For his part, Sir Irvine Patnick recanted shortly before his death in 2012:
I would like to put on the record how appalled and shocked I was to discover the extent of the deceit and cover-up surrounding these events. It is now clear that the information I received from some police officers at the time was wholly inaccurate, misleading and plain wrong.
However, I totally accept responsibility for passing such information on without asking further questions. So, many years after this tragic event, I am deeply and sincerely sorry for the part I played in adding to the pain and suffering of the victims’ families.62
‘A licence is required for the export to Iraq of goods which are subject to control…. Applications for such licences are examined in particular against the guidelines on the export of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq announced to the House by my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary on 29 October 1985.’
Alan Clark, House of Commons, 20 April 1989
When three directors of Midlands company Matrix Churchill were arrested in February 1991, just days after the end of the first Gulf War, and charged with exporting machine tools used to make weapons to Iraq, it looked like an open-and-shut case. Certainly that was the opinion of Geoffrey Robertson QC, the lawyer hired to represent the company’s managing director, Paul Henderson. The MD appeared to be
a businessman clever enough to deceive ministers and DTI officials while flying back and forth to Baghdad to superintend the installation of his machine tools in the arms factories. There was extremely prejudicial evidence that bombs made by Matrix Churchill had been found on battlefields where British soldiers had fallen: once the jury heard that it would be the end of any chance of acquittal.63
But Matrix Churchill had not been acting alone. The government had been in on the whole thing. Henderson and his colleagues had faked their export applications, which claimed the tools were for non-military purposes, with the connivance of those DTI officials, and with the explicit encouragement of one of the department’s ministers. In January 1988 Henderson had visited trade minister Alan Clark as part of a deputation from the Machine Tool Technologies Association, to discuss the difficulties in getting export licences to sell their goods – which could be used for all sorts of innocent manufacturing purposes as well as crafting guns and bombs – to Iraq, as a result of the stringent restrictions imposed a few years earlier when the country had been at war with its neighbour Iran. Clark had been explicitly charged by his boss and heroine Mrs Thatcher with promoting British exports, and his own unique morality – shag-happy Hitler fan, obsessed with animal rights, not in the slightest bit bothered about human beings – meant he was unable to see why that shouldn’t include warmongers like Saddam Hussein. He regarded the restrictions agreed between his department and the Foreign Office as ‘irksome, tiresome and intrusive’, and was quite happy to advise the manufacturers that ‘the intended use of the machines should be couched in such a manner as to emphasize the peaceful aspect to which they will be put. Applications should stress the record of “general engineering” usage of machine tools.’64 Clark would later describe this as being ‘economical… with the actualité. There was nothing misleading to make a formal or introductory comment that the Iraqis would be using the current orders for “general engineering purposes”…. All I didn’t say was “and for making munitions”.’65
The minister was not the only representative of the British state to have encouraged Henderson either. That same year the businessman had been recruited as an informant by MI6, who had requested he pass on information he picked up on his trips to Baghdad. Since Saddam did not look kindly on people he suspected of spying – in 1990 he hanged an Observer journalist, Farzad Bazoft, after torturing a false confession out of him – this was a very risky sideline indeed. Henderson’s secret-service handler testified in disguise at his abortive trial in 1992 that he was ‘a very, very brave man…. There are very few people who would take such risks and take them so much in their stride’.66
The government approved the first batch of Matrix Churchill’s machine tools going to Iraq one month after Henderson’s meeting with Clark. Given that the end address for the consignment was the Nassr munitions factory, this would qualify as the most blatant blind-eye-turning in history, were it not trumped for the title by the fact, revealed at the trial, that they had also approved a consignment of rifles and shotguns to the same address under the pretence they were for ‘sporting purposes’.67 But between the Matrix Churchill delivery in February 1988 and the arrests of the company directors three years later, something very awkward had happened: Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and British soldiers had been killed in the resulting war – very possibly using weapons produced using equipment the British government had approved the sale of. As a subsequently disclosed Whitehall memo put it, any trial carried the risk of having ‘the DTI’s dirty washing aired in court’.68 The Foreign Office wrote to Number 10 to warn Prime Minister John Major that ‘the trial may be embarrassing for the Government…. The press may use disclosures in an unhelpful sense to suggest that ministers knowingly broke their own guidelines.’69
A massive cover-up was launched. No fewer than six government ministers from four different departments signed public-interest immunity certificates claiming that it was ‘necessary for the proper functioning of the public service’ to withhold the paperwork which Henderson and his colleagues needed to defend themselves at their trial.70 Officials even prepared one certificate for Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke to sign which played the ultimate card,71 suggesting that to release official documents would be ‘likely to prejudice national security by revealing matters, knowledge of which would assist those whose purpose is to injure the security of the UK and whose actions in the past have shown that they are willing to kill innocent civilians’.72 The British government was prepared to let three British businessmen, one having spied for his country, go to prison in order to hide its own role in the crimes those men had allegedly committed.
The plot failed, partly thanks to the judge taking a dim view of such draconian secrecy measures, but mostly thanks to Alan Clark. Even before the trial started he had changed his story twice: first, when allegations about his meeting with Matrix Churchill emerged, he had dismissed them as ‘rubbish, trash and sensational’;73 then, he had admitted giving the exporters a nod and a wink because ‘it was clear to me that the interests of the West were well served by Iran and Iraq fighting each other, the longer the better’.74 His witness statement ahead of the trial reverted to the official line, but in the box he was only too happy to admit that the phrasing of the export licences had been ‘a matter for Whitehall cosmetics to keep the record ambiguous’ – something he had personally encouraged.75 Robertson, who cross-examined Clark, reckoned he was the only figure from Whitehall and Westminster involved in the trial who ‘genuinely cared about the possibility of Paul Henderson’s innocence’.76 Clark’s testimony blew the prosecution out of the water. The trial was abandoned the next day, 9 November 1992.
Clark admitted something else in the witness box too: that the arms export guidelines everyone thought the government was working from, which banned any ‘lethal equipment’ from going to either Iraq or Iran, had been secretly changed, several years back, to ‘tilt to Iraq’, which at that pre-Gulf War point was Britain’s preferred party in the region.77 This caused panic in Whitehall, because minister after minister was on record over the years telling the Commons that the guidelines – known as the Howe guidelines for Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe – were the same as they had ever been. The prime minister himself, John Major, had stated just a few months earlier that the policy had not changed between 1985 and the invasion of Iraq in 1990.78 Now a memo from his private secretary brought him awkward news: ‘It emerges that the Howe guidelines of 1985 were amended by ministers in December 1988, but the amendment was never announced to Parliament.’79
The change had followed a ceasefire in the war between
Iran and Iraq. It was agreed between the three departments that had to agree export licences for arms and related equipment: the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Foreign Office. William Waldegrave, the minister responsible at the last department, claimed he had been bullied by his counterparts at the other two ministries into both agreeing to relax the restrictions and not announcing them, even though he thought it was ‘a serious mistake; both regimes were still dangerous, not only to their immediate neighbours but further afield…. Both had appalling human rights records’.80 There is little sign of such hand-wringing in the note he scribbled in the margin of an internal memo from 1989 warning that Iraq could be using imported machine tools to develop nuclear weapons: ‘screwdrivers can be required to make atom bombs!’81 Fancying himself as one of the few intellectuals in government, Waldegrave personally drafted a response to potential questions:
The form of words we agreed to use if we are now pressed in Parliament over the guidelines was the following: ‘The guidelines on the export of defence equipment to Iran and Iraq are kept under constant review, and are applied in the light of the prevailing circumstances’….82
You would look at that sentence for a long time before you read the words ‘have changed’.
At the Scott inquiry, the lengthy judicial investigation into the whole business which the prime minister was forced to call after the collapse of the Matrix Churchill trial, Waldegrave tried to argue that – despite everyone concerned working from different guidelines from the end of 1988 onwards – the fact they had not been announced made it ‘perfectly clear they were never changed’.83 At his own appearance, Alan Clark cut through the crap once again to point out that this was a ‘slightly Alice-in-Wonderland suggestion’.84
It was far from the only tortuous logic on display at the inquiry. Mrs Thatcher, confronted with a Downing Street minute requesting that she be ‘kept very closely in touch and at every stage consulted on all relevant decisions’ about the arms guidelines, said that the change wouldn’t have been brought to her attention because it was ‘not a change of policy but a change of circumstance’.85 Former minister Tristan Garel-Jones tried to argue that when he had claimed the release of official documents to the trial could have caused ‘unquantifiable damage to the functions of security and intelligence’, he wasn’t exaggerating, because ‘the word “unquantifiable” can mean unquantifiably large or unquantifiably small’.86 Robin Butler, the head of the Home Civil Service, said it was perfectly possible when drafting responses to parliamentary questions to give ‘an accurate but incomplete answer… an answer which in itself is true, [although] it did not give a full picture’.87 Ian McDonald, an official at the MoD, was reduced to spluttering that ‘truth is a very difficult concept’.88
One of the few straightforward answers came from Mark Higson, a former civil servant who said he had left his job on the Foreign Office’s Iraq desk partly because of the ‘sham’ of dishonest ministerial statements about the exports policy. Asked why he thought the relaxation of rules had not been announced, he said: ‘we were getting, you know, tens and tens of letters about gassing of the Kurds and political prisoners or hostages or whatever. It would have been unacceptable…. There would have been trouble from the public and members of Parliament if we had announced publicly that there was a relaxation in favour of Iraq.’89
As Lord Scott established in the 1,800-word report he delivered in 1996, the fact was that the British government had secretly adopted ‘a more liberal policy on defence sales to Iraq’.90 They had agreed to sell Saddam Hussein the tools he needed to make weapons, despite being warned that he was working on what would later come to be known as weapons of mass destruction. And they had lied to the British people about it.
Who could possibly have guessed that this sort of thing might eventually come back to bite them?
‘The document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.’
Tony Blair, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, 24 September 2002
I do not believe Tony Blair lied about his reasons for taking the country to war against Saddam Hussein. I think he genuinely believed that the Iraqi leader possessed WMDs, and was preparing to use them.
Thing is, I do not think he held that belief on any kind of sound evidential basis.
Most prime ministers go mad eventually. Harold Wilson got there by his second stint in Downing Street, when he started seeing plots and paranoia everywhere he looked. It took Margaret Thatcher until her third term, when she stopped trying to keep any of her colleagues on side and decided she was the only woman who could save the world. Gordon Brown, amazingly, managed to lose his grip on reality even before he made it to Number 10, so utterly consumed did he become with a determination to oust his predecessor. Blair began to slip the surly bonds of earth when he returned to Downing Street in 2001.
It was then that he became infused with the messianic fervour that has stuck with him ever since – a conviction that he had somehow moved so far beyond the conventional political wisdoms of left and right that he alone was afforded a vision of what was best not just for Britain but for everyone. Emotional truth counted for far more than historical truth. In the days after the 9/11 attacks he had attended a memorial service in Manhattan, talked about the London Blitz and told his hosts: ‘As you stood by us those days, we stand side by side with you now.’91 This solemn pronouncement ignored the inconvenient detail that the two years when the greatest number of German bombs were raining down on London, America was maintaining a position of studied neutrality.
There was no evidence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on America, but nevertheless Blair was carried along with President George W. Bush’s belief that there must be. In his 2010 memoir A Journey he writes: ‘I thought I could see something deeper, that at a certain level down beneath the surface there was an alliance taking shape between rogue states and terrorist groups.’92
His American partner in the misadventure was open about his belief that God gave him his orders directly. Blair, who hid his own fervent religiosity while he was in Downing Street, seemed to take his inspiration from somewhere within. In his party conference speech from 2004, he fessed up, in his usual staccato fashion, to having been mistaken about those WMDs:
The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong.
I acknowledge that and accept it.
…the problem is, I can apologise for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can’t, sincerely at least, apologise for removing Saddam.
The world is a better place with Saddam in prison not in power.…
Do I know I’m right?
Judgements aren’t the same as facts.
Instinct is not science.
I’m like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong.
I only know what I believe.93
That was Blair’s starting point: what he believed. Then all he had to do was find the evidence to fit around it.
This was exactly how the infamous dossier that he commissioned in the autumn of 2002 was compiled. The most damning bits of intelligence were cherry-picked, then wrapped up to look as damning as they possibly could. Yes, of course, as Downing Street communications boss Alastair Campbell has always furiously insisted, the security services had ‘ownership’ of the document. But they knew exactly what their job was, because the prime minister had announced on 3 September that the dossier would demonstrate how Saddam ‘is without any question still trying to develop that chemical, biological, potentially nuclear capability’.94
Besides, while the metaphorical pen might have been held by Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chief John Scarlett, it was Campbell who chaired meetings at which the dossier’s contents were discussed ‘from the presentational point of view’. W
riting in his diary, he was explicit as to the point of the exercise: ‘Today was about beginning to turn the tide of public opinion and it was going to be very tough indeed…. It had to be revelatory and we needed to show that it was new and informative and part of a bigger case.’95 The extent of the influence he and other Number 10 spin doctors had over the way the dossier was written is evident from the welter of documents that have been released to the no fewer than three official inquiries that have studied its compilation. ‘Re dossier, substantial rewrite… as per TB’s discussion’ runs one email, sent from Campbell to Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell on 5 September 2002.96 Another spinner, Godric Smith, emailed Campbell six days later to say, ‘I think there is material here we can work with but it is in a bit of a muddle and needs a lot more clarity in the guts of it’.97 Eight days after that, his colleague Tom Kelly pointed out: ‘The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say that he could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon.’98 And Desmond Bowen from the Cabinet Office defence secretariat emailed Scarlett directly on 11 September with the following advice:
In looking at the WMD sections, you will clearly want to be as firm and authoritative as you can be. You will clearly need to judge the extent to which you need to hedge your judgements with, for example, ‘it is almost certain’ and similar caveats.
I appreciate that this can increase the authenticity of the document in terms of it being a proper assessment, but that needs to be weighed against the use that will be made by the opponents of action who will add up the judgements on which we do not have absolute clarity.99
The effect was to strip out every qualification, nuance and doubt from material that the JIC – and every other intelligence body – warned was ‘sporadic and patchy’ at best.100 Nothing was added, but plenty was taken away. Emails between intelligence officials who were shown what had been done with their information complain about ‘iffy drafting’ and claims that were ‘likely to mislead’.101 Some of the changes seemed to go even further. In one case, a sentence detailing how Iraq ‘would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon’ if sanctions remained in place, and would need ‘at least five years’ to do so if they were lifted, was changed in a subsequent draft to ‘Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years.’102
The Lies of the Land Page 20