When the material was presented to the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, made some ‘snippy comments’ about how thin it seemed. But neither he nor anyone else on the JIC really probed its quality, not knowing how useless it truly was and not thinking it was their job to second-guess Sir Richard Dearlove and MI6.60 Reflecting later, some senior members of the intelligence committee concluded: ‘We let the PM down.’61
The urge to make ‘poor intelligence’, which was in fact worse than poor, look like ‘incontrovertible proof’ lay at the heart of everything that was rotten about the dossier. It was even mooted that one of Campbell’s family practice of spin doctors should take direct charge of the exercise. John Williams, the Director of Public and Press Affairs at the Foreign Office, put himself up for the job. Williams, like Campbell, was a former Political Editor of the Daily Mirror. He offered to take full-time responsibility for writing the dossier.
That raised a protest from John Scarlett. The chairman of the JIC argued that he should have titular charge of the operation. Blair and Campbell saw that it would suit them better to let Scarlett have ‘ownership’. The dossier would appear more authentic if it could be presented as the work of intelligence officials rather than spin doctors. Blair wanted to be able to present it as coming from ‘an objective source’ because, in his own words, ‘it was important to make sure that no-one could question the intelligence that was in it as coming from the genuine intelligence agencies.’62 Campbell happily noted that his ‘mate’ Scarlett and ‘the SIS guys’ were anyway being ‘really helpful’.63 Scarlett and Dearlove were not politicians, but they had not got to such senior positions in the intelligence bureaucracy without possessing acute political radar. ‘They are a service,’ notes another member of the JIC. ‘They’d made their careers by building their organisations into organisations that are needed by government and deliver what government wants.’64 As well as more specific pressures to deliver, there was a general psychological one. The intelligence agencies had been delivering all these warnings to Blair over many years; they and even more so their cousins in America were facing enormous criticism over the failure to anticipate 9/11; none of them wanted to be accused of underestimating dangers ever again; now they were expected to produce the goods so the politicians could make the case to the public for doing something about it. On top of that, Blair was a powerful, charming and charismatic Prime Minister with their careers in his hands.
‘They never reined him in,’ observes one very senior member of the diplomatic corps. ‘Dearlove and Scarlett find themselves sitting on the sofa next to Tony in his den, day after day. I think they became intoxicated by their proximity to power.’65
A senior figure in intelligence also saw that ‘they enjoyed being intimate with this Prime Minister who is taking them very seriously.’66 Iain Duncan Smith, who led the Tories into enthusiastic support for the war, believes: ‘They crossed the line.’67
A very senior Whitehall official agrees: ‘There was a breakdown in process. The more hot and urgent a situation is, the more important it is that there is a cool body of people assessing the evidence in a rational way. That didn’t happen.’68
Elements of the intelligence services would later brief that they had always been unhappy about the way in which the dossier was put together and only co-operated through gritted teeth. Yet to Number 10 staff ‘they did not give the impression of being dragged along kicking and screaming.’69 Senior civil servants and diplomats observed plenty of enthusiasm for the exercise on the JIC and at the top of SIS. ‘Dearlove, Scarlett and all their guys were really gung-ho for war. They believed there were WMD. They wanted the war.’ One influential figure was the SIS bureau chief in Washington, who was very committed to ‘doing Saddam’.70
The careful Butler inquiry would later suggest that Scarlett was too vulnerable to pressure. That report concluded that they saw ‘a strong case’ for the chairman of the JIC to be ‘someone with experience of dealing with ministers in a very senior role, and who is demonstrably beyond influence, and thus probably in his last post’.71 In fact, Blair would later reward Scarlett for his services with a knighthood and promote him to head of MI6.
When all the flaws in the dossier were later exposed, Scarlett would take the bigger hit. Yet some very senior figures in Whitehall concluded that this was unjust. ‘John has taken more of the flak reputationally. That’s unfair. Richard [Dearlove] was more responsible for distorting the process.’72 In the months after 9/11, Dearlove and Blair had been thrown together as no head of MI6 and Prime Minister had been before.
‘They bonded as a result of 9/11. They became very close friends,’ remarks another senior mandarin who was friends with the head of MI6.73
Sally Morgan, one of the Prime Minister’s closest aides, thought the seduction flowed both ways. ‘Tony was beguiled by rich people, by military people and by intelligence people. He loved these smooth, urbane, Oxbridge types. There was also running through it a lot of smug British “we’re better at this stuff than the Americans”.’74
One senior civil servant says: ‘Whether Richard recruited Blair or Blair recruited Richard, it is hard to say.’75
Dearlove was not as he seemed. ‘He looks like a clumsy bear. But Richard is really a pirate, he’s a buccaneer.’ During the frenzied construction of the dossier, the head of MI6 personally delivered to the Prime Minister ‘hot’ items of intelligence. ‘I think he must regret that: taking intelligence direct to the Prime Minister.’76
‘It was not just Blair’s fault,’ says one member of the JIC. ‘Everyone forgot that intelligence is not fact.’77
Over the summer, the weak March text of the dossier was redrafted to depict Saddam as a much graver threat. On 10 September, Scarlett circulated the latest version, including for the first time a claim that the Iraqi dictator had the ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes. This was sourced to a ‘senior Iraqi officer via a trusted Iraqi agent of MI6’.
The consumers in Number 10 were still not satisfied.
Every senior spin doctor in Downing Street, none of whom had any experience of handling delicate intelligence material and none of whom had a clue about its quality, was invited to throw in their opinions. Phil Bassett, a former industrial relations correspondent who was now a political adviser, e-mailed Campbell that ‘it needs to be written more in officialese, lots of it is too journalistic as it now stands … reading like STimes [Sunday Times] at its worst. Crucially, though, it’s intelligence-lite.’78 Godric Smith, a career civil servant with no intelligence experience whatsoever, complained: ‘I think there’s material here we can work with but it is a bit of a muddle and needs a lot more clarity in the guts of it in terms of what is new/old.’79
Tom Kelly, a former BBC journalist, wrote to Campbell suggesting that the dossier was not strong enough on a nuclear threat. ‘The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he could pull the nuclear trigger anytime soon.’80 Reflecting later, Kelly agrees: ‘It got totally ridiculous, the number of people weighing in.’81
Campbell liked to joke that things were always done in such a panicked rush inside Number 10 that it should be renamed ‘lastminute.com’.
There was a lot of the last minute about the way the dossier was pulled together. ‘It was a very tense time,’ says Robert Hill, another Blair aide. ‘Everyone was working under huge pressure.’82 The 11th, two days after Campbell had taken the chair at the JIC, was a crucial day in the process. One of the intelligence officials issued a frantic appeal to his colleagues for yet more material as if they might find something that had slipped to the bottom of the filing cabinet: ‘This is therefore a last! call for any items of intelligence that agencies think can and should be included.’83
In the view of Tom Kelly, it was:
a fundamental mistake to start talking up the dossier with the media before it was completed. That created an expectation that the dossier was going to be a defining moment, that thi
s was going to be a biggy. It created a public expectation that then fed back into the system and fuelled the feeling that we had to come up with the goods.84
Pressure was directly applied to Scarlett to think about stripping the dossier of qualifications about the intelligence. Desmond Bowen, the head of the Cabinet Office’s Overseas and Defence Secretariat, and one of the cast of the meetings chaired by Campbell, sent an e-mail direct to Scarlett, copying in Campbell, Powell and Manning. The message read:
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.85
An early draft said that Iraq ‘would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon’ while sanctions remained effective. Even if sanctions were lifted, it would take ‘at least five years’. The final document contained the much more blood-chilling line: ‘Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years.’
There was internal dissent from some intelligence officials and Iraq experts. One dissenter was Brian Jones, the most senior expert on chemical weapons at the Defence Intelligence Staff. He complained to his superior that the dossier was exaggerating the threat only to be told that there was ‘one secret piece of information that could not be shared with him’ because it was too hot.86
Other intelligence officials complained about ‘iffy drafting’, protested that elements of the dossier were ‘likely to mislead’ and exchanged exasperated e-mails that no-one would heed their pleas to moderate its language. One official mocked the claim that Saddam had scientists capable of producing a nuclear weapon. ‘Dr Frankenstein, I presume?’87
These protests were ignored. By this stage of his premiership, Blair was very impatient of dissent. According to Andrew Turnbull, Blair was ‘less and less interested in hearing contrary opinions. He didn’t like having people throw grit into the machine.’88
In the frenzied September days leading up to the dossier’s publication, it was intensively reworked, each edit hardening up the claims within it. Among Blair’s staff, the two greatest influences on the shaping of the dossier were Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell. Campbell ‘never gave the impression that he was enthusiastic’ for war in Iraq to other senior staff at Number 10.89 But he swallowed his apprehensions and threw himself into the dossier with typical obsessiveness because he was ‘captivated by it as a project’.90
Powell had first been recruited to Blair’s team while he was a diplomat at the embassy in Washington. Curly-headed, fast-talking and clever, he was a fervent Atlanticist and the aide who most embraced Blair’s belief in preemptive intervention and the conviction that they had to stick with the United States no matter what. He was the one ‘true believer, the only one who was really gung-ho’ next to the Prime Minister.91
Previous generations of politicians had learnt to handle intelligence material with scepticism. Geoffrey Howe, a Conservative Foreign Secretary, observed: ‘In my early days, I was naive enough to get excited about intelligence reports. Many look, at first sight, to be important and significant and then when we check them they are not even straws in the wind. They are cornflakes in the wind.’
Another Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, remarked: ‘There is nothing particularly truthful about a report simply because it is a secret one.’92
‘Intelligence is not an exact science,’ notes Charles Guthrie, whose long military career included being commandant of the intelligence corps. ‘You tend subconsciously or consciously to select the intelligence which suits you.’93
Which is precisely what Blair did. He was never going to be minded to probe the intelligence with any hard questions about its reliability because he wanted to believe the worst about Saddam. He had already arrived at a conclusion about Iraq and was working backwards from there to try to make a case for confronting its dictator. His senior aide, Sir Stephen Wall, says: ‘He didn’t ask a lot of crucial questions about the extent of Saddam’s nuclear capacity, for example. Partly because he didn’t want to ask the questions.’94
That was compounded by a failure by all the institutions of the British state which are supposed to ensure quality control. The two big departments – the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office – were almost entirely excluded from this process. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, did not even see the dossier until very shortly before publication.95 The Cabinet Secretary was ‘invisible’.96 Turnbull, mindful of how previous holders of his post had been damaged by embroilments with security matters, did a deal with Blair which handed over that part of his responsibilities to a new security coordinator. Most of the Cabinet were beguiled by what they were shown when they were sent in small groups for private briefings by Dearlove and Scarlett. The way the intelligence was presented, ‘there was nothing speculative about it,’ says Tessa Jowell.97
The intelligence services were not coolly and disinterestedly sifting through their thin material and then making their best estimate of Iraq’s capabilities and intentions. They were scrambling under intense pressure to come up with material to support a pre-cooked conclusion that Saddam was a growing menace.
Under the weight of pressure to deliver what the Prime Minister wanted, the integrity of the system was disastrously compromised. Boundaries were trampled, lines of responsibility blurred, objectivity lost in the frantic drive to make a case against Saddam.
One of the frighteners in the dossier was the assertion that Iraq had tried to get the raw material for a nuclear weapon by buying uranium from Niger in Africa. The CIA didn’t believe this claim, which originated with documents that were later exposed as forgeries.98 That didn’t stop the bogus claim going into the dossier. Nor did it deter George Bush from repeating it the following January in his State of the Union address.
On 17 September, Saddam Hussein blinked in the face of the growing threat from America and declared that Iraq would allow the UN weapons inspectors to return without any preconditions. One of the motives for publishing a dossier – to put pressure on Saddam by mobilising international opinion around the issue of WMD – was now gone. That still left another reason: Blair’s desperate need to rally his own MPs and British public opinion to his point of view. So Saddam’s retreat did not end the process. Rather, the redrafting of the dossier went on at an even more frenetic pace.
Paradoxically, given what would later happen, the fear in Number 10 at this stage was not that they would be accused of fabricating a case for war. Their worry was that the media would see the dossier as ‘a rather damp squib’.99
That was underlined when the pro-war Tory leader was called in to be given a confidential briefing by John Scarlett. Iain Duncan Smith expected to be presented with a ‘bang, wallop’ case. He was surprised when he read through the draft presented to him. ‘There’s no great, big smoking gun here, is there?’ Duncan Smith said to Scarlett. ‘No, I suppose not. That’s not the nature of intelligence,’ said the chairman of JIC, who protested that he nevertheless thought that ‘some of it is compelling.’100
Powell was also underwhelmed by the latest drafts, not finding in them a sufficiently strong footing for military action. On 17 September, he pinged off an e-mail to Scarlett with his concerns:
First the document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam. It shows he has the means but it does not demonstrate that he has the motive to attack his neighbours let alone the west. We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he had continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions. The international community h
as to enforce those resolutions if the UN is to be taken seriously.101
The next draft was produced forty-eight hours later, and the wording had been considerably altered, the changes taking the text in a direction designed to suggest that Saddam was more of a menace. The most striking inflation during the process was about Saddam’s ability to use WMD. An early text said: ‘Iraq has probably dispersed its special weapons, including its CBW [chemical and biological weapons]. Intelligence also indicates that chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 20 to 45 minutes.’
The qualifications ‘indicates’ and ‘could be’ had gone by the time the dossier was published. They were transformed into the much harder claim: ‘Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.’102
Dr David Kelly, the Ministry of Defence’s top expert on weapons of mass destruction and an inspector who had been on tours to Iraq on more than thirty occasions, found that claim ‘risible’. Though a supporter of action against Saddam, he dissented from the dossier. To a close friend, he ‘just laughed’ about the impossibility of arming and firing a WMD warhead within forty-five minutes.103
Some in MI6 were queasy about the exercise. They knew they had very little that was solid or new to say about Iraq. They were also mindful that their sister agency MI5 had been damaged in the past by being sucked into political controversy. ‘C’ did send a ‘rigorous response’ to a memo sent to Scarlett by Campbell trying to further beef up the alleged threat from Iraqi nuclear ambitions. On Dearlove’s later account, MI6 insisted that it should ‘stick to original intelligence’.104 Sir Richard otherwise took the view that he could live with the dossier and what the politicians did with it was not his responsibility. Scarlett’s professional conscience was satisfied because he did not accept every linguistic alteration pressed on him. But in its final drafting stages Campbell nevertheless sought and secured no fewer than fourteen changes to the wording of the dossier, each one toughening its language.105
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