Downing Street's
determination to use intelligence to bolster its case for war against Iraq
provoked a fierce debate in Whitehall last autumn.
Many in the intelligence community, including MI6 and GCHQ, the
government's eavesdropping centre, were against publishing a dossier
spelling out their assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
They were concerned that MPs and journalists would say the dossier,
which was sanitised, contained little that was new. They feared there
would be demands for the disclosure of more intelligence-based
information.
Above all, they were concerned that Downing Street would use the
intelligence agencies to justify a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in the
face of widespread opposition at home. Downing Street needed intelligence
for political reasons.
The intelligence community's worst fears about this unprecedented use
of their information were fully realised. The dossier may have been based
on intelligence as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's communications chief,
insisted yesterday; the question was how the words were used and dressed
up.
In the foreword to the dossier Mr Blair said it "discloses that
[Saddam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD [weapons of mass
destruction] to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".
What the dossier actually says is that "intelligence indicates that the
Iraqi military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45
minutes of an order to do so".
Yesterday, Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, told BBC Radio 4's
Today programme: "That was said on the basis of security service
information - a single source, it wasn't corroborated." Intelligence
officials said yesterday that whether the claim came from a single source,
or many, was a red herring.
What mattered was the reliability of the source. That claim, like all
the others in the dossier, was based on intelligence assessments with all
the caveats that implies. In this case, it was based on the assumption -
which now seems highly unlikely - that Saddam's forces had drums of
chemical or biological weapons close to missile batteries.
Intelligence is an imprecise art but Downing Street wanted certainty to
back up its case for war. The intelligence agencies' anger was heightened
in February when another "intelligence" dossier put out by Downing Street
contained information lifted from academic sources and included a
plagiarised section written by an American PhD student.
Compilers of the documents included members of Mr Campbell's staff and
the Coalition Information Centre, a propaganda body set up in the Foreign
Office. Intelligence officials, including John Scarlett, chairman of
Whitehall's joint intelligence committee, were reported to be furious. It
was a "serious error", a Whitehall source said yesterday.
The intelligence agencies - unused to the limelight, although certainly
accustomed to being used for political ends - could not stand up to Mr
Campbell, let alone to the prime minister. Their situation was further
complicated by tensions with their counterparts in the US about the nature
of the threat posed by Iraq and al-Qaida. They strongly contested American
claims - put about notably by the highly politicised agency set up by the
US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, called the Office of Special Plans
- of links between al-Qaida and Baghdad.
Mr Blair went further than the agencies wanted by suggesting to MPs
that such links could exist. They had to keep mum because they did not
want to embarrass the prime minister. They also were under pressure from
the Foreign Office not to upset Britain's relations with the US.
But the agencies, and MI6 in particular, were themselves vulnerable to
allegations of "doctoring" or manipulating intelligence. The September
dossier claimed that there was intelligence that Iraq "has sought the
supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa".
The claim was seized on by the media. But investigations by the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear inspections body,
soon discovered that documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to
buy uranium from Niger were forged. Whitehall officials admit they were
forged. Mr Blair, so far, has not.
The episode encouraged the scepticism of Hans Blix, chief UN weapons
inspector, about intelligence he was given by western agencies during his
visits to Iraq. Whitehall sources yesterday described the government's
dossier as based on earlier information and reflecting a current view
that, as one put it, the Iraqis "were up to something".
A source said: "It may take several months to decide what the Iraqis
were doing". He added that something had to be found if only for political
reasons - to support Mr Blair.
The issue presents the intelligence agencies with an important test of
their credibility as well as the government's case for pre-emptive
military action against Iraq, analysts said yesterday. That action was
widely opposed in Whitehall.
Peter Hennessy, professor of modern history at Queen Mary and Westfield
College, University of London, and a close watcher of Whitehall said: "If
ever we needed a vivid example to show the indispensability of politically
neutral crown servants, this is it."
