Art of Betrayal (64 page)

What bothered Jones and his staff was the certainty being expressed. How was such confidence possible? That was when he heard the first whisperings of a new source so sensitive that only a few could be let into the details, the one that had just arrived in mid-September (and which was describing accelerated production). His antennae went up and he went to see his boss.

‘This dossier business,' his superior began. ‘DCDI [Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence] wants me to tell you that there is some new intelligence, very sensitive, can't be shown to many, that clears up this business your chaps have been worrying about. OK?'

Jones complained that this was not good enough.

‘But an officer from MI6 has reassured me that it is OK,' his boss replied.

Had he seen it personally?

‘No. But MI6 have told me it was good stuff.' He told Jones he had
been reassured by MI6 that the report was sound even though he had not seen it.

Jones privately contacted someone who had seen the MI6 report and explained his concerns. Should he take the unusual step of writing a formal minute outlining these concerns or was it really as good as claimed? ‘Write the minute,' he was told.
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His Chemical Weapons analyst also recoded his concerns on paper. ‘The 20 September draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by the evidence available to me,' it read.
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The information from the new source on trial was not included directly in the dossier because Dearlove wanted to protect the source, but knowledge of it was crucial in hardening up the judgements and overcoming the concerns within DIS. The new source, with its talk of accelerated production, seemed to confirm what had been only implied in the August report and helped overcome the last remaining qualms, including over forty-five minutes.
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‘We were told at the time that it did clinch it, and that we should bury our concerns,' Jones later said.
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How could reports be so sensitive that they could not be revealed to the experts but could be shown off to the Prime Minister and used to harden up a dossier designed for public consumption?

‘They weren't seen by experts. You forget this is a Secret Service. We have to protect our sources. We can't allow documents like that to reach anyone who really knows.' That was how the fictional MI6 employee in Graham Greene's
Our Man in Havana
explained to the vacuum-cleaner salesman why no one had noticed that his technical diagrams for a new super-weapon were actually enlarged versions of a two-way nozzle and double-action coupling from an ‘Atomic Pile' vacuum cleaner. ‘We haven't shown them the drawings yet,' the Chief explained in the 1958 novel, referring to the experts outside the service. ‘You know what those fellows are like. They'll criticise points of detail, say the whole thing is unreliable, that the tube is out of proportion or points the wrong way.'
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By mid-September the dossier, stiffened by MI6's new sources, was nearly ready to face the outside world. Scarlett maintained that while he was in charge of the main text, the foreword was overtly political and therefore not under his control. Downing Street officials say it would have been important for Blair to have felt his JIC Chair was comfortable with it.
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Scarlett did make a few small changes and
then, in the words of one member, ‘flashed it round the JIC', some members of which paid relatively little attention.
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The language was stark. ‘What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons,' Blair assured the reader in his foreword. The idea that there were limits to the intelligence and even major gaps had been lost, along with so many of the other caveats.
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The dossier's foreword implied that there was more that the public could not see and had to be kept under wraps because of security. The reality was that the dossier ‘may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgements than was the case.'
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Blair rose to present his case before an expectant House of Commons on 24 September 2002. ‘I am aware, of course, that people will have to take elements of this on the good faith of our intelligence services, but this is what they are telling me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence picture that they paint is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within forty-five minutes.' Thanks to MI6 riding to the rescue with its new sources, the intelligence that in March had been ‘sporadic and patchy' could now be claimed as ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative'.

In the land of intelligence, like that of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The trickle of MI6 sources amounted to more than the Americans had managed and the fresh intelligence, including the new source of September, was quickly passed over the Atlantic. ‘Did this information make any difference in my thinking?' asked CIA Director George Tenet when he later tried to explain why he had got things wrong. ‘You bet it did.'
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The Bush administration was preparing to make its case both to its own public and to the world and British intelligence would be closely involved.

An American National Intelligence Estimate was hastily cobbled together reflecting the fact that no one had assessed Iraq's programmes properly for a long time. One officer said he could count
the number of sources on one hand and still pick his nose. None of the four sources the US had on Iraq were inside the WMD progamme. ‘How come all the good reporting I get is from SIS?' Tenet asked one of his staff once – music to British intelligence's ears with their long-standing desire to show they could always bring something to the party.
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Each side would lean on the other, sometimes more than they realised.

The CIA and its Director George Tenet's experience mirrored that in Britain. ‘Don't worry, it's a slam dunk,' Tenet told President Bush when he worried that the public case for Saddam's weapons was not strong enough (‘The two dumbest words I ever said,' he later reflected). Tenet would see himself as the fall guy when it all went wrong, arguing that the dilemma for the spies was that if they did not get involved the intelligence would be misused, but when they did involve themselves they were drawn into a messy, political process of advocacy.

Tenet had the White House on his back, constantly pushing and probing, and Vice-President Cheney visiting Langley to check up on progress. No one, on either side of the Atlantic, could easily put their finger on direct pressure on analysts to come to certain conclusions. But it is also naive to think that analysts can close themselves off from their surroundings and the political context, however hard they try. How likely is it that junior staff will challenge assumptions to which they know their superiors have committed themselves in their relationships with politicians? The analysts also complained they were not told enough about the intelligence sources to understand their motivation and reliability or to realise that some of the material was going round in circles between different countries and being repackaged to look as if it was new when in fact it was old. The case for Iraq having developed mobile biological weapons was emblematic of much that what went wrong.

In an upmarket but anonymous hotel room in Amman, Jordan, a well-built, olive-skinned man nervously chain-smoked cigarettes, the ashtray overflowing as the hours passed. He was, he said, a former major in the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence service. He could talk in ghastly detail about the methods he and his colleagues used to maintain Saddam's grip on power. But there was more, he explained. He knew something about biological weapons labs. His
rapt audience consisted not of spies but two journalists. His back-story sounded plausible, but there was something in the way he glanced downwards when he talked about the mobile labs that did not quite feel right. And there was the fact that he had been introduced by the Iraqi National Congress, an émigré group run by the mercurial Ahmed Chalabi, dedicated to Saddam's overthrow. So the story about the mobile labs languished through a lack of confidence in the source.
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A few weeks after that Amman meeting US Secretary of State Colin Powell stood before the United Nations, George Tenet literally and metaphorically covering his rear. ‘One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents,' he explained. ‘Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories,' he claimed, before outlining the four sources that backed up the case. ‘A fourth source, an Iraqi major, who defected, confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories.'
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While one of the journalists listening wondered, but only for a few weeks, if he had missed a story, Powell did not know that parts of his own intelligence community had a year earlier deemed the major to be a fabricator. They had issued a ‘burn notice', but never recalled his reports or amended the work based on them. Nor did Powell know that CIA officers had also been warned that the crucial main source about mobile labs, on whom so much in America and Britain depended, might also be a fabricator. ‘Curveball' was the fitting codename for that main source.

In November 1999 a young Iraqi had arrived at Munich airport and requested asylum from the German government. It was well known in the barbed-wire-encrusted holding camp in which he was placed that one way out was by convincing German intelligence you had something they wanted. Streams of Iraqi defectors pimped their stories to the intelligence agencies. Many were entirely made up or wild assertions based on fragments of what they had heard or seen back home. Most, but not all, were weeded out. Like Golitsyn and the Cold War defectors, Curveball knew he needed something of value to avoid being discarded. He appeared reserved and calm as he told his interrogators that not only did he have details about Saddam manufacturing biological weapons on mobile grey metal trailers
but that it was being done with German equipment. The Germans clumsily debriefed Curveball, asking him leading questions. Within a few months he had his own apartment and had been granted political asylum. The Germans passed the intelligence to allies including Britain's MI6 and American military intelligence, the DIA, but not the CIA with whom relations were less close. The DIA introduced the stream of reporting into the American system – a total of 100 reports in less than two years. It was agreed the material was technically credible, but that was different from determining whether it was actually true. Because of the potential embarrassment centring on the involvement of their companies, the Germans decided not to allow direct access or reveal his true identity to their allies. He did not speak English and he hated Americans, they lied. They also, truth be told, were not too sure about him. Little did they know the vast edifice that would be built on the shifting sands of his meagre, unreliable intelligence. And it was not just America. ‘The vast majority' of Britain's case for believing in biological weapons production came from Curveball.
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No one likes being dependent on a source without knowing much about it, so MI6 did its best to get around German reticence and find out who Curveball really was. The Americans were angry that their ‘closest ally' was not keeping them in the loop, at least initially, of their investigation. ‘People were really pissed off that the Brits were talking to the Germans about the case and they didn't share it all with us,' a CIA officer said afterwards.
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CIA officials say that they later learnt that some MI6 officers began to have doubts about Curveball in 2002, saying they were not convinced he was a ‘wholly reliable source' and ‘elements of [his] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators'. But despite these concerns, MI6 was never willing to reject completely his reliability (largely due to his apparent technical knowledge) and continued to use his reports, which would become crucial to the dossier.
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From 2002, Curveball was also backed up by the major from the Mukhabarat, providing false reassurance, and MI6's third new source, from an agent known as Red River. Red River, a long-standing MI6 agent, reported a new ‘sub-source' in the summer of 2002 who talked of the possible use of fermenters on trailers and railway trucks. These were suspected of being for biological weapons production but the
source could not be sure of their purpose. In London, it was said that this confirmed the Curveball account; in truth it was complementary rather than confirmatory, a subtle but important difference.

The CIA division chief rolled into lunch fifteen minutes late at the Sea Catch restaurant overlooking the canal in Georgetown. His lunch partner, an ever-prompt German spy, had been waiting. After small talk the CIA officer asked if his agency could meet Curveball. ‘Don't ask,' was the reply. ‘He hates Americans.' That was not enough of a reason, the CIA man responded. ‘You do not want to see him because he's crazy,' the German said. ‘I personally think the guy may be a fabricator,' he added.
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The Germans had begun to realise that Curveball might be critical to the American case for a war and that worried them. The CIA officer says he passed on these concerns at a number of meetings with senior officials. But some in the CIA and Washington did not seem to want to have a major source knocked out from under them.