|
|
|||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
News Search
|
|
October 3, 2003, Scotsman THE SPIES WHO CLUTCHED AT STRAWS Gethin Chamberlain WHEN Colin Powell told the UN in February that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, he did so with the confidence of a man who truly believed what he had been told by his senior intelligence officers. The US Secretary of State left little room for doubt : defectors had told US agents that Iraq had seven mobile biological weapons labs, he said. It could have produced 25,000 litres of anthrax and might be able to produce botulisum toxin, aflatoxin, ricin and biological agents that cause gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox, haemorrhagic fever and smallpox. Saddam Hussein was determined to get his hands on fissile material to build a nuclear weapon, Mr Powell added. It was a confidence shared by Tony Blair. The Prime Minister appeared to find it inconceivable that the information he was receiving from MI6 could be in any way flawed. Saddam, he said, had to account for the thousands of litres of anthrax that he was known to have had, along with the thousands of special munitions for chemical and biological warfare and 1.5 tonnes of VX nerve agent. Even after the war ended, and not a single weapon, laboratory or ounce of chemicals had been recovered, that confidence did not waver. In May Mr Blair insisted that he was "absolutely convinced and confident" about the case on weapons of mass destruction. His doubters, he said, would have to eat their words. But five months after George Bush pronounced the war over, it is Britain and the United States that are having to eat their words. Despite their bluster and insistence that the search goes on, the language has changed. No longer does Mr Blair talk about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction; now, if pressed, he refers only to WMD programmes. As each purported breakthrough is revealed to be another false dawn, so their confidence has dwindled. Mr Bush and Mr Blair put their trust in their intelligence services: now they have the baffled air of children who have just discovered that their parents lied to them about the existence of Father Christmas. The Hutton Inquiry and investigations in the US have shown that they placed their faith in information that was at best flawed, and at its worst simply untrue. Far from checking and re-checking their sources to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that their information was true, the intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic appear to have been happy to accept any old bit of gossip and to repackage it as fact. Those familiar with the workings of MI6 say it is not unknown for information to be culled from the internet or from local newspapers. Worse, informants who rely on the money they receive for their reports cannot afford not to come up with juicy titbits to keep their employers happy. Just as the intelligence services appear to have dished up exactly what their masters wanted, so their informants produce exactly what the intelligence services require. Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, appeared genuinely affronted to be challenged at the Hutton Inquiry over the use of single sourced information. It was, he said, common practice to use such pieces of information. Much high -quality information came from single sources, he explained. But the case of the alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger has thrown new light on the use of such sources. A key element of Colin Powell's case against Iraq, it has proved impossible to substantiate. Documents which purported to prove the claim were shown to have been forged, and badly forged at that. The CIA eventually put up its hands and admitted that there was not enough evidence to substantiate the claim. The British, on the other hand, refused to go along with this, a position that has caused tension with their US counterparts. They insisted that their evidence had come not from the forged documents but from a foreign intelligence agency, widely believed to be France, that had not been prepared to share its intelligence with the US. And this, in itself may be true. But what seems most likely now is that the French had picked up the information from another source, who had come across a report based on the forged documents. The British source was the same as that used by the US: it had simply reached MI6 by a more roundabout way. What has appalled the British and US governments is that such incompetence was supposed to have been a thing of the past. After the intelligence community was caught flat-footed by the events of 11 September 2001, everything was supposed to have changed. Instead, the intelligence services appear to have no better idea of what is going on in those parts of the world hostile to their own than they had before the planes smashed into the twin towers and the Pentagon. In February, the CIA was said to believe that al-Qaeda was planning major attacks against Americans in the US and in the Middle East to coincide with the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. None materialised. Intelligence reports suggested that there were concerns about al-Qaeda's ability to deploy a dirty bomb. Nothing came of it. The reports were compiled from interviews with captured al-Qaeda members, clearly eager to hand over the information their inquisitors wanted to hear. Later the same month intelligence services claimed that Iraq was moving some of its weapons of mass destruction "every 12 to 24 hours" to avoid UN inspectors. No evidence has ever materialised to support this contention. In Britain, intelligence reports prompted the arrival of troops at Heathrow airport to thwart what was described as a serious threat. The threat, however, was not serious enough to require the grounding of planes. After a few days, the soldiers left. Before Mr Powell's UN speech, the US National Security Agency produced tapes purporting to be of Iraqi officials discussing how they had thwarted the UN weapons inspectors. The recordings included such gems as "Move that" and "Ha! Can you believe they missed that". None of the threats materialised. As for the tapes, they have been quietly forgotten. The theory that the intelligence services are now touting around is that they have been the victims of a very effective bit of bluffing, that Saddam Hussein duped them into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction to save face in the Middle East and to try to stave off the threat of invasion. If the Arab world believed that he possessed WMDs, it is argued, it would boost his standing in the region, although how this fits with Tariq Aziz's repeated assertions that no such weapons existed is not explained. There is however an alternative theory: that they are simply not very good at their jobs. In the US, the House permanent select committee on intelligence has turned on its spies, accusing them of using outdated, circumstantial and fragmentary information. It believes there were too many uncertainties to reach the conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda. The information used to make the case for war contained significant deficiencies, it concluded, and too often the intelligence services had relied on old reports and snippets of new information which had not been checked. Rather than looking for proof that weapons did exist, they relied on the absence of proof that they had been destroyed. The CIA has fought back, describing Iraq as an "intractable and difficult subject." But a letter leaked to the Washington Post reveals the concerns of the committee. "Intelligence reports that might have been screened out by a more rigorous vetting process made their way to the analysts' desks, providing ample room for vagary to intrude," the letter said. There was no attempt to identify which reports were from credible sources and which would normally have been dismissed, if the information they contained had not been so vital to the case for war. Information to justify claims that Iraq was attempting to revive its nuclear programme was said to be "fragile" in nature. The intelligence services know that their political masters are unhappy. In the US, this unhappiness spilled out into a public row after the White House was accused of outing the wife of a diplomat as a CIA operative. In Britain, there is talk of an overhaul of the security services. With Sir Richard Dearlove due to retire next year, there is talk of the job going to John Scarlett, as thanks for the robust way in which he defended the Government's handling of the dossier on Iraqi WMDs. Meanwhile, the intelligence services in the US and Britain are continuing their attempts to deflect criticism and head off a complete overhaul of their operations, by going back through the intelligence material to see if Iraq was putting out false information. There are reports from the US that Iraqi double agents were sent to the west posing as defectors to plant false information and that genuine defectors were fed misinformation about weapons production and storage sites. Doubts have also been raised about the wisdom of relying on defectors who backed the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Their motives have been questioned and there have been claims that they routinely exaggerated their reports in the hope of receiving cash, visas and asylum. One group singled out for particular criticism is the London-based Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who now sits on the coalition -backed Iraqi Governing Council in Baghdad. Both the CIA and the State Department have described the group's information as unreliable. Intelligence officials in the US have suggested that their analysts may just have been so eager to come up with what the White House wanted to hear that they only focused on the information that appeared to fit that bill. A US weapons expert who spent time in Iraq with the survey group looking for evidence of WMDs made the point quite clearly to the Los Angeles Times. "We were prisoners of our own beliefs, he told the newspaper. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."
|
|
||||
|
................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
|||||||
