MARCH 1996
Our work so far
Background
12. We set out first and foremost to build up our knowledge of the Agencies’ individual roles, working methods and current priorities. In our Interim Report in the Spring, * we identified our first major subject for enquiry as:
“how the Agencies have adapted in general to the new situations post-Cold War and, in particular, how tasks and the priorities attached to them have altered, and whether the resources now provided are appropriate to those tasks and used in a cost-effective way”
and gave a number of other major issues on which we proposed to focus as our work developed. These included:
– the extent to which it is appropriate to try to maintain a ‘global reach’ in intelligence terms;
– increasing resource pressures and their effects on Agency capabilities and staff;
– the extent to which the Agencies are able to maintain their ‘core’ capabilities and their major investment patterns and commitments;
– the protection afforded to Agency information and operations;
– the Agencies’ work with the police and other enforcement bodies in the UK, and their relationships with the civil community;
– how the Agencies are coping with the ever increasing flow of openly available information.
13. It is possible to approach all these questions from several different directions: structures and organisational responsibilities, resources and funding, and questions bearing on operations. We decided first to look in the round at the post-Cold War world; address in some detail the reduction in the military threat posed by the former Soviet Union (FSU), and the consequent resource allocation decisions taken in the Agencies; and focus in addition on some of the ‘functional’ issues, * in particular work against serious organised crime, † on which the Agencies have increasingly been tasked by Government and on which they are now concentrating significant proportions of their effort.
Tasking the Agencies
14. We examined the systems for tasking the Agencies. The UK’s requirements for the collection of secret intelligence are set annually by the Cabinet Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and endorsed by Ministers. ‡ Intelligence targets are divided into three broad priorities which reflect the importance of particular policy objectives and the significance of secret intelligence in helping to achieve them. § These requirements are elaborated in a series of ‘Guidelines’ papers, which enable SIS and GCHQ to plan the allocation of their resources in more detail. At the working level, the Agencies meet regularly with customer departments to ensure that they are meeting their needs. Outside this formal framework, customers put forward proposals for new or amended requirements, or downgradings or deletions, at any time. ¶ The Security Service does not, as yet, ** have ‘customers’ in the same sense as the other two Agencies, but its priorities in terms of threats to national security, and the Service’s plans to counter them, are examined and validated each year by a sub-committee of the Cabinet Official Committee on Security, and approved by Ministers. ††
The changing nature of the threat
15. The Chairman of the JIC told us that the past few years had seen a significant shift in the overall balance of intelligence requirements. With the ending of the Cold War, activity has moved away from traditional NATO-Warsaw Pact concerns towards a more varied range of threats to, and opportunities for, British interests at home and abroad. Increased emphasis is now placed on what are termed ‘functional’ topics, such as terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, serious organised crime * (which is taken to include drug trafficking, money laundering and other international financial crime) and international sanctions. †
16. Attention, however, continues to be paid as a matter of the highest national order of priority to some of the more ‘traditional’ concerns, in particular Russia. The JIC has assessed that neither Russia nor any of the other FSU states currently poses any direct military threat to the UK or to NATO. ‡ Russia, however, retains both a formidable strategic capability and the largest conventional armed forces in Europe; and Russian military equipment, which is of generally high quality, is being aggressively marketed around the world. Intelligence customers’ needs are, therefore, set increasingly in the context of risks of instability and proliferation concerns. Other high priority tasks include the UK’s continuing intelligence needs in relation to Northern Ireland following the 1994 cease-fires; the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, where British forces are operationally deployed; and certain countries in the Middle East. Lower down the priority list, intelligence needs in several regions of the world including Africa and South-East Asia have been considerably scaled down. §
The Agencies’ response
17. It is a measure of the significant shifts in the Agencies’ efforts over the past few years that SIS now devotes only about *** of its operational effort to Russia and the other FSU states , as against almost *** at the height of the Cold War, ¶ this being a reduction of about two thirds. The Service considers its current effort to be the absolute minimum that it can safely devote to the target. For GCHQ, about *** of the total Sigint effort is still devoted in one way or another to work on Russia (about a half of the previous level). ** ***.
18. Only rarely in the Agencies’ history have they had to face the major difficulties that are involved in significant shifts of effort and resources. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, was followed rapidly by the Gulf War. This led to a rapid, relatively short term, increase in SIS effort devoted to Iraq and other targets in the Middle East, and to a steady increase in counter-proliferation work. Since that time, the longer-lasting Balkan crisis has led to the Service devoting a significant proportion of effort to a target against which there had previously been very little work. These increases, and others designed to meet ‘functional’ †† requirements, in turn necessitated balanced reductions across other areas and, on occasion, the closure of less essential SIS stations abroad. ‡‡
19. GCHQ’s reallocation of resources over the same period followed a similar pattern, with the fall in effort against the FSU mirrored by significant increases in effort on the Middle East and the Balkans, and work on other regions of the world staying roughly constant. Among ‘functional’ topics, there was increased emphasis on work on counter-proliferation, terrorism and serious organised crime in particular. GCHQ has also been altering the balance of expenditure between manpower costs and technical facilities, placing increased emphasis on developing a flexible resource which can quickly be deployed against alternative targets as priorities change. *
20. For the Security Service, a significant reduction in the overall ‘intelligence threat’ posed by the former Warsaw Pact states allowed a consequent reduction to less than half the operational resources required five years ago. † We have been told, however, that covert intelligence activity against the UK by Russian intelligence services is now once again on the increase. ‡ This has led in turn to the reinstatement of some resources that had previously been moved to other areas of work.
21. Taken together with parallel reductions in the effort necessary to counter subversion, these changes meant that resources could be released to work against Irish terrorism, at a time (1992) when the Service was taking on the lead role in countering Republican terrorism on the British mainland. Monitoring Irish terrorist groups and their supporters has involved just under one half of the Service’s operational resources over the past couple of years, and will continue to do so ‘for at least the next year’ in order to produce intelligence in support of the Government’s conduct of the peace process. §
22. The scope of these changes presents major challenges of leadership and management for all three Agencies. The Agency Heads have each made clear to us that they recognise the crucial importance of the most sensitive handling of the reassignments and, in some cases, compulsory redundancies that have proved necessary. We welcome these assurances.
2
3. In view of these challenges, we also asked a number of questions on, and intend to pursue further, the methods of appointment of the Heads of the Agencies, with particular regard to the identification of successors to Sir John Adye as Director of GCHQ and Mrs Stella Rimington as Director-General of the Security Service. We have already stressed to the Foreign and Home Secretaries respectively the importance, in senior Agency appointments, of a conscious effort to include candidates from outside as well as inside these organisations, which tend by their occupation to be somewhat removed from the normal exchanges that exist between other departments. The Hurn Review of GCHQ ¶ shows how outside experience can be most usefully brought to bear.
24. We conclude that there have been significant and unprecedented changes since the end of the Cold War in the tasks all three Agencies are required to undertake for Government. Each has had to respond rapidly and with flexibility to these changes; all must be prepared for further changing demands in the years ahead. The reductions in the Agencies’ work on the former Soviet Union are appropriate to the changing nature of the threat, and have released resources to work on the newer ‘functional’ targets such as proliferation and serious organised crime.
25. We further conclude that the Security Service will need to keep under close review the resources it devotes to work against Russian espionage. On work against the hazard of Irish terrorism, we support the Service’s decision to keep deployed about one half of its total operational resources on this work for at least the next year, and recommend that the recent assumption of responsibility by the Service for the lead in work against Republican terrorism on the British mainland should be maintained .
* Cm 2873, May 1995, paragraph 10-11.
* See paragraph 15.
† See paragraphs 26-30, and footnote 25 on page 16.
‡ Evidence from the Cabinet Office, December 1994.
§ Evidence from the Chairman of the JIC, May 1995.
¶ Evidence from the Cabinet Office, December 1994.
** See paragraphs 26-29.
†† Evidence from the Cabinet Office, December 1994.
* See paragraphs 26-30.
† Evidence from the Chairman of the JIC, May 1995.
‡ Evidence from the MOD, October 1995.
§ Evidence from the Chairman of the JIC, May 1995.
¶ Evidence from SIS, March 1995; evidence from the Chief of SIS, May 1995.
** Evidence from Director of GCHQ, May 1995.
†† See paragraph 15.
‡‡ Evidence from the Chief of SIS, May 1995.
* Evidence from the Director of GCHQ, May 1995.
† Evidence from the Security Service, October 1995.
‡ Evidence from the Security Service, May 1995; evidence from the Director-General of the Security Service, May 1995.
§ Evidence from the Security Service, May 1995; evidence from the Director-General of the Security Service, May 1995.
¶ See paragraph 4.
Notes
1 . Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in Benjamin B. Fischer (ed.), At Cold War’s End: US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991 (CIA, 1999), available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/bo oks-and-monographs/at-cold-wars-end-us-intelligence-on-the-soviet-union-and-easter n-europe-1989-1991/art-1.html#rtoc8 (last accessed 11 November 2013).
2 . Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (London: John Murray, 1997) p. 121; Percy Cradock quoted in Max Hastings, ‘Heroes of the war that wasn’t’, Telegraph website, 5 March 2002, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/historybookreviews/3574020/Hero es-of-the-war-that-wasnt.html (last accessed 11 November 2013).
3 . David Arbel and Ran Edelist, Western Intelligence and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 1980–1990: Ten Years That Did Not Shake the World (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. xii.
4 . Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: HarperPress, 2011), p. 465. Christopher Andrew has stated that it took MI5 by surprise – historians can assume that it also therefore took the JIC by surprise (Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 771).
5 . Powell (Strasbourg) to Wall (FCO), also copied to Robin Butler (Cabinet Office), 8 December 1989, RS 020/2/3, Document 70, in Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton and Stephen Twigge (eds), Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III, Vol. VII: German Unification, 1989–90 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
6 . Gordon Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 410.
7 . Richard J. Aldrich, review of Percy Cradock: Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World (London: John Murray, 2002), International History Review 15/1 (2003), pp. 216–18.
8 . Andrew, The Defence of the Realm , p. 780; Gordon Corera, The Art of Betrayal: Life and Death in the British Secret Service (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2011), p. 316; Aldrich, GCHQ , p. 495.
9 . James Woolsey, statement before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, US House of Representatives, 9 March 1993.
10 . Major to King (chairman, ISC), 26 March 1996, reproduced in Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report, 1995 , Cm 3198 (London: HMSO, 1995).
11 . This was transferred in 2009 to the National Security, International Relations and Development Committee Official Subcommittee on Intelligence (NSID(I)(O)).
19
WAR IN IRAQ:
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
B EFORE THE TURN of the twenty-first century, very few people outside Whitehall’s security and intelligence circles had heard of the Joint Intelligence Committee. This was soon to change. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the JIC exploded into the public consciousness amid deep controversy. The committee acquired unprecedented media coverage and its Chairman briefly became a household name.
The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) saga is undoubtedly the most famous, indeed infamous, episode in the JIC’s long history. Tony Blair’s government publicly drew upon its intelligence to justify a controversial war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That intelligence has since been subjected to no fewer than four inquiries. It is now widely acknowledged that the intelligence was deeply flawed.
The JIC had been monitoring Iraqi WMD and strategic weapons programmes since the First Gulf War. Assessments initially downplayed Saddam’s capabilities, so long as Iraq lacked external support. UN inspections, however, later revealed that Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear programme was more advanced than the JIC had realised. Underestimation of Iraq’s weapons programme led to overcorrection in the early 2000s. It must be remembered that this is a highly specialised field of intelligence analysis and the same people involved in 1991 were present in 2002. They did not want to be wrong twice. 1
Towards the end of the 1990s, the JIC assessed that the weapons inspectors had curtailed the vast majority of Iraq’s 1991 WMD capability. Some biological and chemical weapons, however, apparently remained hidden and the JIC grew increasingly suspicious about Iraq’s ballistic missile programme as the decade progressed. Shortly after the turn of the century, the JIC grew more concerned still. Although acknowledging limited sources, the committee warned that Iraq was becoming bolder in its pursuit of WMD. 2
Intelligence on Iraqi WMDs since 2001 must be placed in its broader context. It should not be forgotten that policymakers who read JIC reports on the subject also received swathes of intelligence on other matters. These included the A. Q. Khan network of nuclear proliferation and Osama bin Laden’s apparent desire for unconventional weapons. When read together, they made a pattern of intelligence that led policymakers to feel they were facing a creeping tide of proliferation by the start of 2002. Having read the JIC intelligence assessments, Tony Blair, for example, believed that states pursuing WMDs, including Iraq, had become ‘ver
y determined’. Moreover, they were states that ‘you would not want to have this type of stuff because of their unstable and repressive nature and there were certainly suggestions [of] the potential link with terrorism’. 3
Meanwhile it is important not to overlook the sheer surprise created by the terrorist attacks on America. Officials on both sides of the Atlantic had simply not seen them coming. A new sense that anything was possible permeated Whitehall along with a feeling that the enemy now occupied an alien intellectual world. Uncertainty reigned. Planes flying over Westminster were watched with an uneasy sense of dread as officials feared further attacks in the weeks after 9/11. 4
September 2001 also changed the policy context. Iraq’s WMD programme had not necessarily accelerated, but Anglo-American tolerance had evaporated. 5 Policymakers moved away from containment towards pre-emption. In September 2002, the government published its evidence surrounding Iraqi WMD. The role of the JIC was important and, between March and September, the committee had disseminated three assessments. The third and most important has been declassified and is reproduced here. 6
Dated 15 March 2002, the first assessment was commissioned by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to aid policy discussions on Iraq, and considered the status of Iraqi WMD programmes. This assessment was followed by another on 21 August 2002. This time prepared at the request of the Ministry of Defence, it considered firstly Iraq’s diplomatic options to deter, avert, or limit a US-led attack; and secondly Saddam’s military options to face such an attack. The key assessment, however, followed on 9 September 2002. Entitled ‘Iraqi Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons – Possible Scenarios’, it was designed to inform military and contingency planning. Accordingly, its conclusions were inherently precautionary. By mid-September therefore, policymakers were under the impression that Iraq sought to pursue its WMD programme. At the time, there was evidence of Iraqi development of ballistic missiles, some evidence of Iraq’s ability to produce biological weapons in a mobile laboratory, and some inferential evidence of chemical capabilities. 7 Much of this intelligence was retrospectively criticised and some of it withdrawn.
Spying on the World Page 45