The Lies of the Land

by Adam Macqueen

  This beefing-up went on right to the end of the process. On 19 September – after the deadline that JIC members had been given for making any changes to the dossier – Number 10 was continuing to tinker. ‘I think the statement on p19 that “Saddam is able to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat” is a bit of a problem,’ Jonathan Powell wrote to Scarlett. ‘It backs up the… argument that there is no CBW [chemical and biological warfare] threat and we will only create one if we attack him. I think you should redraft the para.’103 Scarlett promptly did so, though none of his intelligence colleagues had objected to the phrasing over three previous drafts. ‘We concluded that it was not right, the way that this was phrased, and therefore we took that out,’ he would tell the inquiry, chaired by Lord Hutton, looking into the death of Ministry of Defence expert and former UN weapons inspector Dr David Kelly and the whole dossier debacle. The following summer, Blair continued to insist to that old troublemaker Tam Dalyell that ‘At no time during the process did anyone attempt to override the intelligence judgements of the Chairman of the JIC and his Committee.’104

  Thirteen years later the Chilcot inquiry – the third exhaustive official investigation of the claims and counterclaims that swirled around Saddam’s WMDs ahead of the invasion – drew a subtly different conclusion:

  The urgency and certainty with which the Government stated that Iraq was a threat that had to be dealt with fuelled the demand for publication of the dossier…. The dossier was designed to ‘make the case’ and secure Parliamentary and public support for the Government’s position that action was urgently required to secure Iraq’s disarmament…. The assessed intelligence had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued. The JIC should have made that clear to Mr Blair.105

  Let us follow just one claim through the process of drafting and publishing the dossier – the one flagged up to BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan by David Kelly. It is perhaps the most notorious claim. And it was particularly problematic, bringing the full vengeance of the government, dragged by a near-demented Alastair Campbell, down upon both journalist and source.

  On 5 September the Joint Intelligence Committee received some information from MI6 to consider for the dossier. It came from an Iraqi military source, but only at third hand. They phrased it as such: ‘Iraq has probably dispersed its special weapons, including its CBW weapons. Intelligence also indicates that from forward-deployed storage sites, chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes.’106

  By the time the information made it into the dossier, on 10 September, it had been stripped of the opening qualification, about the material being hidden and not immediately to hand. Instead of a delay, the forty-five minutes had become an issue of rapidity. Iraq ‘Envisages the use of WMD in its current military planning and could deploy such weapons within 45 minutes of the order being given. Within the last month intelligence has suggested that the Iraqi military would be able to use their chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of being ordered to do so.’107 By 16 September the claim had been weakened slightly – ‘The Iraqi military may be able to deploy…’ – but it had also been bumped up into the dossier’s executive summary.

  On 17 September doubts were raised about that wording from both ends of the spectrum. A member of the MoD’s Defence Intelligence staff complained that it was ‘rather strong since it is based on a single source’. Instead, the person proposed, it ‘Could say intelligence suggests…’.108 Campbell, meanwhile, emailed Scarlett to object to the word ‘may’, and got a reply that it would be ‘tightened’.109 It morphed into the definitive ‘Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.’110

  This led members of the Defence Intelligence staff to raise some serious concerns about the claim on 19 September. There were, they told their bosses, ‘a number of questions in our minds relating to the intelligence on the military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, particularly about the times mentioned and the failure to differentiate between the two types of weapons’, either long-range missiles which posed a threat to other countries, or short-range munitions that could only be used on a battlefield.111 On 20 September another pointed out: ‘it is not clear what is meant by “weapons are deployable within 45 minutes”. The judgement is too strong considering the intelligence on which it is based.’112 They were thanked for their input.

  The dossier was finally published on 24 September. The forty-fiveminute claim was highlighted in a signed foreword by the prime minister himself: Saddam’s ‘military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them.’113 Blair flagged this up in the Commons too:

  I am aware, of course, that people will have to take elements of this on the good faith of our intelligence services, but this is what they are telling me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence picture that they paint is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population, and that he is actively trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability.114

  During the drafting of the dossier, Powell had emailed Campbell – copying Scarlett in – to ask a rhetorical question: ‘Alastair – what will be the headline in the Standard on day of publication? What do we want it to be?’115 On 24 September he got his answer. London’s evening newspaper went with ‘45 MINUTES FROM ATTACK’. The following morning’s Sun was even more apocalyptic: ‘45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’. Years later, in his memoirs, Blair would admit that the claim was ‘highlighted by some papers the next day in a form we should, in retrospect, have corrected’, but at the time it can only have felt like a case of ‘job done’.116

  Two years later former cabinet secretary Sir Robin Butler and a committee of privy counsellors delivered a cool and measured assessment of the intelligence and its use in the dossier before the war. They pointed out that when it came to the forty-five-minute claim, ‘The intelligence report itself was vague and ambiguous. The time period given was the sort of period which a military expert would expect; in fact it is somewhat longer than a well-organised military unit might aspire to.’117 They discovered that no one had really known what sort of munitions were being referred to, what their range might be. Not making this clear in the dossier ‘was unhelpful to an understanding of the issue…. [A] more accurate representation… of the report would have highlighted the uncertainties in the intelligence by saying: “A source has claimed some weapons may be deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them, but the exact nature of the weapons, the agents involved and the context of their use is not clear.” ’118 Not quite as sexy, is it?

  But then, as it turned out, the information might well have been nonsense anyway. ‘We have been informed by SIS’ – officials always insist on calling MI6 by its proper name rather than the one everyone else uses – ‘that the validity of the intelligence report on which the 45-minute claim was based has come into question,’ noted Butler. ‘Post-war source validation by SIS… has thrown doubt on the reliability of one of the links in the reporting chain affecting [the] intelligence report.’119 By then, of course, Saddam Hussein had demonstrated that he didn’t have chemical or biological weapons of either the long-range or battlefield variety, by the simple method of failing to use them when coalition forces had invaded.

  In many ways, none of it mattered: George W. Bush was determined to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq, and Tony Blair was determined to go along with America come what may. As Sir John Chilcot put it in his 2016 comprehensive report on the Iraq War, the prime minister had no choice but to
make WMDs his excuse: ‘based on consistent legal advice, the UK could not share the US objective of regime change. The UK government therefore set as its objective the disarmament of Iraq in accordance with the obligations imposed in a series of [UN] Security Council resolutions.’120 Blair hoped to haul a war that was already inevitable onto some kind of legal and internationally justifiable footing, but everyone, on every side, was starting with a desired endpoint and working backwards. In July 2002 the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, told a Downing Street meeting that in Washington ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’.121 Rather than taking it as a warning, the prime minister seemed to have taken it as advice.

  Of course both Blair and Bush received generous help from Saddam himself, who had been quite happy to fulfil the role of international bogeyman previously undertaken by Colonel Gaddafi (as we saw in chapter 5). He had spent the years since 1998, when he kicked out UN weapons inspectors, taunting the world with the possibility that he might be redeveloping chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons; he was hardly in a position to complain when they chose to believe him.

  The world almost certainly is a better place for not having Saddam Hussein in it any more. Trouble is, almost everyone who has rolled into the gap he left behind has been just as, if not more, appalling.

  One final note: don’t get muddled and think the document we have been discussing here was the one that became known as the ‘dodgy dossier’. That one, ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation’, was totally different. It was published by Downing Street in February 2003 as everyone geared up for an invasion the White House had pencilled in for the following month. When it was published, Blair was at pains to stress just how hush-hush its sources were: ‘It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this, or giving us this information, and making it up. It is the intelligence that they are receiving, and we are passing it on to people.’122 Three days later much of its contents turned out to have been cut-andpasted, typos and all, from an academic article by a postgraduate student in California.123

  8

  BREAKING THEIR WORD

  In the early years of the twenty-first century it sometimes seemed as though we could only watch as things spun out of control. Wars without end or aim; financial failures and meltdowns beyond the scope of comprehension. Again and again villainy was exposed on a massive scale – bankers who gambled with all our futures, media titans presiding over criminal enterprises, even paedophiles like Cyril Smith and Jimmy Savile whose political patronage helped them get away with unimaginable crimes for decades. In every case the perpetrators seemed to slip away without punishment. The public could rage all they wanted – an unprecedented number of them took to the streets to try to tell their leaders that war with Iraq would be an unmitigated disaster – but it made no difference.

  Politicians seemed to be able to offer little more than false assurances, and with each broken promise and disingenuous rationale, the public’s trust ebbed away. When all else failed, the politicians tried to dress themselves up in new clothes: George W. Bush, a man whose own military career was chequered, to say the least, donning a flight suit to swagger through a premature victory rally; Gordon Brown, one of the central pillars of government for a decade, presenting himself as a new broom sweeping through Downing Street; David Cameron, the Old-Etonian epitome of a Tory toff, dressed down as a green-minded, hoodie-hugging man of the people. As Brown’s much-repeated pledge of an ‘end to boom and bust’ exploded spectacularly, those who would soon oust him and form the country’s first coalition government in sixty-five years made solemn promises of their own – which they felt not the slightest compunction to keep.

  When even the politicians appeared impotent – and not overly bothered by that fact – was it any wonder that the public began to throw their support behind anyone, or anything, that promised to shake up a system that seemed broken beyond repair?

  * * * * *

  ‘Mission Accomplished’

  Banner, televised presidential address, USS Abraham Lincoln, 1 May 2003

  It was a hell of a spectacle. The plane made a complicated ‘tailhook’ landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier, docking onto the arresting gear at a speed of 150 miles an hour and then decelerating to a halt within just a few hundred feet. As it taxied around, its wings folding gracefully in upon themselves, the markings on its fuselage came into view of the assembled TV cameras: ‘Navy – 1’ on the tail, and on the left side of the cockpit, ‘George W. Bush – Commander in Chief’. Through the smoked windscreen a figure in a white helmet and flight suit could be seen, apparently making his post-flight checks. It couldn’t be, could it?

  It was. As the crew assembled on the flight deck, out climbed the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush, helmet now beneath his arm as he saluted them. So much for those jokes about him being a man who couldn’t even eat a pretzel without choking and falling over; so much for all that gossip about how he had gone AWOL from the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War and lost his authorization as a pilot. For a good twenty seconds he strutted about, giving the impression he had been flying solo. Then he gave a thumbs up and two copilots sheepishly ambled behind him to pose for the photographers. The president had to make his way towards the cameras through a storm of backslapping and handshaking. ‘Yes, I flew it,’ he confirmed to the waiting journalists, skipping over the question of who exactly had been at the controls during the impressive landing. ‘Yeah, of course, I liked it.’1

  Soon afterwards, out of his flight suit and in jacket and tie, he made his way to a podium that had been set up on deck in front of a vast banner hung across the ship’s tower. ‘Mission Accomplished’, it read, across a stars and stripes background. ‘Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans,’ he began. ‘Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.’2

  It is hard to say which part of the operation was more nonsensical. For all the laddish briefings – Vice President Dick Cheney had chortled, ‘he’s going to fly onto the carrier and do a trap – that is, they’ll catch him with cable arresting gear. No president’s ever done that before. And I’m not sure he told [his wife] Laura what he is going to do either!’3 – the plane’s regular pilot, Commander John ‘Skip’ Lussier, was firmly in charge, handing over the controls to the president only for a brief period when they were high in the sky. (Lussier obligingly told the press that the pair ‘were just rapping, like flight school buds’ during the flight.4) The ship, which had been deployed to the Persian Gulf, was now sitting not far off the coast from San Diego, which, despite explicit press briefings to the contrary, put it well within the range of the helicopter the president typically used to get around. He just fancied some Top Gun antics and the chance to play dress-up alongside people who had genuinely been risking their lives over the previous months. Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state, and the 120 journalists who were brought in to witness the stunt arrived by significantly less glamorous transport.

  As for the speech, Bush could not have been more wrong. The fighting in Iraq had barely begun. As 2003 wore on the country settled into a grim cycle of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings. Despite the capture of Saddam Hussein on 13 December 2003, the violence was escalating. US troops were still in the country when Bush left office five years later, vainly protesting that ‘I believe we can win.’5 At the time of Bush’s speech, just over a hundred US servicemen and women had lost their lives in Iraq; by the time his successor Barack Obama pulled the last troops out in 2011, the total stood at nearly 4,500.6 Combat operations had gone on for seven years, longer than either World War I or World War II.

  As the fighting drew on, White House spin doctors took pains to draw attention to the bits towards the end of hi
s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech where the president said: ‘We have difficult work to do in Iraq’ and ‘The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time’, rather than the opening statement.7 But there was no mistaking the central message, even had it not been emblazoned across the ship’s tower in letters several feet high. Bush’s people even tried to disown the banner too. It had, they insisted, been the crew’s idea, and had been intended to celebrate that the USS Abraham Lincoln’s own record 290-day deployment was at an end and its five-thousand-strong crew were on their way home. The US Navy pointed out that while they might have hung it up, it was the White House who had got it made.8 The president’s visit, incidentally, had delayed the crew’s return to their loved ones – they had originally been due home in January – by a day, so that he could spend a night on board before they sailed into dock. If he had the chance to play at sailors, he was going to get his money’s worth.9

  What did ‘major combat operations’ mean, anyway? It was a very carefully chosen turn of phrase. As the highly partisan Fox News reported at the time: ‘He will not declare victory in the war, hoping to avoid triggering Geneva Convention rules that require the release of prisoners of war, the end of the pursuit of enemy leaders, and the designation of the United States as an occupying power once victory is declared.’10 The first reports of American troops torturing and degrading Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib began to emerge before the year was out.