Britain’s intelligence community faces an unprecedented crisis of credibility in the wake of the Commons’s foreign affairs committee’s report on the decision to go to war in Iraq.
By clearing Alastair Campbell, the director of communications at 10 Downing Street, at least of the charge that he sexed up the government’s September dossier, and absolving ministers of misleading Parliament, the cross-party committee has focused attention on the intelligence agencies, MI6 in particular.
Sir John Stanley, a leading Conservative member of the committee and former defence and Northern Ireland minister, said this week that never before had Britain gone to war ”specifically on the strength of intelligence assessments”.
Yet the MPs concluded that ”the jury is still out” on the accuracy of the intelligence ”until substantial evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is found”.
The intelligence services are desperate to find such evidence, partly to regain credibility, but also, they admit, because it is needed for political reasons — for the sake of the government.
Though its report asks more questions than it answers, the committee paints a picture of how the joint intelligence committee (JIC) hardened the contents of the dossier on the basis of what it calls ”thin” material as the government prepared for war against Iraq.
Sir Peter Ricketts, a top diplomat and former chairperson of the JIC, told the committee that a dossier drawn up in March last year was not published because of a need to ”build up a fuller picture”. Intelligence sources put it another way — there was nothing new to say.
Robin Cook, as a former foreign secretary familiar with MI6 reports, told the committee: ”We had very little access to human intelligence on the ground [in Iraq] and no hope whatsoever of putting in western agents.”
Gary Samore, weapons proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: ”The record of Western intelligence agencies collecting information on Iraq’s various weapons programmes is very poor.”
Cook said he would be astonished if the September dossier’s reliance on United States intelligence was ”not immense”, adding that ”the Americans were drawing heavily on exiles who were inside America”.
The committee says it seems Britain’s intelligence agencies relied too much on ”defectors and on exiles with an agenda of their own”.
It is unclear whether a defector was MI6’s single source for the claim that Saddam’s forces could mount a chemical attack within 45 minutes of an order being given. He is described in the report as ”established, reliable, and longstanding”, providing MI6 with the controversial claim in August last year.
Dame Pauline Neville Jones, another former JIC chairperson, made it clear in her evidence that official intelligence reports should err on the side of caution, not exaggeration. She highlighted the dangers of information becoming propaganda.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted that some of the assessments in the September dossier were based on ”judgement”, not on intelligence. Intelligence sources privately admit this.
They concede that intelligence can often be wrong, and that even if it correctly tells what a hostile regime possesses it may not tell anything about the regime’s intentions. The intelligence agencies’ job, they argue, is to give a ”worst case scenario”.
They told British and US military commanders that the Iraqi army, including the Republican Guard, would quickly surrender and help the invading troops maintain law and order and also that Saddam Hussein would use chemical weapons in defence of Baghdad.
Both assumptions were wrong. ”Very little was known about how [the Iraqis] planned to oppose the coalition or whether they had the will to fight,” the Ministry of Defence admitted in its report on the Iraqi war, also published this week.
The ministry report said Iraq was a ”very difficult intelligence target with few sources of information”. They were not sure whether Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were ”available for operational use”, placing further doubt on the 45-minute claim.
It is one thing to alert British troops to the worst possible dangers on the battlefield; it is quite another to use a worst-case scenario to advance the political case for war. The run-up to the Iraqi war was the first time a government had used intelligence in that way.
The foreign affairs committee’s report highlights an irony behind all this. MI6 was dragged into the limelight by the government against its will. It was nervous about the whole idea of a dossier in the first place, partly because it would show up its state of knowledge about Iraq’s banned weapons.
It also feared — in the event, rightly — that the way ministers would seize on intelligence to promote the case for war would lead to unwelcome pressure for greater openness. The committee chastised the British government for not allowing it to see intelligence reports or interview John Scarlett, the JIC chairperson.
It also said the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which meets in private and whose members are hand-picked by the prime minister, should become a proper Commons body under the control of MPs.
There was serious disquiet in the top echelons of the intelligence world about the British government’s use of intelligence. This turned to fury when the February dossier was published by Campbell without the JIC’s say-so.
But by generally backing the government, the Labour majority on the committee has turned the spotlight on the intelligence agencies, questioning the veracity of their information.
The claims made in the September dossier and the way the government handled the Commons committee inquiry will ensure that intelligence will in future be treated with much more scepticism. The intelligence agencies will not be thanking Downing Street for that.
Meanwhile, reports Julian Borger in Washington, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the US had not gone to war against Iraq because of fresh evidence of weapons of mass destruction but because Washington saw old evidence ”in a dramatic new light” after September 11.
The claim, in testimony to the Senate, reflected a sharp change in tactics by an administration that is under fire for knowingly basing its case against Saddam on flawed intelligence.
President George W Bush accused his critics of ”trying to rewrite history”, and insisted that ”there is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace”.
In his State of the Union address in January, the president referred to a British intelligence report that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium in Africa for use in its nuclear weapons programme.
But the White House this week admitted the claim was not based on solid information and that documents purporting to show an Iraqi attempt to buy ”yellow cake” raw uranium from Niger had been forged. — Â