Broken Vows (32 page)

‘Why do you have to be so gloomy?’ Campbell asked him. ‘So half full?’

Surprised by Campbell’s anger, Boyce looked back at him with contempt. ‘I don’t tell people what they like to hear,’ he replied.

‘He had an arrogant style and was irrelevant,’ Boyce, with intense dislike, would later say about Campbell, unaware of the publicist’s bouts of clinical depression. ‘He was trivial, not interested in real outcomes.’ Curiously, Campbell had earlier judged Boyce as possibly ‘a fellow depressive’. Providing erroneous explanations for Boyce’s suspicions about Blair’s intentions was natural to Campbell, and for those same reasons Blair preferred to avoid speaking to the admiral.

The antagonism between Blair and his chiefs highlighted one of several handicaps blighting the British military. For an army to launch an invasion across a desert under the command of a former submariner exposed the inexperience of all British officers in this kind of land warfare. Unlike the American army, no senior British army officer had commanded a battle group or even obtained a PhD. Unaware of that deficit, Blair was also heading towards war without a network of civilian defence specialists providing critical advice. Not only had he excluded Andrew Turnbull from the discussions, but Kevin Tebbit too, the permanent secretary at the MoD, whom Jonathan Powell disliked. He had also abandoned the traditional OPX Cabinet committee that in the past had scrutinised all combat plans. He had constructed what Manning described to the Chilcot committee as ‘a ring of secrecy’.

Whitehall had not previously prepared for a war on the exclusive basis of intelligence rather than reasoned arguments written and discussed by senior officials in the Foreign Office, MoD and Cabinet Office. Never before had the Cabinet secretary, the fulcrum of the
government machine, been excluded from such vital discussions. Blair’s innocence about the fallibility of intelligence officers could have been remedied by the secretary but, during his transfer of responsibilities to Turnbull in the summer, Wilson did not mention his belief that the dossier was being ‘overcooked’ by Scarlett; nor did he comment about Blair’s pressure on the intelligence services. On the contrary, Wilson said, ‘It’s a good thing.’

Blair’s diktat of exclusion also applied to David Omand, the former head of GCHQ, who had been specifically appointed as the co-ordinator of security and intelligence in the Cabinet Office. His repeated requests to Manning for access to Blair were rebuffed. Instead of having a well-oiled bureaucratic machine heading towards a common objective, Blair had fragmented Whitehall between a handful of trusted advisers and the majority, who were alien. Leading the loyalists, Scarlett was scurrying around the intelligence agencies in search of convincing evidence to justify the reason for war, and his pickings were meagre.

Since GCHQ could offer no intelligence from its intercepts, the pressure to come up with conclusive evidence was on Dearlove. He was convinced that Saddam possessed WMDs, but his agency lacked trustworthy Iraqi agents with access to the leader. Without those direct links, he relied upon information traded from foreign agencies.

An Italian source was proffering a letter that showed Saddam had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, West Africa, in order to eventually manufacture enriched plutonium, a redundant process discarded by the Israelis in the 1960s. MI6 had obtained a separate tip about an Iraqi enquiry for uranium in Niger that did not lead to a subsequent purchase. Then there was Rafid al-Janabi, an Iraqi chemical engineer, who arrived in Germany in 1999 and claimed to have worked in a mobile biological warfare laboratory. Code-named Curveball, he was interrogated by German intelligence (BND) for two years. Prevented by the BND from asking the Iraqi any questions directly, Dearlove accepted his eyewitness account of there being WMDs, as did the JIC assessors, without any additional scrutiny. Finally, there was an assortment of information
supplied by the Jordanian and French intelligence agencies that had been gleaned from high-ranking Iraqis who had either been debriefed in Europe or had flitted across the border to Jordan. Among the dissenters was Hussein Kamel, related to Saddam by birth and marriage. He and his family had arrived as fugitives in Amman in 1995. During debriefings, Kamel told MI6 officers that as Iraq’s minister of industries he had supervised the development of WMDs since 1987. Crucially, he described how Saddam’s WMD programme had been destroyed in 1991. In 1996, Kamel and his family were lured back to Baghdad and murdered. Ever since, the intelligence agencies could not agree on whether Kamel was reliable or had been planted by Saddam.

The stories told by all these sources were unverifiable because every Western intelligence agency, including America’s, lacked agents within Saddam’s entourage. But, in 2002, there was also a prejudicial mindset that Saddam was concealing his WMDs, which therefore meant that the low-level Iraqi informants who confirmed that conclusion were classified as ‘reliable’. The professional’s instinctive suspicion of deception was abandoned.

Dearlove’s interpretation of the reports was challenged by some middle-ranking analysts in MI6. Their voice had been weakened by Dearlove’s reduction of MI6’s ‘Requirements’ section, which no longer employed the most experienced officers to scrutinise incoming intelligence. ‘Dearlove removed the checks,’ Omand realised with hindsight, ‘and left some in his team who were too eager to believe in WMDs.’

Dearlove’s certainty was disputed by Brian Jones and his fellow intelligence analysts at the MoD. Despite Jones’s expertise, Scarlett took comfort from the fact that the official was sidelined because of his low security clearance. In Scarlett’s view, Jones was not an ‘authoritative’ expert ‘within the system’, and therefore could be ignored.

All the material was collated and tested for credibility by Julian Miller, a senior official seconded to the JIC from the MoD, who then presented a considered opinion for Scarlett. The system worked only if Miller and his staff treated MI6’s reports with robust scepticism. For
that independence, he needed Scarlett’s support. In September 2002, the JIC assessors faced serious hurdles.

In the scenario offered by high-ranking Iraqis, Saddam’s programme of weapons development had been effectively curtailed by the bombing campaign in 1991, then terminated by UNSCOM inspectors in 1995. An attempt to restart development in 1996 had been stopped two years later by Operation Desert Fox. Thereafter, Saddam delayed setting up the programme again while he negotiated the end of sanctions. That truthful version was not believed by the British and American intelligence agencies. Neither grasped the dictator’s unwillingness to admit his weakness.

Conditioned by the errors of their predecessors in 1991, Dearlove, Scarlett and Miller wrongly believed that Saddam’s weapons programme was more sophisticated than it really was. In unison, the staff of the intelligence agencies in Britain and America fell victim to a familiar flaw: convinced that Saddam possessed WMDs, they interpreted any ‘intelligence’ as supporting their prejudices. They even disseminated false intelligence to the media to generate the notion that Saddam possessed the terrible weapons they wanted him to have.

In the countdown to the dossier’s completion, Scarlett was under intense pressure – or ‘unduly influenced’, as Robin Butler’s subsequent inquiry would conclude – from Campbell to produce the most convincing case. As a believer, he did not raise any doubts about compromising the intelligence agencies’ independence. In fact, he deliberately omitted from the final dossier his damning summary that the evidence for WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’. Instead, he wrote in his draft in early September that Saddam ‘continued to produce chemical and biological weapons’. He must have known that there was no real evidence for that conclusion. His staff also knew that the ‘new’ intelligence describing Saddam’s al-Hussein rockets was as old as the weapons themselves, and there were serious doubts as to whether he possessed a missile that was actually usable. Desperate for something new, on the eve of publication Scarlett made what he called a ‘last call for any items of intelligence
that agencies think should be included’. That produced what his staff believed was a golden nugget belatedly discovered by MI6. Based on information from an Iraqi informant, Scarlett included in the dossier hard new evidence alleging that Saddam possessed ‘weapons’ that could be armed with chemical or biological warheads.

According to the JIC report inserted into the dossier, ‘The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.’ Scarlett never publicly explained the genesis of that account or described the weapon. Butler’s inquiry would describe the original ‘vague and ambiguous’ report to MI6 as ‘based on a single, uncorroborated source’. Scarlett ought to have known that MI6’s second-hand contact was an Iraqi brigadier who was passing on gossip about a short-range artillery shell and not, as was later assumed by the media, the ‘regional’ al-Hussein rocket. Blair’s critics would refer to the omission of that detail as an example of ‘sexing up’ the dossier. According to Butler’s inquiry, ‘More weight was put on it than the intelligence was strong enough to bear … The interpretation [of the intelligence report] was stretched to the limit.’ Scarlett would subsequently blame the litany of errors on Miller’s team and expressly excused himself of responsibility. By nature, he was not of a mind to question the collective wisdom. His role, he believed, was to represent the consensus rather than to encourage counter-intuitive debates. The JIC machine reached conclusions without dissenters.

On 11 September, the latest draft of Scarlett’s report was passed around Downing Street’s media specialists and government spokesmen. Several submitted unflattering comments. Phil Bassett emailed that it was ‘reading like the
Sunday Times
at its worst’. He wanted ‘more in officialese’. Godric Smith wrote, ‘It’s a bit of a muddle,’ while Tom Kelly lamented the absence of any proof that Saddam ‘could pull the nuclear trigger anytime soon’. Boyce and the chiefs were similarly unconvinced.

Their jeers were squashed by Dearlove. In a meeting that same day in Downing Street with Blair and Powell, he disclosed that MI6 had found a new source. He declined to share the new intelligence with
Brian Jones and the specialists in the MoD. At Blair’s insistence, every traditional safeguard that might have led to a warning about any potential danger was excluded. Omand was unaware that the prime minister had invited Dearlove and MI6’s Iraq specialist to return to Downing Street on 12 September for what the MI6 chief called a ‘heads-up’. With Campbell watching, Dearlove would describe ‘a pretty rare event … a silver bullet moment’. Blair never questioned the validity of the new intelligence, encouraging the MI6 chief to bypass Omand, Turnbull and Scarlett. ‘Blair loved his close relationship with Dearlove,’ Turnbull would observe. Even the MI6 chief recognised his position was ‘fragile and dangerous’. Omand would call it Dearlove’s ‘Icarus moment’, when he crashed to his death by getting too close to the sun.

At the meeting, Blair was told that MI6 had received confirmation from a source in Iraq that Saddam had accelerated the production of chemical and biological agents. Blair had the impression that the information was connected to the mobile laboratories that could produce WMDs, thus reinforcing Curveball’s credibility in London.

On the basis of Dearlove’s briefing, Scarlett became more assertive. As he himself recalled, the new information ‘did famously influence what was in the dossier’. Among the changes now made was the removal of Scarlett’s prediction that Saddam would need ‘at least five years’ to produce a nuclear weapon. Overnight, the wording became: ‘Iraq could produce a nuclear weapon in between one and two years.’ No new verified intelligence existed to justify the change.

When Blair read Scarlett’s draft, as Campbell noted, he ‘felt it was pretty compelling stuff’. This self-congratulatory diary note was premature. Six days later, Powell emailed Scarlett that the draft failed to demonstrate any imminent threat. ‘We must make clear’, he wrote, ‘that Saddam would not attack us at the moment.’ As previously, such dissent was unwelcome. Blair’s reply to Powell’s question ‘Why now?’ was that Britain’s priority was to maintain its alliance with America.

Over the following days, the JIC’s blurs and smudges came to be viewed as conclusive proof that Saddam possessed WMDs. Conditional
words, including ‘indicates’, ‘probably’ and ‘could be’, were removed from the draft. On 17 September, Campbell emailed Scarlett, telling him that, after reading the latest draft, Blair was pleased, but asked whether a ‘might’ and a ‘may’ could be replaced in the draft with concrete assertions. No sooner asked than done. Scarlett also removed the sentence, ‘We have little intelligence on Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare doctrine and know little about Iraq’s CBW [chemical and biological weapons] work since 1998,’ and refined his assertion that Saddam possessed rockets with an ‘extended range’.

In his own defence, Scarlett would later describe how he had prevented Campbell from exaggerating the intelligence community’s conclusions. Two exclusions undermined his defence. First, at the very last moment Powell had objected to seventeen words that portrayed Saddam as using WMDs only in self-defence. They were removed to give the impression that Iraq would use WMDs as part of his offensive threat. Second, Scarlett did not object to the exclusion from his own summary of the admission that the intelligence about Iraq’s WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’. Instead, he omitted any serious qualifications in the published dossier about the weakness of his intelligence. He wrote that everything he had learned ‘points clearly to Iraq’s continuing possession after 1991 of chemical and biological agents’. Saddam would, on ‘refurbished sites’, be ‘able to manufacture these agents, and to use bombs, shells, artillery rockets and ballistic missiles to deliver them’.

To reinforce the dossier, Blair decided to express his own opinion in a foreword (written by Campbell) to the JIC’s report. It contained his view that ‘I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile programme.’ He added, ‘I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current … and he has to be stopped.’