by Tom Bower
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.’
The foreword made mention four times of ‘WMDs to be ready within forty-five minutes of an order to use them’. Blair’s words were reviewed and approved by Scarlett, but no subsequent inquiry has asked Blair whether he actually read the final report.
Blair knew publication was a risk, but the odds, he believed, were stacked in his favour. ‘Moral luck’ would conceal the risk once the WMDs were found. (‘Moral luck’ is if two drunken men drive away from a pub and one kills a pedestrian. The other driver had ‘moral luck’.) Scarlett’s silence about the foreword deceived Whitehall insiders. ‘We didn’t realise how misleading the first dossier was,’ said Omand.
Despite the certainty of war in Washington, the prospect was dividing public opinion in Britain. To show their strength, many of Blair’s British opponents joined a 400,000-strong protest march through London by the Countryside Alliance on 22 September. The demonstration showed the deep s
chism between the metropolitan Blairites and those Britons who inhabited the countryside. The marchers detested Blair’s betrayal of British values. To them, the encouragement of immigration and the criminalisation of fox-hunting pandered to English self-hatred. Leaked minutes of a meeting between Prince Charles and Blair recorded Charles repeating a farmer’s complaint that ‘if we as a group were black or gay, we would not be victimised or picked upon’. For opposite reasons – the betrayal of British values and of Labour’s core values – the antagonism towards Blair came from the right and the left. To his credit, Blair had been persuaded that a hunting ban would damage the countryside, and had relied on Anna Walker, a civil servant, and Alun Michael, a non-confrontational Labour MP, to find a third way, with the help of a report by Terry Burns. But, faced with his party’s opposition to the war, he decided after the march to drop any compromise solution on hunting.
One hurdle in his plan for war was the Cabinet, which met the following day, 23 September. This was to be the ministers’ first serious discussion about Iraq since March. Once again, Blair forbade the Cabinet Office to prepare any papers with the latest assessments. ‘The Cabinet will be informed by the media,’ he told Turnbull, confident that his decision would not be challenged. Reports by Campbell that Straw and the Foreign Office were particularly ‘paranoiac’ confirmed his calculation about a possible backlash. There were to be no leaks until the public were persuaded that his cause was valid. Blair’s passion for speed and secrecy, Turnbull realised, was ‘not a bad habit he and Powell had slipped into, but how they wanted to operate from the start’.
The Cabinet meeting was desultory. ‘They never asked for a discussion on the options for war,’ observed Turnbull about the approximately twenty-five ministers in the room. ‘They bought into Blair’s challenge to Saddam.’ Following that tune, his ministers regarded the dossier as one more step to persuade Saddam to allow UN inspectors full access. They agreed to focus on the legitimacy of the UN route as their best method of justifying the war – if it occurred – to their constituents.
The highlight of the meeting was a question from Robin Cook about the military options. Blair replied that no decision about joining the invasion had been made. Manning and Powell, who were both in the room, knew this was not the complete truth, as did Hoon and Straw, but the overwhelming majority of ministers remained unaware that Blair was committed to invading Iraq the following year. Turnbull, attending his first meeting as Cabinet secretary, was surprised by the denial. Cook himself suspected Blair had decided to go to war but few, he knew, would accept his own conviction that his leader was ‘deluded’ and ‘a fantasist’ pursuing some higher moral purpose. To Blair’s good fortune, Cook was a loner who played his cards close to his chest. He sought no allies, nor did he challenge the dossier’s authenticity. No one asked Blair whether he believed the intelligence, and any discussion in what Cook would later describe as a ‘grim meeting’ was kept to a minimum. At Blair’s request, the few critical questions were removed from the official minutes. Cosmetics concealed the meagre trace of a dispute. In hindsight, Cook pinpointed that meeting as the birth of Blair’s Messiah complex, while others would call the moment the collapse of proper government. Blair could run his domestic agenda relying on Powell, Sally Morgan and other cronies, but those were not the people to manage the machinery of a democracy undertaking a war.
On the eve of the dossier’s release to the press, Powell had asked, ‘What will be the headline in the Standard?’ He was answered at 10.30 a.m. on 24 September, as the London paper was distributed across the capital. At eight o’clock that morning, Charles Reiss, the Standard’s veteran political editor, had been allowed to read the dossier, thirty minutes before the deadline for the first edition. After a speed-read, Reiss was left in no doubt that ‘45 minutes’ to deploy a weapon carrying WMDs should be the tabloid’s lead. After all, it appeared in the text four times, and a preceding section mentioned Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’. He juxtaposed the two and sent his copy to the newspaper for instant publication, without speaking to Campbell. The newspaper’s editor supervised the front-page headline, ‘45 Minutes to Attack’, above a map showing the rocket’s range, which stretched across Israel to British troops in Cyprus.
The effect was as dramatic as Blair had anticipated. Taken in conjunction with official advice that Britons should store tinned food and new batteries for their torches, the majority of the population was convinced that Saddam possessed deadly weapons. At Downing Street’s eleven o’clock briefing, Reiss was not approached by a government spokesman to correct the mistaken impression he’d given of a long-range rocket armed with WMDs. ‘They’d have come fast enough if I’d got it wrong,’ observed Reiss, a veteran eyewitness to Campbell’s intimidation.
Blair’s masterful speech to the Commons later that day reflected Dearlove’s assurance about the strength of a new source of intelligence: ‘His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. The policy of containment is not working. The weapons of mass destruction programme is not shut down, it is up and running … Documents show that some of Iraq’s WMDs could be ready for use within forty-five minutes.’ Going further than the dossier itself, and far beyond the JIC’s ‘sporadic and patchy’ evidence, Blair told the country that the intelligence reports describing Saddam’s WMDs were, ‘I believe … extensive, detailed and authoritative’. The public were assured that the dispatch of UN inspectors to specific locations in Iraq would protect them from the deadly missiles. While most Tory MPs approved the dossier without criticism, the professionals reacted coolly. In their opinion, Scarlett’s report revealed nothing new.
Eight years later, Blair would write, ‘The infamous 45-minute claim was taken up by some of the media on the day but not referred to afterwards and was not mentioned by me at any time in the future … So the idea that we went to war because of this claim is truly fanciful.’ He added, in an unintended self-revelation, that after publication the ‘45 minutes’ was universally ignored. Blair had forgotten the million anti-war protesters who marched through London on 28 September. The forty-five-minute claim was alive for them – as it was for Dearlove. During those days, the MI6 chief was feeling, he later said, ‘extremely uncomfortable’ because he knew that the dossier had misrepresented an artillery gun as a rocket, but he remained silent. He would also discover that the new source of intelligence personally revealed by him to the prime minister in Downing Street was bogus. But he did offer Blair another trump card: MI6 and the CIA hoped to persuade an Iraqi general to kill Saddam and take control of the country in a swift coup. Blair voiced no doubts about the scenario.
The protest in central London was mirrored by opposition to the war at the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. As usual, Blair spoke fluently, but his passionate sentiments about dictators fell flat. The audience packed into the Winter Gardens had not devoted their lives to the party in order to approve an imperialist adventure. But without Brown, an Atlanticist who would not want to oppose the American president, or even Cook offering themselves as alternative leaders, they were powerless.
Not that Brown was quieted. Once again, he was demanding a date for Blair’s departure, with foundation hospitals his new battleground. His rallying cry in his conference speech was, ‘We’re best when we’re Labour.’ Overnight, Blair’s team invented the riposte, ‘We’re best when we are boldest,’ and recited that the reforms were not ‘the betrayal of the public services, but their renewal’.
For the first time, Blair failed to inspire passion among the faithful. His magic had faded. Five years earlier, he had shaped a moment in history, speaking for the majority of Britons about responsibility and honesty. Since then, dozens of quangos had been established to transform Britain into Blair’s image of a fairer country. In his moral equivalence, creating fairness in Britain was no different to doing so in Iraq. His conscience acquitted him of wrongdoing for secretly planning a potentially illegal war. His miscalculation was underestimati
ng his audience’s anger.
This error was illustrated by the appearance of Bill Clinton on the Blackpool stage and a colourful story in the media about the former president eating a McDonald’s hamburger late at night in the deserted seaside town. Clinton excited the party faithful, but others wondered why Blair, at the moment when his credibility was to be tested, would want to stand alongside a proven liar whose alleged abuse of state funds in Arkansas, association with high-profile criminals and receipt of kick-backs for favours cast him as an irrefutably corrupt politician. ‘He’s the only man’, a wag sniped, ‘who can cry out of one eye.’ Blair replied that Clinton’s presence showed that ‘I counted, was a big player, was a world, not just a national leader … Our alliance with America gave Britain a huge position.’ In turn, Clinton queried why Blair had aligned himself so closely to Bush, a question that Boyce was also asking. Answering Clinton was easier than responding to the admiral, not least because Blair had been told that the army was dissatisfied by Boyce’s ‘marked reluctance’ to commit beyond package one.
Under that package, the British army would enter Iraq after Saddam’s defeat to act as peacekeepers. That scenario, General Mike Walker, the chief of the army, told Tebbit, was ‘profoundly unsatisfactory’. Following Operation Swift Sword, the army’s recent training exercise in the Omani desert, Walker was insistent that 42,000 British soldiers supported by ships and planes should be integrated into the US forces according to package three. ‘This is what we have to do if we are to deliver,’ he said. Britain needed to share the risk with the Americans and bear the casualties. The global status of the country’s military depended upon close involvement with the US. Without full collaboration, the British would be denied future access to American intelligence, new equipment and planning.
In response, Blair quibbled. He did not reject Walker’s opinion but wanted to delay his decision until the last moment. He agreed to the purchase of some equipment for an invasion. He also agreed with Walker’s criticism of Boyce. Tebbit had been agitating against the admiral, who had been complaining about the permanent secretary’s failure to secure sufficient funds to re-equip the military. ‘I hadn’t hidden my contempt,’ Boyce admitted. Blair had no reason to defend an officer critical of the war.
