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The Hutton inquiry has confirmed what we all should have guessed-- Britain 's secret intelligence services are untouchable. It does not matter how badly wrong they were on Iraq and how often they have got things wrong in the past. They will continue to go from strength to strength because, as Lord Hutton realised, they are in bed with the government and a major power in the land.
Lord Hutton's narrow terms of reference did not allow him to examine the intelligence services' role in making the case for war and the accuracy of the dodgy dossier. This was, he said, “beyond my remit”.
So let us do it for him and look at what was happening in the intelligence services at the time and what their relationship was with the Prime Minister.
Intelligence officers, particularly those on the security side, are by nature anti-Labour. But the Prime Minister made his peace with them early on and won them over just as he won over big business. He increased their budgets, spoke up for them in public and convinced them New Labour could be as ardent a defender of the Realm as any Conservative government.
In return they gave him what he wanted to help achieve his political ends. John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and probably the next director general of MI6, was a “mate” of spin doctor Alastair Campbell. And even Lord Hutton thought Blair's desire to make a strong case for war might have “sub-consciously” influenced Scarlett's JIC dossier.
There's not much anyone can do about this relationship because of the fascination that intelligence holds for many world leaders, from Winston Churchill through John F. Kennedy to Tony Blair. This, and the many works of spy fiction, from James Bond to John le Carré, have made the intelligence officer one of the most potent images of our age.
There was a fleeting hope that the collapse of communism and the loss of their major enemy might have weakened the power of the intelligence services. But then terrorism gave them a new lease of life with new names, new faces, new acronyms, almost limitless funding and the power to direct our lives and define reality for us. And they are brilliant bureaucrats.
The last time I looked at the reporting procedures of MI6, MI5, the listening service GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) it went like this: SIS reported to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the Overseas Economic Intelligence Committee (OEIC) and the Co-ordinator of Intelligence and Security (CIS) in the Cabinet Office. MI5 reported to the OEIC, CIS and the Official Committee on Security (OCS). GCHQ reported to the JIC, OEIC, CIS and the London Signal Intelligence Board (LSIB). DIS reported to the JIC, OEIC and CIS. JIC, OEIC, CIS, LSIB, and OCS reported to the Permanent Under-Secretaries Committee on Intelligence Services (PSIS). OEIC reported to the PSIS and the Prime Minister (PM). CIS reported to the PSIS and PM. LSIB reported to the PSIS and PM, as did the OCS. What politician in this right mind would want to tangle with that lot?
They are not only skilled at bureaucratic in-fighting but flexible. They can sense new political trends and attitudes and adapt to meet them. So British intelligence officers were aware for some time before the Iraq war that leading figures in the Bush administration had been trying to impose on the CIA a major change in the way the agency operates.
The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his team felt there should be a doctrinal shift in the CIA and that the analysing of intelligence material and the use made of that material should be decided not by CIA officers but by politicians.
The traditionalists in British intelligence thought that this was a bad idea and could lead to trouble--as indeed it did. But the Young Turks here saw in such an idea a way of expanding their service's influence. They could say to a government: “Look, in the twenty-first century, knowledge is power, information a weapon. We have the skills to use information we accumulate to manipulate people and achieve the political result you want. Let us develop plans to get the best mileage out of the material we gather.”
So instead of secret reports for ministers' eyes only, the intelligence services began producing “dossiers” calculated, in this instance, to help the government's case for a war against Iraq . One of the traditionalists appalled by this was the former chairman of the JIC, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.
“In the first months of this year [2003] we were bombarded with warnings that British cities might at any moment face a massive terrorist attack,” he wrote in a letter to the Financial Times. “Housewives were officially advised to lay in stock of food and water. Tanks were sent to Heathrow.”
Sir Rodric said that in this atmosphere of near hysteria, people began to believe that Britain itself was under imminent threat and that we should get our blow in first. “So the Prime Minister managed--just--to swing Parliament behind him.”
The information on which the government based its warnings and its decision to send tanks to the airport came, of course, from the intelligence and security services. It does not matter to them that their warnings turned out to be wrong. They have stock replies. The first is that that the terrorists realised that we were on to them so they aborted their plans. The second is that it is better to be safe than sorry. Both cannot be challenged.
But frightening us is not the only use that the intelligence services make of their material. A former American intelligence officer says that a member of the UN inspection team who supported the British position on Iraq arranged for “inactionable” (read “dodgy”) intelligence reports to be quietly passed on to British intelligence which would feed them to newspapers in London and elsewhere.
The New Yorker magazine quotes the intelligence officer as saying: “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world.”
And former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims that MI6 actually ran a campaign called “Operation Mass Appeal” designed to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction.
Why would British intelligence have done this? Because a number of senior officers were convinced that Iraq was a threat to Britain and that Saddam Hussein should be toppled.
And to this end they were prepared to go beyond their traditional role of reporting their intelligence findings in an objective way and instead help the government make a case for war. In short, they were prepared to play a political role. This caused other intelligence officers deep unease and split the service.
I think the new politicised intelligence service is here to stay. In the interests of its own survival and the maintenance of its own power it has adapted to fit the new political suit created for it by the Prime Minister.
This is not to say that either Tony Blair or those intelligence officers who helped him make the case for war did it cynically. As Rodric Braithwaite aptly put it: “Fishmongers sell fish; warmongers sell war. Both may sincerely believe in their product.”
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