There were explanations for everything, but no one was listening. The aluminium tubes the US (and for a while the UK) said were for centrifuges to make a nuclear bomb were for rockets. The trip to Niger was not for uranium – ‘We had 500 tons of Yellow Cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another 500 tons from Niger?’ explains Jaffar.91 Part of the problem, former inspectors argue, was the past behaviour of officials including Jaffar. ‘The failure to give Iraq a clean bill of health really relates to Jaffar’s own behaviour,’ argues David Kay who led inspections of the nuclear programme in the early 1990s. ‘They did not come forward with the evidence of their programme. We had to discover it, they lied, cheated and tried to deceive us, they tried to cover up and they tried to retain portions of that programme … So you can never be sure that you’d gotten everything because the Iraqis failed to be honest about it. They started out lying, they continued lying and so consequently the attitude among the inspectors developed: they never tell the truth, and so there must be something more there.’92
Iraq was saying the same thing secretly as it was saying publicly. One of MI6’s tasks is to conduct back-channel contacts when the British government does not want it known openly that it is talking to someone. This was the case with the first contacts with the Provisional IRA when the British government maintained a public policy of not talking to terrorists. The same kind of back-channel contacts also took place with Saddam’s regime (with British ministerial knowledge). The Controller for the Middle East met a senior Iraqi intelligence official secretly a number of times as war approached (it remained unclear to MI6 whether this was with or without Saddam’s agreement). The Iraqi official told him there were no weapons and there was nothing more to say. This was not the lost opportunity to avoid war, as some would later claim. The official was saying in private exactly what Saddam was saying in public. At the time everyone considered this statement, like those of Saddam in public, to be simply rhetoric and ‘just what he was expected to say’ and therefore deception.93 ‘[He] failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer … and the British – on their own – elected to break off contact,’ George Tenet later said.94 The bar for intelligence that suggested there were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their existence.
At the same time in the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York, a strange sideshow was taking place. The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, had been in contact with French intelligence for some time through an Arab journalist intermediary and was now passing information indirectly to the US in response to questions. Even though he was Foreign Minister, Sabri was never in the tightest circle around Saddam and he may well have not known the truth. What he said and how it was reported remains contentious. By one account, he said that Jaffar had been summoned in to see Saddarn earlier in the year and told him he could build a nuclear bomb within eighteen to twenty-four months of receiving fissile material – a fairly meaningless statement since obtaining the material is arguably the hardest part of the process. Sabri is also supposed to have said that chemical weapons may have been dispersed but there were no serious biological programmes. Former CIA officers have suggested the reports of the contact were rewritten to strengthen the conclusions and imply that Iraq was still aggressively pursuing a WMD programme including a nuclear weapon. This was technically true but only at a real stretch since it was a long-term aspiration rather than a current project. In George Tenet’s later account he says (without naming Sabri) that the source said Iraq was stockpiling material for chemical weapons, had mobile launchers and was dabbling with biological weapons, though not with sufficient success to constitute a real biological weapons programme. That last point conflicted with Curveball and so was ignored while the more gloomy parts were highlighted. A more alarmist account of the Sabri intelligence was passed to MI6 which fed into their analysis. A CIA officer chased Sabri around the world to try and meet him and get a direct answer to questions but only got close to him just before the war. By then, he was told, it was too late to bother.
The train had left the station in London and Washington. ‘The books had been cooked, the bets placed,’ reckoned one CIA official.95 The accretion of scraps of intelligence had become impossible to disprove. This was the same error as the molehunters made. Every piece of evidence which seemed to contradict a deeply found belief was treated as a masterful act of deception by the other side. Or to put it another way, how do you prove a negative? How do you persuade someone that you are not hiding something? Donald Rumsfeld expressed this strange view best when he said ‘the absence of evidence is not absence of evidence.’96 But what if sometimes the absence of evidence really is a sign that something is not there? Reports arrived late in the day saying that most members of the Iraqi leadership were not convinced that it would be possible to use chemical or biological weapons and that chemical weapons had been dispersed and would be hard to reassemble. The fact that intelligence now suggested Iraq did not have usable weapons able to attack, let alone in forty-five minutes, was never revealed to the public (although some ministers had been told by Blair). The intelligence picture now looked far more contradictory and complex than the public knew.97
At 12.35 p.m. on 18 March, Tony Blair stood up in parliament. He had just failed in a desperate attempt to secure a second UN resolution to authorise war explicitly, one in which he had enlisted MI6 to brief swing members of the Security Council and try and convince them. He now needed to explain to an anxious parliament – and especially to his own Labour Party – why war was about to start when some voices called for more time for inspections, especially as there were signs the Iraqis were providing more co-operation. As he spoke, the first planeload of inspectors was arriving in Cyprus following a phone call Hans Blix had received two days earlier from US officials telling them it was time to get out. If Blair had lost the vote he would have resigned. An anxious President Bush called privately to offer him the chance to back down, and Jack Straw had told him a few days earlier that it was still not too late to change course, but Blair was committed. ‘The truth is that our patience should have been exhausted weeks and months and even years ago,’ he told parliament before reaching for an analogy with the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.98 Blair also went on to place Iraq within the frame of his wider fears. He said he knew of some countries or groups trading in nuclear weapons technology and that he knew of some dictatorships desperately trying to acquire such technology. ‘Some of those countries are now a short time away from having a serviceable nuclear weapon.’
As the bombs were about to fall on Baghdad, a phone call came into MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. It was from a Palestinian who was an occasional contact for the service. He had a message from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. The leader’s son, Saif, was ready to deliver it. The rendezvous took place in the private room of an upmarket hotel in London’s Mayfair. Present were two MI6 officers. Saif was nervous. He had not met with anyone from the British Secret Service before and had been brought up to think of its officers as a breed of half-man half-devil intent on destroying his father. He explained that Gaddafi senior wanted to talk about weapons of mass destruction. The MI6 officers called David Manning at Downing Street who told them to keep talking. On the day the first bombs fell on Baghdad, a plane took off for Libya.99
The two British intelligence officers on board the plane headed for Sirte, desert headquarters of the Libyan leader, where the eccentric colonel held court in a huge Bedouin tent with camels roaming outside. Gaddafi was worried about being next on the list after Saddam and wanted to see if he could buy his way back into the international community by giving up a weapons programme that he thought no one knew about. What he did not realise was that MI6 already knew all about his secret nuclear weapons programme. It had been supplied by the Pakistani salesman A. Q. Khan and his network had been penetrated by MI6 for a number of years. Gaddafi told the leader of the MI6 team, Mark Allen, that his Libyan counterpart
for the negotiations would be the intelligence chief Musa Kusa.100 It was made clear that the Libyans wanted the Americans on board and saw the British as the best way of achieving that goal.
Mark Allen went with Dearlove to Washington a few days later to discuss the offer. Dearlove briefed the President personally. Steve Kappes was assigned by the CIA to work with Allen on talking to Gaddafi. The mercurial Gaddafi would make it a difficult process. The Libyans were nervous about revealing what they had purchased from A. Q. Khan (even though it was still far from operational) because they feared that their old enemies could simply walk away from the secret negotiations and use the information as a pretext to attack. Libya’s evasiveness in turn inspired distrust from MI6 and the CIA, who knew how much the Libyans were hiding even as they kept on insisting they had to come clean. At one point, a retired British military figure had to be sent out as a gesture of good faith with the message that a deal was on the table. As months passed, Gaddafi may also have been watching the ‘victory’ in Iraq turn sour as roadside bombs began to detonate and he may have started to wonder if the appetite was still there for another war.
By the summer, a nervy, frustrating impasse had been reached. Plans to take down the A. Q. Khan network had been stalled in order not to compromise the Libyan negotiations. A risk needed to be taken. A source inside the Khan network revealed that a consignment of nuclear parts was going to be shipped to Libya. The boat carrying them, the BBC China (which had nothing to do with the BBC or with China) was diverted in the middle of the night to an Italian port, where a team quickly identified five cargo containers and opened them with considerable relief. Allen called Musa Kusa and confronted him. The Libyans folded. They agreed to allow a team of CIA and MI6 inspectors into the country to examine their sites.
A small unmarked plane carrying a joint CIA–MI6 team departed from Northolt airfield on 19 October for Libya. Only a handful of officials on each side of the Atlantic knew about the trip. The team, which consisted of specialists in nuclear programmes, chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles, was taken around previously clandestine sites by Libyan guides during the day and then filed reports back to Langley and Vauxhall Cross by night. But the Libyans continued to prove evasive on key details. After ten days, the group returned home frustrated. The enigmatic Musa Kusa (whose past links to international terrorism and especially in arming the IRA were well known to the British and American officials) was invited to Britain to discuss the problem with Allen and Kappes. Intelligence was literally laid out on the table before him to highlight the differences between what Libya was claiming and what was known to be true. This included playing a tape of a recording between A. Q. Khan and Libya’s nuclear chief from February of the previous year.
Kusa agreed a second inspection visit which began on 9 December. This time there was more co-operation but still not quite enough. The scale and ambitions of the nuclear programme were the main stumbling block. Rain fell on the last full day as the possibility of failure hung over the visiting team. In the dark before dawn the next morning, the team headed to the airport and their thirty-two-seat plane. As the British and American intelligence officers prepared to board, the Libyans announced that they had something for them. A stack of brown envelopes about a foot high was handed over. When the team opened the envelopes on board the aircraft they found inside the design for a nuclear weapon that had been given to Libya by A. Q. Khan. It was what they had been waiting for.
The final outlines of the deal were hammered out on 16 December in an all-day session in a private room at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall, a favourite haunt of Secret Service officers. Those Libyans who had forgotten to wear ties were quickly hustled inside before a doorman could stop them. Libyan resistance over just how much they would publicly admit proved the last stumbling block, along with questions over whether Gaddafi would humble himself by making the announcement. The Libyans continued to fear being double-crossed. Saddam Hussein had just been captured in Iraq and Gaddafi seemed to fear meeting the same fate. Blair spoke by telephone with the Libyan leader two days later to finalise plans. On 19 December the secret diplomacy finally became public, although only after a bizarre delay when Gaddafi decided to wait to make his announcement because a football match being shown on television ran over schedule. Within weeks, President Musharraf was pressurised to put A. Q. Khan out of business. These were crucial victories, but they were only a sideshow to the problem that was preoccupying London and Washington, as Saddam’s weapons proved to be a Banquo’s ghost, haunting them long after his regime had been crushed.
The war in Iraq had been won swiftly, the peace was another matter. The non-existent weapons of mass destruction were not the only intelligence failure. The political reporting before the war was paltry. Few, apart from some academics whose advice was ignored, were aware of the country’s tribal and social structures. Not only had there been a failure to understand Saddam’s mindset and ask if he was bluffing, but the focus on the weapons meant not enough work was done on how the country would stand up to invasion and what would come after. There was, however, a warning that war would lead to more terrorism against the UK and serve the narrative of Al Qaeda by providing a justification for more attacks.101 ‘Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so he was able to move into Iraq in a way he wasn’t before,’ Eliza Manningham-Buller later reflected. But the intelligence community never predicted the extent of radicalisation in the UK, nor that foreign jihadists would flock to Iraq to fight the coalition within days of the war starting. When the Secretary General of the Arab League warned that a war would ‘open the gates of hell’ it was dismissed as hyperbole.
As the war had unfolded, a few people had also begun to wonder why Saddam had not used any of his ‘special weapons’, especially as troops approached Baghdad. Perhaps deterrence had worked or command and control had been disrupted, the military explained.102 When the war was over, the question of the missing weapons could no longer be ignored. ‘We were being warned of the possibility that Saddam had got rid of WMD and certainly most of the documentation, before the conflict,’ Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary as the war ended. A month later the panic grew as Donald Rumsfeld said weapons might not be found and his deputy dismissively stated that the focus on WMD had been a ‘bureaucratic convenience’.103 When a BBC report claimed that the intelligence on the forty-five minutes had been included against the wishes of the spies and despite knowledge that it was wrong, Blair was angry. A struggle began between Downing Street and the BBC. The source for the story, weapons inspector David Kelly, would be caught in the crossfire and killed himself within weeks.
For a tense few days, the spies and politicians eyed each other nervously. Each wondered if the other side would break ranks and try to pin the blame on them. Every hint that this nuclear option might be pursued sent tremors through the system. Campbell called Scarlett on 1 June as stories of unhappiness among the spooks proliferated. Scarlett said the ‘agencies were pushing back and denying all this, but there was precious little sign of that in the Sundays,’ wrote Campbell.104 ‘He [Scarlett] said we were being made to accord to our stereotypes – you are the brutal political hatchet man and I am the dry intelligence officer. It’s not very nice but I can assure you this is not coming from the people at the top. He was clear I had never asked him to do anything he was unhappy with. I said it was really bad, all this stuff.’ Three days later, government ministers were talking about ‘rogue elements’ in the intelligence services and ‘skulduggery’. This time it was the spies’ turn to worry. Campbell’s phone lit up with messages from Dearlove, Scarlett and Omand.105 Staring into the abyss of mutually assured destruction, the spies and politicians came to a fretful peace.
As time went on, and site after site was searched and hope after hope of finding weapons of mass destruction was dashed, an air of panic began to consume Vauxhall Cross. ‘People were going round saying “For Christ sakes, just find something”,’ recalls one individual.106 Every
one understood how important this was politically. In Number 10, the Prime Minister became increasingly agitated.107 The men given the job of finding something were drawing a blank. David Kay went out first, convinced there were weapons. The first warning sign came when he was briefed on the intelligence. Is that all there is? he thought. He had asked to see the underlying material behind the British dossier. The sources, it seemed, had been over-interpreted, perhaps misinterpreted. ‘I thought it was a pretty thin gruel.’108 A couple of mobile trailers were heralded as a big find but then had to be discounted. There was excitement about containers on a river-bed but they disappeared. Some old chemical shells were discovered buried in the desert which the White House wanted to publicise but they were told they dated back to before 1991. Jaffar was among those interviewed by Kay’s team. He told them everything had been in the 7 December declaration. Tensions emerged between allies. At a meeting one person present recalls Tenet asking Dearlove outright if he could see the intelligence that lay behind the British claim on Niger. Dearlove declined, but said MI6 still believed it to be true. Tenet told colleagues later that Dearlove was no more forthcoming in private. The refusal was most likely based on the control principle, meaning the original intelligence was not Britain’s to share without permission.
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