by Tom Bower
On 24 July, Blair met David Owen, the former Labour foreign secretary, for dinner. Although restless, he spoke with certainty about war, despite the difficulties. His enthusiasm was explained by some as a way to sabotage Gordon Brown’s attempts to make him resign; others, like Peter Mandelson, anticipated that a victory would seal his reputation, as the Falklands had for Thatcher. Few could understand why he was so focused on Saddam, whose rule posed no risk to Britain nor an immediate threat in the region, on top of which there was no proof that he possessed WMDs. Yet Blair had brushed these factors aside and told Bush that Britain was committed to the invasion. Nothing could interfere with his crusade against evil.
One result was immediate. ‘The Americans are raising the shutters,’ Britain’s army liaison officer in Tampa reported to military headquarters in Northwood, north London. Shortly after, a team of American planning staff arrived at Northwood to describe the invasion plan. Boyce and the chiefs intensified their discussions about the size of Britain’s commitment, or ‘package’.
Britain could enter the war, Blair knew, only with the public’s support. Putting British lives at risk and spending billions of pounds could be justified by defining the military and political objectives as vital to the national interest. He realised that ‘force for good’, the original policy, would meet those criteria, so long as Saddam’s WMDs threatened world peace. The JIC, he decided, should publish a dossier bringing together all the intelligence. Giving the public what Powell called a ‘sort of Rolls-Royce information campaign’ would be judged as honourable.
JIC chairman John Scarlett started assembling the material, but then Blair reassessed the implications. Publication would trigger speculation. Daylight was dangerous. After a press conference in late July, his astute performance led Simon Jenkins to write, ‘Mr Blair has no clue what America intends to do in Iraq. This is understandable since, as yet, nor does America.’ By keeping his plans in the shadows, even his most cynical critics could be controlled, as Blair discovered on the eve of his summer break. Towards the end of July, he agreed to meet Clare Short.
‘I really think we should have a discussion about Iraq,’ she said.
‘No decisions have been made,’ replied Blair, ‘but I do not want it to come to Cabinet because it might leak into the press and hype things up.’
Short appeared satisfied, and Blair left for his summer vacation resolved not to publish the dossier Scarlett was assembling.
The holiday, which included a stay at the home of Alain-Dominique Perrin, the French billionaire owner of the luxury-goods company Richemont, ended with a hike in the Pyrenees with a friend. Blair stayed overnight in a mountain hotel. At breakfast the following morning, he was tense. ‘He said he’d been up all night’, the friend told the Financial Times, ‘because he couldn’t get to sleep. And then he said, “I’ve made some big decisions.”’
Blair returned to London at the end of August. Dick Cheney was agitating for war and declaring that Iraq was undoubtedly amassing WMDs. In Britain, Labour Party activists were threatening revolt, but Blair had decided. Any lingering doubts about his support for Bush and his fear of the Labour Party and public opinion had been resolved in favour of war.
By then, the chiefs had read the JIC’s first draft of the dossier about WMDs. Scarlett’s committee admitted that their conclusions were based on just one source and that there was ‘very little intelligence’ about Saddam’s WMD programme. ‘An overlong and rather poor cut-and-paste job,’ concluded Admiral Nigel Essenhigh. The source of the ‘intelligence’ seemed to be information drawn from the ‘red books’ – the intelligence summaries distributed among senior military staff – and material already in the public domain. Based on historic information, the draft lacked any compelling new evidence.
‘I think this is all ghastly,’ said another chief. ‘Rubbish. We don’t need this.’ The three chiefs told Boyce they were puzzled as to why the government needed a dossier. Essenhigh in particular argued that Blair could go to war on the basis that Saddam had breached UN resolutions. ‘If the government insists that a dossier be published,’ said Essenhigh, ‘this confused version is as good as anything.’ Boyce did not repeat those messages to Blair.
By 28 August, the chiefs’ comments were redundant. Blair decided that an intelligence dossier should be published after all. Scarlett’s team under Julian Miller, the chief of the JIC’s assessment staff, began rewriting the draft. At a press conference in Sedgefield, Blair announced, ‘America should not have to face this issue alone. We should face this together.’
Since the informal decision in July, a small team in the defence staff had been compiling three options for Britain’s participation. Package one was limited to air, maritime and intelligence support of the American invasion. The second package committed ninety planes and twenty ships employing about 13,000 personnel. Package three was full-blown involvement by 42,000 personnel, including infantry and tanks, all totally integrated within the American command. Half the British army, comprising a third of the invasion force, would be committed to the full brunt of war. In September, Boyce told the army to assume its involvement would be limited to package one. The generals regarded Boyce’s decision as ‘profoundly unsatisfactory’. The army, he was told, wanted to be involved from start to finish.
One obstacle was the army’s decay, mainly as a result of Brown’s refusal to provide extra money to replace equipment. The fallacy of the 1998 strategic defence review was exposed. Essenhigh told Geoff Hoon that the budget was inadequate. ‘It’s like talking to a wall,’ he complained. Without influence over Blair and his confidants, Hoon refused to become involved. Essenhigh’s request for a meeting with the prime minister was refused.
The military’s fate depended on Boyce making a direct appeal. Late one afternoon in Chequers, he stood in front of maps of Iraq explaining to Blair the different scenarios, packages and problems of an invasion. ‘I’m told repeatedly’, he said to Blair, ‘that we are not sufficiently funded. We are committed to do our best but we cannot do the whole mission.’
Blair nodded. The Treasury, he knew, would in the event of war fully fund an operation, but for the moment he resisted the army’s request that he commit himself to package three, and pointedly refused to permit the purchase of new equipment. ‘If you want more money,’ he said, ‘speak to Gordon.’
Following the familiar path, Boyce approached Brown twice. ‘I got no traction,’ he reported wearily.
The quickening pace posed Blair with a dilemma. Although he believed that his ‘force for good’ philosophy justified removing Saddam, none of the senior politicians in his Cabinet shared his unqualified passion or his trust of Bush. To justify Britain’s participation, he needed the president’s continued support in building a coalition of nations working through the UN ostensibly to seek a peaceful resolution with Saddam. Certain of his power to persuade America to follow his path and not alienate other countries by focusing only on an invasion, he sent Manning to Washington to convince Bush to ‘stick to the UN’, meaning that an invasion needed to be authorised by a UN resolution in order to be legal. Manning reported back that the UN was ‘not a lost cause’ and that Bush wanted to meet Blair.
During a quick trip to Camp David, where he met Bush and, to his surprise, Cheney, Blair laid out his plan to achieve disarmament through the UN. If that happened, he said, Saddam would find survival difficult. If the process were exhausted and shown to have failed, then an invasion could be justified. ‘If we get disarmament through the UN,’ said Bush, ‘we would have crated the guy.’ However, his sympathy was crushed by Cheney’s antipathy towards the British. Cheney wanted disarmament delivered by regime change, nothing less. Blair returned to London fixed on an implacable truth: regardless of Britain, Bush and Cheney were going to war.
On 23 August, the JIC had reported that we ‘know little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons since late 1998’. On 9 September, the team hardened their opinion, with the latest draft stat
ing that ‘Iraq could produce more biological agents within days … and nerve agents within months.’ This new conclusion was reached without any new proof. Despite the ‘relative thinness’ of the existing evidence, an inquiry would later decide, the JIC applied ‘greater firmness’ in their judgement.
The evidence had been sharpened after Alastair Campbell’s intercession. Four days earlier, during a committee meeting to consider the JIC draft, he had told Powell that it required ‘a substantial rewrite … It had to be revelatory and we needed to show what was new.’ Campbell relied on Scarlett, whom he called a ‘mate’, and Dearlove, who was praised as ‘really helpful’, to deliver the goods. Both met Blair in his den rather than in an austere committee room surrounded by sceptics. And both were keen to oblige.
As chairman of the JIC, Scarlett had to assess the information provided by all the intelligence agencies and present an uncorrupted conclusion. Blair was entitled to expect a judgement based on forensic examination of MI6’s sources. Accordingly, when the chairman spoke with conviction about Saddam’s WMDs, Blair in theory had no reason to harbour doubts. But what Scarlett actually said did raise questions. The intelligence agencies, he conceded, lacked hard evidence. The latest information from the European intelligence services confirmed that judgement, and some early sources on whom Dearlove depended had already been reclassified as ‘fabricators and fantasists’. Those circumstances had persuaded the Cabinet defence committee to conclude that ‘our intelligence is poor’.
Scarlett’s solution was to offer a compromise: Saddam did possess WMDs, yet intelligence to that effect was ‘sporadic and patchy’. His words of caution, he would later explain, did not carry their normal meaning. He was not challenged over his vagueness. Blair could choose what suited him. For others, the confusion Scarlett sowed was complete – not least for the defence chiefs.
Regardless of their personal opinions, Blair could depend on the chiefs’ loyalty never to challenge a prime minister’s legal order. The only fly in the ointment of the ‘can-do’ spirit that Blair so admired was Boyce. ‘He says everything is too difficult,’ complained the prime minister. ‘He’s too negative and monosyllabic.’ The admiral reported ‘problems’ in a dry manner, without making himself amenable.
‘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.
