Michael Smith

Blair would have us believe that this was cock-up not conspiracy, and that it was all entirely the fault of the intelligence services. He apologizes for the intelligence being wrong but not for the way it was used to justify the war.

The Intelligence and Security Committee respectfully agrees. Fortunately, alone among the many inquiries, Lord Butler's inquiry (see the two following images) put its finger on the real problem. Civil-service speak it might be but it is none the less highly damning.

We ought not to be surprised at the way in which the intelligence services have been used as whipping boys to detract attention away from the Prime Minister's blind determination to join the US administration in the war on Iraq. Documents leaked to me and published last September in the Daily Telegraph showed that Blair had ignored all the warnings from his officials, warnings, which were, of course, based on untainted assessments of the intelligence and conversations with their American colleagues.

Sir David Manning, his Foreign Policy Adviser, warned Blair on Mar. 14, 2002 that the Americans seemed to have no idea of what would happen after a successful invasion, or as he put it: "What happens on the morning after? There is a real risk that the Administration underestimates the difficulties," he said.

A week later, Sir Peter Ricketts, the FCO Policy Director, said: "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam. The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programmes, but our tolerance of them post-11 September. Even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or chemical warfare, biological warfare fronts."

Three days later, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw took those themes further. The US decision to attack Iraq appeared to be a direct result of 9/11. But there was no credible evidence to link Iraq with Osama bin Laden, and the threat from Iraq had not worsened as a result of 9/11. There were even bigger question marks over what an invasion would achieve.

"There can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better," Straw said. "Iraq has no history of democracy so no-one has this habit or experience."

Blair ignored all of this advice and went to war with no clear idea of 'what happens on the morning after.'

Blair is undoubtedly a serial offender in ignoring intelligence and advice from the experts. But he is not alone. During the Scott Inquiry, politicians lined up to denigrate the intelligence they received and Iraq is not the only recent example of politicians behaving badly.

The British inquiry into the intelligence available to policymakers before the 9/11 attacks was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which largely absolved the British intelligence services of any blame. But its main conclusion, that no-one in the intelligence services understood 'the scale of the threat and the vulnerability of Western states to terrorists with this degree of sophistication and a total disregard for their own lives,' was bizarre.

That the committee could conclude this was scarcely credible given that anyone who knew anything about terrorism had known for some years that there were a number of modern groups, mainly but not exclusively Islamist, who did not care what the public thought of them and were very happy to kill as many people as possible, and that, of these types of groups, al-Qa'eda represented the biggest threat of all.

More importantly, it is impossible to reconcile the committee’s conclusion with the first paragraph on the same page of the report, which quotes John Scarlett, then the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as saying that from the spring of 2001, there was 'an acute awareness... that Osama bin Laden and his associates represented a very serious threat' and were planning a terrorist 'spectacular' in the USA that summer with the intention of causing 'massive casualties.'

A whole series of different intelligence reports from late 2000, indicated that an attack was imminent. A US intelligence briefing for senior administration officials in July 2002 predicted that bin Laden would 'launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.'

So why did the committee conclude that the nature of the likely attack was 'not understood,' presumably because the only people to whom the politicians on the committee were actually listening, were their fellow politicians in the British cabinet.

The committee's conclusion was immediately preceded by a quote from David Blunkett, the then Home Secretary, who said the nature and level of the threat was 'different from what was previously envisaged' and that the intelligence assessment 'had underestimated what potentially might happen and the level of the threat, particularly to the US.'

The truth is that pre-9/11, most politicians simply took no notice of intelligence that was given to them unless it related directly to something that was on their political agenda, as was clearly the case with Iraq. It is interesting to note that various ministers admitted to the committee that they were attaching 'greater emphasis' to intelligence reports post-9/11.

On Lord Butler's recommendation, the Cabinet Office has published a series of guidelines to try to help the politicians understand the intelligence they receive.

No doubt, the politicians are now fully aware of the threat from al-Qa'eda. The challenge for the intelligence and security services is to make sure their political masters take notice of the intelligence that predicts the next threat, and before it happens, not only in order to pre-empt it, but also to ensure they are not blamed for another major failure of intelligence.

Michael Smith is a veteran intelligence reporter for the London Sunday Times. He broke the leaked Downing Street documents for the Telegraph last fall.

Originally published on Wednesday August 24, 2005.