Art of Betrayal (62 page)

As America's objective became clear, a meeting at Chequers was called in April 2002. A minute of the meeting recorded that the Prime Minister wanted to lead and not just support the American process of regime change (although what precisely regime change meant remained unclear). Britain's two most senior spies, Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, both argued for co-operation with the US planning. ‘It's keeping our hands on what's going on and not letting the Americans run away with the ball,' Dearlove later said of the
thinking.
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The roles of these two rivals, Scarlett, as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Dearlove, as Chief of MI6, were central to the build-up to war. Scarlett, a graduate of Moscow Rules, was ever the details man. Dearlove was the forceful, big-picture visionary thinker, keen for intelligence to make an impact. Both would be accused of drawing too close to power.

Richard Dearlove was a frequent transatlantic traveller in the months after 9/11, commuting back and forth between London and Washington and meeting with the most senior American officials in the White House. Like all MI6 chiefs since Dick White he understood the importance of nurturing close relations with the US. But along with David Manning, he had now been given the specific task of tracking the development of US policy on Iraq and reporting back to Blair. The Americans were well aware of this. CIA officials noted how skilfully Dearlove, like the experienced case officer he was, cultivated his relationship with Tenet, who, like many CIA chiefs, came from a more political than operational background, in order to gain maximum access for Britain.
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The British always did this (to the annoyance of the non-Anglophiles in the agency), but Dearlove did it particularly well. ‘We used to joke that Tenet was Dearlove's best recruitment,' recalls one CIA officer.
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CIA officers had been surprised at just how upset the British were in the summer of 2002 when they heard that their annual summit was going to be cancelled. The CIA and MI6 would have regular meetings, often in Bermuda or somewhere far flung, to divide up the world, agreeing targets and identifying potential conflicts of interest. In the summer of 2002 Tenet explained that he was too busy for such a meeting. He was worried it would not look right for him to disappear for so long. In the end, it was agreed that a quick summit could take place, but only if it was in Washington and over the weekend. Dearlove and colleagues travelled over in July. After the regular discussion, Dearlove approached Tenet and asked to speak ‘off-line'. They talked for close to two hours. According to Tenet, Dearlove came away with a clear perception that the US administration was determined to transform the Middle East, starting with Iraq. During the visit, Dearlove also had an argument with staff in Vice-President Cheney's office about their claim that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda, which the British generally thought was ‘bollocks'.
‘[Dearlove] believed that the crowd round the vice-president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about “fixing” the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used,' Tenet later said.
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Dearlove headed straight to Downing Street on his return for a crucial gathering of Britain's national security nomenclatura on 23 July. Scarlett began by summarising the latest assessment of Saddam's regime. The regime was tough and based on fear and the only way of overthrowing it would be through massive military action which Saddam was not yet convinced would come. Dearlove was up next and reported back on his trip to Washington. In the draft minutes of the meeting, he was quoted as saying that there had been ‘a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.' When the draft minutes were circulated, Dearlove objected to that last sentence, saying it was not what he meant, and it was altered. The British Chief of Defence Staff then spoke up and outlined the possible contribution Britain could make. The military wanted in. They disliked the idea of a big war being fought by the Americans without their closest ally by their side. The Chief of Defence Staff told Blair later that he would have a real problem with his army if they were not properly involved.
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The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, piped up next with a note of caution and a line of argument he frequently deployed. ‘The case was thin,' he said. ‘Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.' Libya had become an increasing worry as a new stream of intelligence through 2002 showed it acquiring components for a bomb. The intelligence was far stronger than anything on Iraq. Blair dismissed Straw's remarks by saying that there were other strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. The best approach to deal with Iraq, Straw said, would be an ultimatum demanding the return of UN inspectors. ‘This would help with the legal justification for the use of force,' he added. The UK, much more than the US, needed a legal rationale. Non-compliance with UN resolutions on WMD offered more chance of a rationale than regime change.

One person in the room was startled and taken aback by the nature of the discussion. ‘What struck me was that some of the language used implied that we were closer to military action than I had imagined that we were,' recalled Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary. He also detected an underlying tension between Blair and his Foreign Secretary. Straw, Wilson believed, was trying to prevent Blair being too ‘gung-ho about military action'. Wilson was about to retire and used his farewell meetings with Blair to warn him that ‘he was getting into a position which could be dangerous'. He sensed Blair was serious about military action. ‘There was a gleam in his eye which worries me,' he thought.
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The overall conclusion was that Britain should work on the assumption that it would join the US in military action. America's intentions were clear. So were Blair's to those around him After the meeting he wrote a private note to President Bush. His advisers were so worried by the opening line that they asked him to tone it down. ‘What I was saying to President Bush was very clear and simple. It is: You can count on us,' Blair would later say of the content.
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But selling a war to an unconvinced public would be tricky. Regime change did not cut it in Britain in the way it did in post-9/11 America, even though Blair believed that this would be the only way of dealing with the weapons.
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The decision was taken to rest the public case entirely on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction in defiance of the United Nations. This would mean leaning heavily on intelligence. As far back as April, Scarlett had met with Alastair Campbell to discuss what would be needed ‘communications-wise to set the scene for Iraq'. Early drafts were begun of a dossier on Saddam's weapons programmes. Some MI6 officers, including the senior Arabist director who had briefed Manning, were unhappy with the idea. ‘All our training, all our culture, bias, would be against such a thing, and we were very relieved when we thought we had seen it off.' But when the officer returned from holiday in the first week of September, he was alarmed to find the idea had been resurrected and now appeared unstoppable. ‘It was up and running like a racehorse … and we didn't feel that there was an opportunity, an occasion, when we could throw ourselves in front of it.'
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Every Wednesday afternoon, Britain's spy chiefs and those they
work with from other departments gather in a cosy egg-shaped conference room. The select few always sit in the same seats and arrive without aides or assistants. With no politicians present it is a useful time to catch up on gossip, but the collegiate atmosphere turns sober and serious as they get down to business reviewing the latest, carefully drafted assessments that have been produced for them. The Joint Intelligence Committee has acquired something of a mystique. Some former members believe this was not always well founded, but nevertheless it was precisely that mystique which politicians wanted to tap into when they asked the JIC to take the unprecedented step of publishing a dossier for public consumption. No one on the committee demurred. ‘We weren't asked would we like to produce this. We were told we will produce this,' recalled Sir David Omand, Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator and member of the JIC at the time. ‘Now, in my position, I could have phoned up Downing Street and I could have asked to see the Prime Minister and said, “This is a terrible idea. Why do you want to do this?” I didn't do that because I didn't think it was such a terrible idea at the time.'
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Campbell told Scarlett and others that the dossier had to be ‘revelatory and we needed to show that it was new and informative and part of a bigger case.'
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The JIC prides itself on its ability to come to an agreed collective decision with no dissent. ‘All have to dip their hands in the blood of collective judgement, however unwelcome that may be', as Omand describes the process.
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Scarlett was in charge but working closely with Downing Street. The fact that Alastair Campbell could talk of the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee as a ‘mate' and ‘a very good bloke' was indicative of the informality of the Blair government and the willingness of the spies to work with it.
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At times of crisis, Downing Street takes on the sense of a bunker under siege, its residents hunkering down as the artillery rounds lobbed by the press, parliament and diplomacy explode all around. In this heady atmosphere, it can be hard to resist when the Prime Minister asks for help. Former chairs of the JIC have argued that the committee entered the ‘the Prime Minister's magic circle' over Iraq and was engulfed by the heady atmosphere, failing to keep its distance and objectivity.
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As the drafting process took place, Scarlett received comments from the Prime Minister as well as from Alastair Campell and
Jonathan Powell, his Chief of Staff, and he attended meetings chaired by Campbell to look at the presentation of the dossier.
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Intelligence was drawn closer to policy than it had ever been before. Politicians and their advisers would never normally comment on JIC drafts. The dossier, those at the top would claim, was not designed to make the case for war. It was just putting information in the public domain so that people could make up their minds. ‘In no sense, in my mind, or in the mind of the JIC, was it a document designed to make a case for anything,' Scarlett later asserted.
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That claim was disputed by some of those just below him. ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the Dossier was precisely to make a case for war,' one senior military intelligence officer, Major General Michael Laurie, later complained. ‘During the drafting of the final Dossier, every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible … It was clear to me that there was direction and pressure being applied on the JIC and its drafters.'
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A line had been crossed. Intelligence, some would argue, was being used as a tool for political persuasion.

Scarlett was the meticulous briefer at formal meetings but the man who had more informal access to the Prime Minister was Dearlove. What was discussed between the two men remains their secret. Dear-love was a confident, can-do character. Blair was also more forward leaning on Iraq than many of his advisers, including David Manning. Manning watched the Foreign Office, where he had come from, struggling with the demands placed on it while MI6 began to provide more policy advice than it had in the past.
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Dearlove, like Blair, was a liberal interventionist. ‘The case for going to war with Iraq was only, as it were, partially supported by the intelligence,' he later told an audience. ‘I think the case for going to war in Iraq was a moral one … I take the liberal interventionist view of foreign policy. That's my personal view as a citizen of this country. The reasons for looking at Iraq as a problem that might justify military action were very broad-ranging. And in a way I think the most difficult issue for a British prime minister facing the possibility that the United States were going to invade Iraq was the dilemma any British prime minister would face – do you support the United States in this venture, or, and the alternative – there probably was no alternative – do you go with Russia, France and Germany and as it were oppose US policy?'
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Dearlove, his critics say, relished being at the epicentre of power,
briefing Blair and even President Bush in the Oval Office. But this was the culmination of not so much a personal as an institutional desire, an urge to show that the Secret Service was still needed despite all those questions after the end of the Cold War. ‘One of the cultural weaknesses of SIS [MI6] is that it is too eager to please,' one former senior official reckons.
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For all the Bondish bravado, an insecurity had always haunted the service since its inception in 1909, a fear that it would no longer be needed and that one day it might simply be disposed of, its cherished traditions and war stories consigned not even to the history books but just to the fading memory of a few. The post-9/11 era had offered deliverance from those fears. Iraq was its apotheosis. Dearlove developed a relationship which was far, far closer to the Prime Minister than to the Foreign Secretary to whom a Chief normally reports. He was among the Prime Minister's closest advisers and, in the eyes of other officials, enjoyed a ‘privileged relationship'.
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Dearlove disputes the idea that he was too close as ‘complete rubbish'. ‘I wasn't sipping Chardonnay in the evenings with Tony Blair, or nipping off to have breakfast with him to Chequers. I was going to meetings, as the head of SIS, to discuss SIS business in relation to the development of national security policy … A lot of people were jealous of my position, and therefore, I think, motivated to talk about it, including the Foreign Secretary of the day.'