneath the surface for months, as intelligence officials have briefed against the more outrageous claims made by the Government.
The tensions between the intelligence services and the Downing Street spin operation date back to last summer, when the first so-called secret dossier on Iraq, detailing Saddam’s armoury of weapons of mass destruction, was being finalised in the autumn.
The team working on it — led by Tony Blair’s director of communications Alastair Campbell, head of homeland security David Omand, Downing Street foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, and representatives of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ — began by deciding what messages derived from intelligence material should be put across, and then attempting to find publicly available information backing them up.
The September dossier went through two or three final drafts, with Campbell writing it off each time, and had already resulted in fairly serious rows between Campbell, Omand and Stephen Lander, then head of M15.
The essence of the disagreement is said to have been that intelligence material should be presented ‘straight’, rather than spiced up to make a political argument.
The problem with a second dossier on Saddam’s record of deception, drawn up in January when it began to become obvious that Hans Blix’s work was not making an incontrovertible case for war, was that it was completed with far less time for cross-checking.
The result was the infamous ‘dodgy dossier’, reliant on a plagiarised PhD thesis to make its argument that Saddam was a threat, and admissions from Downing Street that it should have acknowledged its sources.
‘The dossier was unhelpful,’ said one officer. ‘It undermines the very real message that we are trying to get across – to persuade the public that Saddam Hussein is a risk, but for many complicated reasons.
‘There is a feeling that there is something reckless about some of the people around Tony Blair — that they are dangerous.
‘There is a feeling among many in the intelligence community that they are being forced to sacrifice their integrity for short-term political gain.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â