Kay returned within a few months to tell a stunned Washington they had been ‘almost all wrong’. The US and British administrations had wanted Kay to keep quiet and were furious. British officials had even gone to see the CIA head of station in London to complain about him. The CIA man had cabled Washington but Kay himself was copied into the traffic and asked the MI6 station chief in Baghdad to intervene. This led to another complaint from London to Washington, with Kay again copied in. Charles Duelfer was next up to lead the hunt, passing through London on the way where an eager Blair wanted to hear his plans.109
Those working on inspection reports sensed the anxiety in London. How can you be sure there isn’t anything when you haven’t covered the whole of the country? British officials kept asking. The inspectors explained they had not just visited sites but interviewed captive Iraqi scientific, military and intelligence officials who all said the same thing. Scarlett was among those keen to make sure that any report was as robust as possible. He emailed a series of ‘nuggets’ to Duelfer asking if they would be included. These were unresolved items from an older classified report. Details had been unearthed of Iraqi intelligence doing work on poisons but inspectors said it would be disingenuous to describe this as work on chemical weapons. ‘I could not believe my eyes,’ thought Rod Barton, one of the senior inspectors, when he saw the email. He told Duelfer it was unacceptable to include the nuggets since there was no evidence. Over a video conference, Scarlett backed away. ‘The nuggets were fool’s gold,’ Duelfer reflected. ‘It was obvious the game was up,’ Barton, who soon quit, thought. ‘There was no WMD there. They were going to have to bite the bullet and say so.’110 Letting go was not easy.
One by one MI6’s prized sources were melting away like mirages in the desert heat. As each oasis was approached, the weary travellers of the MI6 validation team sent out to check the sources, often escorted by special forces soldiers, discovered only sand slipping through their fingers. Some of the key sources did not last long. Just three months after the fall of Baghdad, MI6 interviewed the cherished new source in whom so much had been invested and who had dispelled so many doubts. He denied ever having said anything about accelerated production of biological and chemical weapons.111
With the forty-five-minutes claim, MI6 visited the military officer alleged to have supplied the report, who denied any knowledge of having ever said such a thing. So they went looking for the main source who had passed on the information claiming it was from the military officer. He proved hard to track down. ‘There was a lot of umming and aahing,’ remembers one of the people involved. It was clear he had simply made it all up. He was the Baghdad equivalent of Graham Greene’s Havana’s vacuum cleaner salesman with an overactive imagination. MI6 reported the bad news back to London in 2004. ‘I particularly remember the moment when the Prime Minister was told that the forty-five-minutes intelligence was false,’ one individual later recalled. ‘That felt like a pretty big moment in terms of the Prime Minister’s trust of SIS and intelligence. Privately, I felt that he felt let down.’112
When an American team went to a key facility looking for Curveball’s mobile trailers they found a seed-purification plant. They went back six times to make sure. A six-foot-high wall made it impossible for trailers to move in and out at the location he had described. A confused site manager said there had never been any doors where Curveball indicated.113 Curveball’s own travel records revealed he could not have been in Iraq to witness an accident as he had claimed. His former boss admitted he had been fired from his position in 1995. A CIA team who finally got access to Curveball found that he simply refused to answer any more questions when they confronted him with the holes in his account. They also thought the British were doing their best to hold on to his intelligence. Perhaps the mobile laboratories were there just in case Saddam wanted a capacity to produce material in the future, MI6 argued defensively. The Germans and the British disagreed over who had introduced the disputed technical details into the reporting. It transpired that Curveball had got much of his material by reading inspectors’ reports off the internet and piecing it together with the little he knew.114
The British and Americans turned to each other. But we thought you had other intelligence to back everything up? Each realised the other side’s material was less substantial than they had believed, and not just on Curveball. They had shared much but never everything. On the Sabri case and Curveball it was only after the war that each realised that the other side had doubts about intelligence the other had thought cast-iron. ‘If only you’d told us everything and we’d told you everything, maybe we could have pieced it together,’ one officer told his American counterparts wistfully after the war. The American agreed, but would later wonder whether that would really have made any difference.115
The shutters at Vauxhall Cross came down. ‘It was like drawing teeth,’ a Whitehall official said of the long-drawn-out process of MI6 rowing back on its sources and painfully reporting each time to a special JIC sub-committee. The nuclear and missile sources were not too bad, it was argued, but the latter in particular were never relevant to the public debate. Those senior officers who had invested most in the sources continued to argue they had not been wrong. They said the weapons, particularly mobile rocket launchers with weaponised VX, must have been moved to Syria before the war. They said their multiple sources (human and technical) on this were never disproved and were ‘very compelling’.116 But this was thoroughly investigated by the inspectors of David Kay and Charles Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group after the war. They interviewed Iraqi pilots and ground crew to see if anything could have been smuggled on flights; they looked at the routing of trucks. They found no hard evidence. The absence of a clear Syrian motive for accepting such dangerous consignments and the failure of even the Israelis to push the line added to the case against. Some still cling to the fading hope that something will be proved to have gone over the border.
With the exception of the forty-five-minutes claim, Lord Butler’s inquiry said the original intelligence had not been misreported. There was no distortion, he concluded. The original intelligence was simply wrong. This, in many ways, is a far more damning conclusion for MI6 than the notion that the politicians had ‘spun’ the intelligence against the wishes of the spies. The politicians may have pushed and pressed, but ultimately, the problem was that MI6’s reporting was dud.
Bureaucratic explanations were proffered. For instance, the posts of requirements officers at headquarters, who were supposed to act as a quality control on reporting from the field, had been staffed by inexperienced officers because of cuts and their role had become subordinate to the production officers, whose job was to get as much intelligence to customers as possible.117 But few believed this really explained the disaster that had befallen the service.
‘There was a sense in which, because of past success – very, very considerable successes supporting this government – that SIS [MI6] overpromised and under-delivered,’ David Omand later reflected. ‘We were getting the promise,’ a Downing Street official agreed, ‘but it was only … after the military invasion that we realised just how much of their product was false.’118 The argument that they had overpromised is disputed by some who maintain that they always made clear the intelligence was scanty. Clandestine weapons programmes are the most closely guarded secrets of a state, their intimate details known only to a handful, the hardest target for a secret service. But stealing secrets from such a target is exactly what the service is there for.
A few of the spies implicated in the whole affair argued they had been left exposed by the politicians. ‘We got dumped on and we took it,’ is how one puts it. Their argument is that the intelligence was never the reason that Britain went to war. The decision was a political choice by a prime minister who settled on intelligence as the best means by which to sell that choice to parliament and the public. Their failing, these spies argue, was not to see the risk to the service’s reputation and get more political cove
r. ‘Blair promised to look after you and then dropped you in it,’ one said. ‘But he had never quite promised to do so nor quite dropped you in it directly. His DNA was never on the murder weapons.’ Secret services though are supposed to be smart enough to play these games and not get caught with their trousers down.
Dearlove, who continued to believe that war was the right decision, took a more nuanced line. ‘The policy was made to be over-dependent on the intelligence particularly in presenting the case in parliament, when in reality there were many others factors contributing to policy decisions,’ he told an audience a few years after the war. ‘I think it was feared those other factors would not carry the day with the parliamentary opponents of the war. This calculation turned out to have very undesirable consequences for the intelligence community. There were obvious risks involved, but at the time [they] appeared manageable.’119 It was the overemphasis on intelligence that was the mistake, in his eyes, and the failure to make more of the moral argument for removing Saddam. ‘I agreed with the policy. I still do. I still think it was the right decision to take at that time in the circumstances. But the reasons for going to war were not specifically intelligence based.’120
One of the reasons that Blair and others made the decision for war in the first place, though, was because they believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The two sides – politicians and spies – were so closely conjoined in the run-up to war that separating them requires an almost impossibly delicate operation. Blair was taking a risk, utterly confident in his own judgement. Icarus-like, the service had flown a little too close to the sun, it was said by many. It was an analogy rejected by those at the top of MI6. ‘The Icarus metaphor is used time and again,’ argued the Arabist MI6 director who had observed Dearlove work so closely with the Prime Minister. ‘It has limited applicability because Tony Blair was not the sun and Dearlove was not a child with wax wings. They were consenting adults, wrestling with unprecedented policy riddles.’ Was there another way? ‘I would have done it differently. I believe in a Chief who stays south of the river and is not so easy to get hold of,’ he also said, before adding that this might not have been so easy to carry out in practice. ‘That’s my daydream. But that’s a … daydream. Real life … is different.’121
A few might have believed they had been left swinging by Number 10 but many more inside MI6 believed the organisation itself was to blame. Some simply acknowledged that their sources had been wrong. Others thought it was their own leadership who had left them exposed by getting too close to power. The unhappiness was palpable. During the Suez Crisis the official machinery of intelligence was largely ignored and bypassed; this time, in an attempt to avoid a similar fate, it had been sucked deep into the maelstrom. ‘The vehicle of WMD as an argument for the war was incapable of sustaining the weight put upon it, given that we didn’t have all the answers and we didn’t have the sources,’ reflected an MI6 director who had worried for the morale and integrity of his service.122 The impact on MI6’s reputation – and its self-perception – was calamitous. The use of intelligence to sell a war to the public might not have mattered much if it turned out to be true. But once it was proved to be wrong, it left the public, and especially those who had been persuaded by the intelligence, feeling bitter, not least towards the spies.
With the service still reeling, the appointment of John Scarlett as the new Chief was viewed with distinctly mixed feelings in some quarters. Dearlove, who was due for retirement, was well-known to be opposed and pushed his own number two forward for the job. A few others believed Scarlett was too much the quiet professional and lacked the vision to lead the service. The disquiet in some quarters at Scarlett’s appointment was expressed at staff forums. As one person remembers, it was strongest among the old-school ‘Tory backwoodsmen’ who thought a New Labour placeman getting the job was another sign of the service being subordinated to Downing Street and as a return favour for delivering the dossier. The response was that he was the best man for the job. One of the reasons Scarlett was appointed was that he was a traditionalist by instinct, a man who was seen as capable of restoring a focus on the core task of gathering intelligence. He was also seen as a hawk on Iraq’s weapons compared to some of the other candidates.
Two weeks before he left MI6 in the summer of 2004, Dearlove addressed staff in the Vauxhall Cross auditorium. Those who expected a fulsome apology would be disappointed. He gave a robust, even militant, defence of his approach. Don’t think you can keep away from Whitehall, he warned. Just because we were caught up in a controversial war does not mean the whole modernising approach was wrong. A couple of weeks before that address, he had been in Washington for a farewell dinner at the CIA on a hot summer’s evening. People who judge us have not done what we have done, he told the assembled spies with a nod to George Tenet, who would resign soon after. One CIA officer at the party thought the two spymasters looked ‘defeated’.123 His supporters believe Dearlove had been taking MI6 in the right direction and had been the right man for the moment in the period after 9/11. It was only Iraq which blew the exercise off course. Others believed the direction itself was wrong, drawing the service too near to power.
On taking over, Scarlett knew he had to convince the sceptics and adopted a strategy of holding meetings and sandwich lunches with staff to listen to their concerns. Egged on by colleagues, a veteran asked at one of these whether Scarlett had any regrets over Iraq. Neither then, nor when asked publicly, would he explicitly say that he did.124 ‘It was a difficult time for the service obviously,’ he admitted in an interview. ‘The worry clearly at the time was that the reliability of our reporting had been brought into question … We had to carry on doing a good job, responding to the criticisms where you have to, put things right where it has been pointed out they’ve been wrong and over the passage of time the quality of your work will ensure that those questions move away.’125
Scarlett was told by some staff that they wanted to keep their distance from policy, their fingers having been burnt by Iraq. A few who had been close to Dearlove worried that their careers were finished, but most of them stayed and adapted. They believed that, as time went on, Scarlett realised how much the service’s work had changed since his departure for the JIC before 9/11 and he began to restore the shift towards a more integrated approach with other services and other parts of Whitehall to cope with the challenges of terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The old Cold War world of gathering intelligence on static targets had largely but not totally passed away.
Scarlett also began edging the service once again into the public eye. The process had begun in the 1990s with avowal, and Dearlove had pushed the pace harder until the whole process was subsumed beneath the tidal wave of Iraq. With MI6’s reputation battered by Iraq and British intelligence as a whole deeply worried by allegations of complicity in torture, it was time to put aside a concern for maintaining the air of mystery. For its centenary in 2009, Scarlett went so far as being interviewed in his office, a Union Jack fluttering outside the window and a clock built by the founder of the service, Mansfield Cumming, tick-tocking steadily in the corner. A degree of openness was now necessary, but it had its limits, he explained. ‘What we brought out of the shadows rightly in my view is the fact that we exist when for the majority of my career we didn’t even admit the fact that Britain has a secret intelligence service … The role which we play in government … is also there for discussion; the kinds of people that we employ, the way in which we recruit our staff … But what we actually do, the operations we conduct, the particular intelligence we produce, the sources with whom we work, the people with whom we work, that remains secret. And those are the key secrets, the operational secrets, which have always remained secret and must remain secret.’ Scarlett’s traditionalism still shone through in some areas, particularly a deep-seated belief in old-fashioned patriotism. ‘If you wish to serve your country, and many people do, then this is a pretty good way of doin
g it,’ he said. Along with the armed services, the intelligence service was one of the few places where patriotism was still talked about openly in contrast to the more modern vogue for ‘shared values’ and the like. Spies, like soldiers it seems, are asked to do difficult things for the country that others might shy away from and so still need that deep-seated emotional sense of national interest and working for the Crown.126
At other times, the failure over Iraq might have raised questions about what the service was really for, but the continued threat from international terrorism provided an answer. A third of MI6’s work focused on the new world of terrorism. But there would have been offices in Vauxhall Cross whose work would have been familiar to Shergy as well as to Scarlett. Russians talk about a ‘third round’ in the duel between the two countries (the first being MI6’s ‘war’ against the Bolsheviks from 1917, the second being the Cold War) and continue to see MI6 as bent on subverting their country. The Russians for their part continue to try and penetrate Britain, never with quite the success of Lyubimov’s time, but still with plenty of vigour. ‘Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK at the Russian Embassy and associated organisations conducting covert activity in this country,’ Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, announced in November 2007. Between a third and a half of staff at the Russian Embassy in London are thought to have some kind of intelligence role.
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