Art of Betrayal (63 page)

Politicians and spies frequently have one personality trait in common with each other which they do not share with the civil servants with whom they work – they both have an appetite for risk-taking. Dearlove was acutely aware that the Prime Minister was relying on him by deploying intelligence as the central plank of the argument for intervention. This, he knew, was a ‘fragile and dangerous position'. At one point Blair turned to his spy chief. ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands,' he said.
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The problem with making the public case about the threat posed by Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was that even though everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons, they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument. The intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy', as a Joint Intelligence Committee report of March 2002 indicated (the assessment was even less confident about the weapons than a paper from the previous May).
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A war could not
easily be justified on sporadic and patchy intelligence. What the Prime Minister needed was clear. Would MI6 be able to step up to the plate and deliver?

Before September 2001, Iraq had been a graveyard slot for MI6 officers, a backwater where you were sent if your career was sloshing around in the shallows. ‘The intelligence picture on Iraq was, I would say, neglected,' Dearlove later admitted of the decade between 1991 and 2001.
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Gathering secrets on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ranked way down the list of priorities set by the Joint Intelligence Committee, twentieth by some accounts. The intelligence base was ‘thin'.
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After 11 September, Iraq would roar up the top twenty faster than one of the guided missiles Saddam was suspected of hiding. But, even once it had become a priority-one target, it takes time to build up intelligence sources. Good human intelligence cannot be switched on and off like a tap. Potential agents have to be spotted, researched, cultivated, approached and their veracity and good faith validated. It can take years to establish proper intelligence coverage against a hard target; eighteen months is a minimum. That was not the time-frame on offer. ‘If we had had clear options, we wouldn't have felt the pressure so much,' argued the senior MI6 director involved in the process. ‘We would have been able to gear it through to our operational activity. I think we felt the pressure because there weren't obvious lines to follow up which were going to be fruitful. So we had to be intense about looking at every opportunity. There was no signposted way in to Iraqi WMD.'
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MI6 had a small stable of agents reporting from within Iraq. One or two of these were agents of long standing and reliability. One in particular had been reporting since the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. He had some personal disgruntlement with Saddam and disliked his regime. His reports had been impressive on certain specific areas where he had access, such as Iraq's air defences. These reports had proved vital in helping administer the No Fly Zone over Iraq in the 1990s. The problem is that neither this agent nor any of the others had any first-hand, inside knowledge of Iraq's WMD programme; their expertise lay elsewhere. But they could see which way the wind was blowing and they knew exactly what MI6 was looking for. And so they managed to find it. Much of the crucial – and controversial – evidence would come from these agents, though not directly. They
would find their own agents (or sub-sources) who in turn provided the goods – cash bonuses were on offer. Much of it would be inferential, sourced from their circle of contacts in Baghdad or people they had met and recruited (or at least claimed to have done). There was no point, these agents thought, in reporting on the rather large number of people who knew nothing about special weapons or who were doubtful of their existence. That was not what was wanted.

And so in August and into September 2002 the magicians at MI6 were able to pull a rabbit or three out of their hat. With their customary flourish, they produced new intelligence, in the nick of time, that seemed to save the day. The new sources would be vital in adding colour to the dossier and would allow Scarlett to instruct the assessments staff to ‘firm up' the dossier's conclusions and dispose of the caveats.
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Walking through Baghdad at the end of August, the Iraqi was nervous. He had been risking his life for many years by spying on his own country as an agent for the British Secret Service. At an agreed location he activated a tiny transmitter, smaller than a packet of cigarettes, to send an encrypted message to his contact. At the receiving end was another undercover source operating for MI6 in Baghdad (not an MI6 officer but an intermediary), who could eventually get the information back to Vauxhall Cross. One of the Iraqi agent's sources had produced a rather vague and ambiguous report saying that biological and chemical munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within twenty to forty-five minutes. Quite what the weapons were he could not say. The report seemed to have come originally from someone who was just talking to a colleague casually, unaware that they would pass on the information to a foreign secret service. The source was untested but he was named and seemed to be in a position to know the information.

The dossier was being drawn up in a rush, far faster than usual for a JIC document. Emails whizzed back and forth, some pleading for more information. ‘Has anybody got anything more they can put in the dossier?' was the plea Sir David Omand recalled. ‘I wouldn't interpret that as meaning people saying there isn't enough intelligence in substance, but this isn't going to look very convincing if we are not allowed to show more of it. That's my personal explanation of why, as it were, people fell on the forty-five minutes. At least that
was something the Secret Service would allow to be used. With hindsight, one can see that adding a bit of local colour like that is asking for trouble. But we didn't really spot that at the time.'
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MI6 officers were feeling the pressure to come up with the goods. [T]eams were wrestling with all this, having a very difficult time,' according to the senior MI6 director.
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Not everyone was convinced by the ‘local colour'. Expert analysts found MI6's description of the new sub-source not as straightforward or as clear as they would have expected. When they asked MI6 ‘their response was unusually vague and unhelpful'.
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The problem with the claim that munitions could be deployed in forty-five minutes was the absence of the type of collateral and corroborating intelligence an analyst would expect. Where were these chemical weapons being produced and by whom? What kind of chemicals were they? It was just a lonely piece of intelligence floating in a sea of uncertainty to which those who wanted to could cling.

There was a debate about how this new intelligence should be worded. An original draft talked about Iraq ‘probably' having dispersed its special weapons and stating that they ‘could' be with military units and ready for firing within forty-five minutes. Alastair Campbell pointed out that in one draft of the dossier the use of the qualifier ‘may' in the main text was weaker than the language used in the summary. Scarlett replied that the language had been ‘tightened'. Scarlett would later say this followed a re-examination of the original intelligence. A few of the experts inside Whitehall remained unhappy with the claim but consoled themselves with the thought that at least the press or parliament would probe it carefully. They never did.

What did the report actually mean? The source did not seem to know much about chemical or biological weapons or even about the difference between them. And the issue of timing was also perplexing. If it related to battlefield shells, as the JIC's drafters in the assessment staff believed it probably did, then forty-five minutes to move munitions from storage places to the units which would fire them was not particularly surprising. In fact it was pretty pathetic rather than scary if it took forty-five minutes to fire a shell. If it was referring to a ballistic missile then that would be rather too quick. Ministers say the difference was never explained to them. Nor was it explained to the public. When he heard about it, the Director of the CIA had his
own view. His people thought it did not fit with what they knew about the artillery capabilities of the Iraqis. He thought the original source questionable and referred to it privately as the ‘they-can-attack-in-45-minutes shit'.
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But this was not the most important piece of intelligence that rode, like the cavalry, to the rescue. The most welcome of the new sources galloped over the horizon just as the sun was setting on the dossier. MI6 had managed to bag what looked like an important new agent. Dearlove personally mentioned the good news to David Manning at a meeting on 10 September and a copy of the report was duly despatched to Downing Street. The next day Dearlove informed Scarlett on the phone and MI6 formally issued its new report. An agent claimed that the production of biological and chemical weapons was being accelerated. The agent promised more critical intelligence soon. The source was still untested but Dearlove believed the information was too important to sit on.
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But while those people at the top in London had learnt about this new source before even the intelligence report was formally issued, others – the ones who could judge the technical credibility of the information – remained in the dark.

Dearlove had a scheduled meeting with the Prime Minister on 12 September to update Blair on MI6 operations in Iraq. Accompanied by a senior officer, he went through all of MI6's sources with Blair one by one, including the new source. The aim was to give Blair a ‘flavour' of what was happening on the ground. Dearlove made clear just how important the new source promised to be but added that the case was developmental and the source unproven. Some inside MI6 believed this process was emblematic of what had gone wrong. Too much unproven intelligence, hot off the printer, was walked too quickly into the welcoming arms of Downing Street, they argued. This, traditionalists claimed, was the logical end point of the desire of modernisers within the service to make it useful, relevant and close to policy. There is a reason, they say, why intelligence gets assessed by experts carefully and placed into context and put down on paper rather than orally briefed to policymakers. But that was not the style of the Blair government. In truth, this was not a new debate. There is a rich pedigree of intelligence officers walking their successes round to Downing Street, particularly during times of conflict. ‘Everything is supposed to go through the assessment staff,' one
member of that staff at the time of Iraq recalls in discussing how the process worked in general terms. ‘Often we got it half an hour after it had gone to Downing Street with it post-dated to cover their back.' Observers of the relationship believed this desire to make an impression has long reflected the insecurity of MI6 and the way in which its leadership has sought to win over political leaders.

The new source talked not just about accelerated production but also the building of further facilities and the employment of so-called dual-use facilities. Strangely there was no satellite imagery nor intercepted communications to confirm this.
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The new source promised another consignment of crucial intelligence in the next three to four weeks, including details of WMD sites. This, it was hoped, might be the eagerly sought ‘silver bullet'. The key ‘new source on trial' was said to have direct access. He may have been in the Iraqi Special Security Organisation which was responsible for protecting key sites and individuals. A source from the SSO was reporting on Iraq's plans to confuse UN inspectors and bug their rooms, and on how scientists were to be kept away from them if there were any suspicions about their loyalty. Those who later saw reports reflected that this was all actually standard Iraqi behaviour that anyone who had been an inspector in the 1990s would recognise. However, these security precautions were taken to indicate that there must be something to hide and this source reported that he was sure there was. But would a security official actually know much about what that was? Saddam had in fact ordered key military units to check methodically and scrub themselves of anything that could be suspicious (for instance, traces relating to pre-1991 equipment), fearing that the US would use it as a justification for war, and to hide sensitive materials unrelated to unconventional weapons.
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Dearlove and senior officers around him were bullish. They were delivering the goods. One officer went so far as to utter the immortal words: ‘We've got another Penkovsky.'
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A third new sub-source over the summer had delivered what looked like confirmation of mobile biological labs. In all, three reporting streams produced six new reports at the crucial moment. But further down the food chain there were rumblings in some corners of Vauxhall Cross. A few members of staff felt uncomfortable that fresh, untested intelligence was being taken to Downing Street; two people asked to be moved because of
their misgivings over the war. But on the whole there was disquiet rather than vocal dissent. In Whitehall, the unhappiness tended to come from the lower-to-middle orders. The Joint Intelligence Committee was signing off on the dossier but its membership consisted of senior officials, closely attuned to politics, sitting in the Downing Street bunker. They were the experts on what the government wanted, not on the subject matter.

Brian Jones returned from a holiday in Greece on 18 September just as the dossier neared completion. He was in charge of a team of analysts of weapons of mass destruction in the Defence Intelligence Staff of the Ministry of Defence, the home of much of the government's residual knowledge and in-depth expertise. His staff told him that their work in his absence had been dominated by the dossier. His expert on biological weapons was not completely happy with the dossier but felt he could live with it; his expert on Iraq's chemical weapons was very unhappy, especially since his suggested changes to drafts were being ignored. ‘The trouble is I have absolutely no reliable intelligence that Iraq has produced significant quantities of any chemical warfare agent or weapons since the Gulf conflict of 1991,' Jones said he was told by his colleague. ‘I have been making this point in comments on every draft of the dossier,' he said. ‘But we are just being ignored.'
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