10

IN THE BUNKER

It was late on 24 September 2002 and the MI6 officer was wearily heading home. He took the lift down to the ground floor of the service’s ziggurat headquarters at Vauxhall Cross and stepped through one of the airlock tubes at the main entrance. He was an old hand with a couple of decades of service behind him in the hot-spots of the world, but he had never quite got used to the new building. With a nod to the armed security guards, he stepped out into the spaghetti-like chaos of the Vauxhall interchange. As he navigated the buses and cars to make his way to the railway station, a placard heralding the headline for that day’s Evening Standard newspaper caught his eye. ‘45 MINUTES FROM ATTACK’, it warned in big, bold black letters. He stopped in his tracks. The government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been launched that morning and he knew, in a way the public did not, precisely what the headline was referring to. Two thoughts hurtled through his mind in quick succession. ‘That’s not quite what the original intelligence report said,’ was his first. His second thought, which quickly swamped the first, was: ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed.’1

Two and a half thousand miles away in Baghdad, President Saddam Hussein was also perturbed. He had summoned his Revolutionary Command Council which, nominally, helped him run the country. Given that his management style consisted largely of fear interspersed with occasional violence, its members knew their lives depended on his favour, and Saddam realised this meant that they often lied to him. As he looked around the table and demanded answers he appeared ‘stiff’ and ‘under pressure’. He had just read this new dossier published with much fanfare by the British government. It contained detailed information about his own military capabilities. There was even a claim that weapons of mass destruction could be fired in forty-five minutes. This puzzled him. He knew nothing of the capacity they described. Was there anyone in the room who was aware of any capabilities that the President himself did not know about? By turn, each member of the Revolutionary Command Council hurriedly said no, they did not. That would be impossible, they said, knowing a wrong answer could be costly. Anything they knew, he would know. Saddam Hussein remain puzzled. If his underlings really were telling the truth, what explained the confidence of those devils at British intelligence?2

If Saddam had known what had gone through the MI6 officer’s mind outside Vauxhall Cross perhaps he might have had some inkling of the trouble that was heading his way. If the MI6 officer had known of Saddam’s bemusement he too might have shared in that reaction. The service was about to go through a crisis which, according to one colleague with a historical bent, was to be its darkest hour since Philby’s betrayal.

The direction that Britain’s closest ally was heading in was always apparent. The night after the 11 September attack when British officials dined at CIA headquarters in Langley, the Downing Street Foreign Affairs Adviser David Manning had cautioned against striking Iraq, sensing that Washington’s hawks already had Saddam within their sights. The following month CIA officers were over in London for the memorial service for the former MI6 Chief David Spedding. ‘We should focus on Afghanistan,’ an MI6 officer told a CIA counterpart. ‘If you go into Iraq, it’s really going to complicate things.’³ ‘Afghanistan first’ was the message from London but by the first week of December, the chief of MI6 was in the White House with David Manning for talks with President Bush’s top advisers. The British officials were delivering a paper entitled ‘the second phase of the war against terrorism’.⁴

A few days earlier, at four o’clock in the afternoon on 30 November, a senior MI6 director, an Arabic speaker deeply versed in the Middle East, took a telephone call from Manning. The Iraq issue was building up apace, Manning explained. Could the officer do a quick paper on how to approach the subject by six that afternoon? ‘If the US heads for direct action, have we ideas which could divert them to an alternative course?’ the paper began. It warned of the dangers of planning to remove Saddam. ‘This is not going to be simple or straightforward, and it doesn’t have to pan out well,’ was the message from the leading member of the service’s ‘camel corps’.5 After the weekend more papers were sent over by the officer. Another paper took a completely different approach, outlining a set of broad motivations for action beyond just WMD. ‘At our meeting on 30 November, we discussed how we could combine an objective of regime change in Baghdad with the need to protect important regional interests which would be at grave risk if a bombing campaign against Iraq were launched in the short term.’ Where did the talk of regime change come from? ‘It came out of the ground like a mist following the change of temperature on 9/11,’ the officer later reflected. ‘It became clear to all of us that nothing short of decisive intervention in Iraq was going to satisfy the Americans.’ At this stage a bombing campaign in support of Iraqis trying to topple Saddam was perceived as a more likely strategy than an all-out invasion. These were technically private papers rather than ‘policy papers’ but the words regime change were all over them at a time when the Foreign Secretary was trying to head off such talk as a bad idea and illegal.⁶ Downing Street had turned to MI6 and its experts – rather than the Foreign Office – and the service was offering a route map for the way forward, touching even on the need to provide a legal basis for any intervention.

Washington’s hawks held back for a while. But by the spring of 2002 victory in Afghanistan seemed to have been achieved and London watched Washington’s gaze turn resolutely back to Iraq. George W. Bush and members of his team had differing motives – unfinished business for some like Cheney who regretted not driving on to Baghdad in 1991, with an added personal twist for the new President whose father had led that first Gulf War. In neo-conservative eyes this was the once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape the Middle East state by state, beginning with Iraq. America’s intention was clear, although the means by which it would achieve its goal was not.

This provided an opening for Blair. He told President Bush he would stand by him in dealing with Saddam; the only issue was how the Iraqi leader would be dealt with. ‘TB [Tony Blair] wanted to be in a position to give GWB [George W. Bush] a strategy and influence it,’ wrote Alastair Campbell in his diary.⁷ The Prime Minister had known what his mission was within three days of the attack. ‘My job is to try and steer them in a sensible path,’ Tony Blair had told his Foreign Secretary.8 For Blair, this was his moment on the world stage, the chance to harness the writhing anger of the United States and guide it on to a surer footing. He enjoyed being, in his words, ‘a big player’.⁹ In London, there was that reflexive instinct among spies, soldiers and wannabe statesmen to stay close to the Americans. Maintaining that relationship – and with it the flow of American intelligence and the self-perception of walking on the world stage (even if on someone else’s coat-tails) – had become gospel. Staying close supported the often illusory notion of influence.

Blair also shared the view of a titanic struggle that could be fought by ‘modernising’ the Middle East through a dramatic act. ‘Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom.’ ‘In the choice between a policy of management and a policy of revolution, I had become a revolutionary.’¹⁰ Crucially, the British Prime Minister also harboured the same nightmares as those in power in Washington, a dark vision of a world in which, without decisive action, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction were destined to join together with catastrophic consequences. That dread had become all-consuming in the upper reaches of the US government. Fearful of missing another attack, the spies were chasing shadows everywhere. An overheard conversation in a Las Vegas casino about a nuclear weapon obtained from Russia’s stockpile heading for New York made it on to the CIA’s Daily Threat Matrix which some days listed a hundred specific threats.¹¹ Then anthrax turned up in the post, killing five people, and the nightmare seemed to have become real. As Kabul fell, new intelligence emerged revealing that bin Laden himself had met with two former members of Pakistan’s nuclear programme just weeks before 9/11. CIA Director George Tenet personally jumped on his plane to Pakistan to try to discover the truth. All this time, Bush and Blair were also receiving secret intelligence briefings about the Pakistani nuclear salesman A. Q. Khan offering countries, including Libya, instructions and parts to make a nuclear bomb. Saddam’s weapons, such as they were, were no more of a threat after 9/11 than they had been before. What had changed was the tolerance in London and Washington.¹²

There was a commingling of calculation and belief in Tony Blair to the point where pulling them apart was impossible. In his view, a line needed to be drawn somewhere when it came to states developing weapons of mass destruction, and that somewhere was Iraq.13 Blair was sure that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction because his spies believed it always had been. After the first Gulf War of 1991, MI6, the CIA and UN weapons inspectors had combed over the wreckage of Iraq and had been shocked to find Saddam had been much closer to building a nuclear bomb behind their backs. They vowed never to be caught out again, overlooking the fact that they had also over-estimated Saddam’s stockpile of chemical agents.¹⁴ As with Soviet military and economic power, it was safer to err on the side of caution because normally the costs of being wrong that way were lower. In 1995, a fleet of limos pulled up outside a hotel in the Jordanian capital, Amman. Inside were two of Saddam’s daughters and their husbands. One of the men, Hussein Kamel, revealed that there had also been a larger biological programme than anyone had suspected before 1991 but said it was destroyed. The Iraqis then owned up and provided extensive documentation. Western intelligence had been deceived again. Saddam was clever and cunning, they decided, a master of deception. Through the 1990s, there had not been much need for independent intelligence gathering. The UN weapons inspectors became the eyes and ears of the CIA and MI6. In some cases this was done covertly, the US placing its own spies inside the inspection teams who collected military targeting information on sites.¹⁵ MI6 also passed intelligence to and debriefed inspectors, twice in 1998 discussing with them how to publicise the finding of traces of VX on missile warheads (although Operation Mass Appeal, as it was called, was abandoned when the story leaked out independently).¹⁶ Later that year, the inspectors were expelled by Saddam. With their dominant source of new information eradicated, intelligence analysts were left with history. Worst-case assumptions had become just assumptions, which were left unchallenged.

As America’s objective became clear, a meeting at Chequers was called in April 2002. A minute of the meeting recorded that the Prime Minister wanted to lead and not just support the American process of regime change (although what precisely regime change meant remained unclear). Britain’s two most senior spies, Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, both argued for co-operation with the US planning. ‘It’s keeping our hands on what’s going on and not letting the Americans run away with the ball,’ Dearlove later said of the thinking.17 The roles of these two rivals, Scarlett, as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and Dearlove, as Chief of MI6, were central to the build-up to war. Scarlett, a graduate of Moscow Rules, was ever the details man. Dearlove was the forceful, big-picture visionary thinker, keen for intelligence to make an impact. Both would be accused of drawing too close to power.

Richard Dearlove was a frequent transatlantic traveller in the months after 9/11, commuting back and forth between London and Washington and meeting with the most senior American officials in the White House. Like all MI6 chiefs since Dick White he understood the importance of nurturing close relations with the US. But along with David Manning, he had now been given the specific task of tracking the development of US policy on Iraq and reporting back to Blair. The Americans were well aware of this. CIA officials noted how skilfully Dearlove, like the experienced case officer he was, cultivated his relationship with Tenet, who, like many CIA chiefs, came from a more political than operational background, in order to gain maximum access for Britain.¹⁸ The British always did this (to the annoyance of the non-Anglophiles in the agency), but Dearlove did it particularly well. ‘We used to joke that Tenet was Dearlove’s best recruitment,’ recalls one CIA officer.¹⁹

CIA officers had been surprised at just how upset the British were in the summer of 2002 when they heard that their annual summit was going to be cancelled. The CIA and MI6 would have regular meetings, often in Bermuda or somewhere far flung, to divide up the world, agreeing targets and identifying potential conflicts of interest. In the summer of 2002 Tenet explained that he was too busy for such a meeting. He was worried it would not look right for him to disappear for so long. In the end, it was agreed that a quick summit could take place, but only if it was in Washington and over the weekend. Dearlove and colleagues travelled over in July. After the regular discussion, Dearlove approached Tenet and asked to speak ‘off-line’. They talked for close to two hours. According to Tenet, Dearlove came away with a clear perception that the US administration was determined to transform the Middle East, starting with Iraq. During the visit, Dearlove also had an argument with staff in Vice-President Cheney’s office about their claim that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda, which the British generally thought was ‘bollocks’. ‘[Dearlove] believed that the crowd round the vice-president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. In his view, it was never about “fixing” the intelligence itself but rather about the undisciplined manner in which the intelligence was being used,’ Tenet later said.20

Dearlove headed straight to Downing Street on his return for a crucial gathering of Britain’s national security nomenclatura on 23 July. Scarlett began by summarising the latest assessment of Saddam’s regime. The regime was tough and based on fear and the only way of overthrowing it would be through massive military action which Saddam was not yet convinced would come. Dearlove was up next and reported back on his trip to Washington. In the draft minutes of the meeting, he was quoted as saying that there had been ‘a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ When the draft minutes were circulated, Dearlove objected to that last sentence, saying it was not what he meant, and it was altered. The British Chief of Defence Staff then spoke up and outlined the possible contribution Britain could make. The military wanted in. They disliked the idea of a big war being fought by the Americans without their closest ally by their side. The Chief of Defence Staff told Blair later that he would have a real problem with his army if they were not properly involved.²¹

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, piped up next with a note of caution and a line of argument he frequently deployed. ‘The case was thin,’ he said. ‘Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.’ Libya had become an increasing worry as a new stream of intelligence through 2002 showed it acquiring components for a bomb. The intelligence was far stronger than anything on Iraq. Blair dismissed Straw’s remarks by saying that there were other strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. The best approach to deal with Iraq, Straw said, would be an ultimatum demanding the return of UN inspectors. ‘This would help with the legal justification for the use of force,’ he added. The UK, much more than the US, needed a legal rationale. Non-compliance with UN resolutions on WMD offered more chance of a rationale than regime change.

One person in the room was startled and taken aback by the nature of the discussion. ‘What struck me was that some of the language used implied that we were closer to military action than I had imagined that we were,’ recalled Sir Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary. He also detected an underlying tension between Blair and his Foreign Secretary. Straw, Wilson believed, was trying to prevent Blair being too ‘gung-ho about military action’. Wilson was about to retire and used his farewell meetings with Blair to warn him that ‘he was getting into a position which could be dangerous’. He sensed Blair was serious about military action. ‘There was a gleam in his eye which worries me,’ he thought.22

The overall conclusion was that Britain should work on the assumption that it would join the US in military action. America’s intentions were clear. So were Blair’s to those around him After the meeting he wrote a private note to President Bush. His advisers were so worried by the opening line that they asked him to tone it down. ‘What I was saying to President Bush was very clear and simple. It is: You can count on us,’ Blair would later say of the content.²³ But selling a war to an unconvinced public would be tricky. Regime change did not cut it in Britain in the way it did in post-9/11 America, even though Blair believed that this would be the only way of dealing with the weapons.²⁴

The decision was taken to rest the public case entirely on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in defiance of the United Nations. This would mean leaning heavily on intelligence. As far back as April, Scarlett had met with Alastair Campbell to discuss what would be needed ‘communications-wise to set the scene for Iraq’. Early drafts were begun of a dossier on Saddam’s weapons programmes. Some MI6 officers, including the senior Arabist director who had briefed Manning, were unhappy with the idea. ‘All our training, all our culture, bias, would be against such a thing, and we were very relieved when we thought we had seen it off.’ But when the officer returned from holiday in the first week of September, he was alarmed to find the idea had been resurrected and now appeared unstoppable. ‘It was up and running like a racehorse … and we didn’t feel that there was an opportunity, an occasion, when we could throw ourselves in front of it.’²⁵

Every Wednesday afternoon, Britain’s spy chiefs and those they work with from other departments gather in a cosy egg-shaped conference room. The select few always sit in the same seats and arrive without aides or assistants. With no politicians present it is a useful time to catch up on gossip, but the collegiate atmosphere turns sober and serious as they get down to business reviewing the latest, carefully drafted assessments that have been produced for them. The Joint Intelligence Committee has acquired something of a mystique. Some former members believe this was not always well founded, but nevertheless it was precisely that mystique which politicians wanted to tap into when they asked the JIC to take the unprecedented step of publishing a dossier for public consumption. No one on the committee demurred. ‘We weren’t asked would we like to produce this. We were told we will produce this,’ recalled Sir David Omand, Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator and member of the JIC at the time. ‘Now, in my position, I could have phoned up Downing Street and I could have asked to see the Prime Minister and said, “This is a terrible idea. Why do you want to do this?” I didn’t do that because I didn’t think it was such a terrible idea at the time.’26 Campbell told Scarlett and others that the dossier had to be ‘revelatory and we needed to show that it was new and informative and part of a bigger case.’²⁷ The JIC prides itself on its ability to come to an agreed collective decision with no dissent. ‘All have to dip their hands in the blood of collective judgement, however unwelcome that may be’, as Omand describes the process.²⁸

Scarlett was in charge but working closely with Downing Street. The fact that Alastair Campbell could talk of the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee as a ‘mate’ and ‘a very good bloke’ was indicative of the informality of the Blair government and the willingness of the spies to work with it.²⁹ At times of crisis, Downing Street takes on the sense of a bunker under siege, its residents hunkering down as the artillery rounds lobbed by the press, parliament and diplomacy explode all around. In this heady atmosphere, it can be hard to resist when the Prime Minister asks for help. Former chairs of the JIC have argued that the committee entered the ‘the Prime Minister’s magic circle’ over Iraq and was engulfed by the heady atmosphere, failing to keep its distance and objectivity.³⁰

As the drafting process took place, Scarlett received comments from the Prime Minister as well as from Alastair Campell and Jonathan Powell, his Chief of Staff, and he attended meetings chaired by Campbell to look at the presentation of the dossier.31 Intelligence was drawn closer to policy than it had ever been before. Politicians and their advisers would never normally comment on JIC drafts. The dossier, those at the top would claim, was not designed to make the case for war. It was just putting information in the public domain so that people could make up their minds. ‘In no sense, in my mind, or in the mind of the JIC, was it a document designed to make a case for anything,’ Scarlett later asserted.³² That claim was disputed by some of those just below him. ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the Dossier was precisely to make a case for war,’ one senior military intelligence officer, Major General Michael Laurie, later complained. ‘During the drafting of the final Dossier, every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible … It was clear to me that there was direction and pressure being applied on the JIC and its drafters.’³³ A line had been crossed. Intelligence, some would argue, was being used as a tool for political persuasion.

Scarlett was the meticulous briefer at formal meetings but the man who had more informal access to the Prime Minister was Dearlove. What was discussed between the two men remains their secret. Dear-love was a confident, can-do character. Blair was also more forward leaning on Iraq than many of his advisers, including David Manning. Manning watched the Foreign Office, where he had come from, struggling with the demands placed on it while MI6 began to provide more policy advice than it had in the past.³⁴ Dearlove, like Blair, was a liberal interventionist. ‘The case for going to war with Iraq was only, as it were, partially supported by the intelligence,’ he later told an audience. ‘I think the case for going to war in Iraq was a moral one … I take the liberal interventionist view of foreign policy. That’s my personal view as a citizen of this country. The reasons for looking at Iraq as a problem that might justify military action were very broad-ranging. And in a way I think the most difficult issue for a British prime minister facing the possibility that the United States were going to invade Iraq was the dilemma any British prime minister would face – do you support the United States in this venture, or, and the alternative – there probably was no alternative – do you go with Russia, France and Germany and as it were oppose US policy?’³⁵

Dearlove, his critics say, relished being at the epicentre of power, briefing Blair and even President Bush in the Oval Office. But this was the culmination of not so much a personal as an institutional desire, an urge to show that the Secret Service was still needed despite all those questions after the end of the Cold War. ‘One of the cultural weaknesses of SIS [MI6] is that it is too eager to please,’ one former senior official reckons.36 For all the Bondish bravado, an insecurity had always haunted the service since its inception in 1909, a fear that it would no longer be needed and that one day it might simply be disposed of, its cherished traditions and war stories consigned not even to the history books but just to the fading memory of a few. The post-9/11 era had offered deliverance from those fears. Iraq was its apotheosis. Dearlove developed a relationship which was far, far closer to the Prime Minister than to the Foreign Secretary to whom a Chief normally reports. He was among the Prime Minister’s closest advisers and, in the eyes of other officials, enjoyed a ‘privileged relationship’.³⁷ Dearlove disputes the idea that he was too close as ‘complete rubbish’. ‘I wasn’t sipping Chardonnay in the evenings with Tony Blair, or nipping off to have breakfast with him to Chequers. I was going to meetings, as the head of SIS, to discuss SIS business in relation to the development of national security policy … A lot of people were jealous of my position, and therefore, I think, motivated to talk about it, including the Foreign Secretary of the day.’

Politicians and spies frequently have one personality trait in common with each other which they do not share with the civil servants with whom they work – they both have an appetite for risk-taking. Dearlove was acutely aware that the Prime Minister was relying on him by deploying intelligence as the central plank of the argument for intervention. This, he knew, was a ‘fragile and dangerous position’. At one point Blair turned to his spy chief. ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands,’ he said.³⁸

The problem with making the public case about the threat posed by Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was that even though everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons, they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument. The intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’, as a Joint Intelligence Committee report of March 2002 indicated (the assessment was even less confident about the weapons than a paper from the previous May).³⁹ A war could not easily be justified on sporadic and patchy intelligence. What the Prime Minister needed was clear. Would MI6 be able to step up to the plate and deliver?

Before September 2001, Iraq had been a graveyard slot for MI6 officers, a backwater where you were sent if your career was sloshing around in the shallows. ‘The intelligence picture on Iraq was, I would say, neglected,’ Dearlove later admitted of the decade between 1991 and 2001.40 Gathering secrets on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction ranked way down the list of priorities set by the Joint Intelligence Committee, twentieth by some accounts. The intelligence base was ‘thin’.⁴¹ After 11 September, Iraq would roar up the top twenty faster than one of the guided missiles Saddam was suspected of hiding. But, even once it had become a priority-one target, it takes time to build up intelligence sources. Good human intelligence cannot be switched on and off like a tap. Potential agents have to be spotted, researched, cultivated, approached and their veracity and good faith validated. It can take years to establish proper intelligence coverage against a hard target; eighteen months is a minimum. That was not the time-frame on offer. ‘If we had had clear options, we wouldn’t have felt the pressure so much,’ argued the senior MI6 director involved in the process. ‘We would have been able to gear it through to our operational activity. I think we felt the pressure because there weren’t obvious lines to follow up which were going to be fruitful. So we had to be intense about looking at every opportunity. There was no signposted way in to Iraqi WMD.’⁴²

MI6 had a small stable of agents reporting from within Iraq. One or two of these were agents of long standing and reliability. One in particular had been reporting since the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. He had some personal disgruntlement with Saddam and disliked his regime. His reports had been impressive on certain specific areas where he had access, such as Iraq’s air defences. These reports had proved vital in helping administer the No Fly Zone over Iraq in the 1990s. The problem is that neither this agent nor any of the others had any first-hand, inside knowledge of Iraq’s WMD programme; their expertise lay elsewhere. But they could see which way the wind was blowing and they knew exactly what MI6 was looking for. And so they managed to find it. Much of the crucial – and controversial – evidence would come from these agents, though not directly. They would find their own agents (or sub-sources) who in turn provided the goods – cash bonuses were on offer. Much of it would be inferential, sourced from their circle of contacts in Baghdad or people they had met and recruited (or at least claimed to have done). There was no point, these agents thought, in reporting on the rather large number of people who knew nothing about special weapons or who were doubtful of their existence. That was not what was wanted.

And so in August and into September 2002 the magicians at MI6 were able to pull a rabbit or three out of their hat. With their customary flourish, they produced new intelligence, in the nick of time, that seemed to save the day. The new sources would be vital in adding colour to the dossier and would allow Scarlett to instruct the assessments staff to ‘firm up’ the dossier’s conclusions and dispose of the caveats.43

Walking through Baghdad at the end of August, the Iraqi was nervous. He had been risking his life for many years by spying on his own country as an agent for the British Secret Service. At an agreed location he activated a tiny transmitter, smaller than a packet of cigarettes, to send an encrypted message to his contact. At the receiving end was another undercover source operating for MI6 in Baghdad (not an MI6 officer but an intermediary), who could eventually get the information back to Vauxhall Cross. One of the Iraqi agent’s sources had produced a rather vague and ambiguous report saying that biological and chemical munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within twenty to forty-five minutes. Quite what the weapons were he could not say. The report seemed to have come originally from someone who was just talking to a colleague casually, unaware that they would pass on the information to a foreign secret service. The source was untested but he was named and seemed to be in a position to know the information.

The dossier was being drawn up in a rush, far faster than usual for a JIC document. Emails whizzed back and forth, some pleading for more information. ‘Has anybody got anything more they can put in the dossier?’ was the plea Sir David Omand recalled. ‘I wouldn’t interpret that as meaning people saying there isn’t enough intelligence in substance, but this isn’t going to look very convincing if we are not allowed to show more of it. That’s my personal explanation of why, as it were, people fell on the forty-five minutes. At least that was something the Secret Service would allow to be used. With hindsight, one can see that adding a bit of local colour like that is asking for trouble. But we didn’t really spot that at the time.’44 MI6 officers were feeling the pressure to come up with the goods. [T]eams were wrestling with all this, having a very difficult time,’ according to the senior MI6 director.⁴⁵

Not everyone was convinced by the ‘local colour’. Expert analysts found MI6’s description of the new sub-source not as straightforward or as clear as they would have expected. When they asked MI6 ‘their response was unusually vague and unhelpful’.⁴⁶ The problem with the claim that munitions could be deployed in forty-five minutes was the absence of the type of collateral and corroborating intelligence an analyst would expect. Where were these chemical weapons being produced and by whom? What kind of chemicals were they? It was just a lonely piece of intelligence floating in a sea of uncertainty to which those who wanted to could cling.

There was a debate about how this new intelligence should be worded. An original draft talked about Iraq ‘probably’ having dispersed its special weapons and stating that they ‘could’ be with military units and ready for firing within forty-five minutes. Alastair Campbell pointed out that in one draft of the dossier the use of the qualifier ‘may’ in the main text was weaker than the language used in the summary. Scarlett replied that the language had been ‘tightened’. Scarlett would later say this followed a re-examination of the original intelligence. A few of the experts inside Whitehall remained unhappy with the claim but consoled themselves with the thought that at least the press or parliament would probe it carefully. They never did.

What did the report actually mean? The source did not seem to know much about chemical or biological weapons or even about the difference between them. And the issue of timing was also perplexing. If it related to battlefield shells, as the JIC’s drafters in the assessment staff believed it probably did, then forty-five minutes to move munitions from storage places to the units which would fire them was not particularly surprising. In fact it was pretty pathetic rather than scary if it took forty-five minutes to fire a shell. If it was referring to a ballistic missile then that would be rather too quick. Ministers say the difference was never explained to them. Nor was it explained to the public. When he heard about it, the Director of the CIA had his own view. His people thought it did not fit with what they knew about the artillery capabilities of the Iraqis. He thought the original source questionable and referred to it privately as the ‘they-can-attack-in-45-minutes shit’.47

But this was not the most important piece of intelligence that rode, like the cavalry, to the rescue. The most welcome of the new sources galloped over the horizon just as the sun was setting on the dossier. MI6 had managed to bag what looked like an important new agent. Dearlove personally mentioned the good news to David Manning at a meeting on 10 September and a copy of the report was duly despatched to Downing Street. The next day Dearlove informed Scarlett on the phone and MI6 formally issued its new report. An agent claimed that the production of biological and chemical weapons was being accelerated. The agent promised more critical intelligence soon. The source was still untested but Dearlove believed the information was too important to sit on.⁴⁸ But while those people at the top in London had learnt about this new source before even the intelligence report was formally issued, others – the ones who could judge the technical credibility of the information – remained in the dark.

Dearlove had a scheduled meeting with the Prime Minister on 12 September to update Blair on MI6 operations in Iraq. Accompanied by a senior officer, he went through all of MI6’s sources with Blair one by one, including the new source. The aim was to give Blair a ‘flavour’ of what was happening on the ground. Dearlove made clear just how important the new source promised to be but added that the case was developmental and the source unproven. Some inside MI6 believed this process was emblematic of what had gone wrong. Too much unproven intelligence, hot off the printer, was walked too quickly into the welcoming arms of Downing Street, they argued. This, traditionalists claimed, was the logical end point of the desire of modernisers within the service to make it useful, relevant and close to policy. There is a reason, they say, why intelligence gets assessed by experts carefully and placed into context and put down on paper rather than orally briefed to policymakers. But that was not the style of the Blair government. In truth, this was not a new debate. There is a rich pedigree of intelligence officers walking their successes round to Downing Street, particularly during times of conflict. ‘Everything is supposed to go through the assessment staff,’ one member of that staff at the time of Iraq recalls in discussing how the process worked in general terms. ‘Often we got it half an hour after it had gone to Downing Street with it post-dated to cover their back.’ Observers of the relationship believed this desire to make an impression has long reflected the insecurity of MI6 and the way in which its leadership has sought to win over political leaders.

The new source talked not just about accelerated production but also the building of further facilities and the employment of so-called dual-use facilities. Strangely there was no satellite imagery nor intercepted communications to confirm this.49 The new source promised another consignment of crucial intelligence in the next three to four weeks, including details of WMD sites. This, it was hoped, might be the eagerly sought ‘silver bullet’. The key ‘new source on trial’ was said to have direct access. He may have been in the Iraqi Special Security Organisation which was responsible for protecting key sites and individuals. A source from the SSO was reporting on Iraq’s plans to confuse UN inspectors and bug their rooms, and on how scientists were to be kept away from them if there were any suspicions about their loyalty. Those who later saw reports reflected that this was all actually standard Iraqi behaviour that anyone who had been an inspector in the 1990s would recognise. However, these security precautions were taken to indicate that there must be something to hide and this source reported that he was sure there was. But would a security official actually know much about what that was? Saddam had in fact ordered key military units to check methodically and scrub themselves of anything that could be suspicious (for instance, traces relating to pre-1991 equipment), fearing that the US would use it as a justification for war, and to hide sensitive materials unrelated to unconventional weapons.⁵⁰

Dearlove and senior officers around him were bullish. They were delivering the goods. One officer went so far as to utter the immortal words: ‘We’ve got another Penkovsky.’⁵¹ A third new sub-source over the summer had delivered what looked like confirmation of mobile biological labs. In all, three reporting streams produced six new reports at the crucial moment. But further down the food chain there were rumblings in some corners of Vauxhall Cross. A few members of staff felt uncomfortable that fresh, untested intelligence was being taken to Downing Street; two people asked to be moved because of their misgivings over the war. But on the whole there was disquiet rather than vocal dissent. In Whitehall, the unhappiness tended to come from the lower-to-middle orders. The Joint Intelligence Committee was signing off on the dossier but its membership consisted of senior officials, closely attuned to politics, sitting in the Downing Street bunker. They were the experts on what the government wanted, not on the subject matter.

Brian Jones returned from a holiday in Greece on 18 September just as the dossier neared completion. He was in charge of a team of analysts of weapons of mass destruction in the Defence Intelligence Staff of the Ministry of Defence, the home of much of the government’s residual knowledge and in-depth expertise. His staff told him that their work in his absence had been dominated by the dossier. His expert on biological weapons was not completely happy with the dossier but felt he could live with it; his expert on Iraq’s chemical weapons was very unhappy, especially since his suggested changes to drafts were being ignored. ‘The trouble is I have absolutely no reliable intelligence that Iraq has produced significant quantities of any chemical warfare agent or weapons since the Gulf conflict of 1991,’ Jones said he was told by his colleague. ‘I have been making this point in comments on every draft of the dossier,’ he said. ‘But we are just being ignored.’52

What bothered Jones and his staff was the certainty being expressed. How was such confidence possible? That was when he heard the first whisperings of a new source so sensitive that only a few could be let into the details, the one that had just arrived in mid-September (and which was describing accelerated production). His antennae went up and he went to see his boss.

‘This dossier business,’ his superior began. ‘DCDI [Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence] wants me to tell you that there is some new intelligence, very sensitive, can’t be shown to many, that clears up this business your chaps have been worrying about. OK?’

Jones complained that this was not good enough.

‘But an officer from MI6 has reassured me that it is OK,’ his boss replied.

Had he seen it personally?

‘No. But MI6 have told me it was good stuff.’ He told Jones he had been reassured by MI6 that the report was sound even though he had not seen it.

Jones privately contacted someone who had seen the MI6 report and explained his concerns. Should he take the unusual step of writing a formal minute outlining these concerns or was it really as good as claimed? ‘Write the minute,’ he was told.53 His Chemical Weapons analyst also recoded his concerns on paper. ‘The 20 September draft still includes a number of statements which are not supported by the evidence available to me,’ it read.⁵⁴

The information from the new source on trial was not included directly in the dossier because Dearlove wanted to protect the source, but knowledge of it was crucial in hardening up the judgements and overcoming the concerns within DIS. The new source, with its talk of accelerated production, seemed to confirm what had been only implied in the August report and helped overcome the last remaining qualms, including over forty-five minutes.⁵⁵ ‘We were told at the time that it did clinch it, and that we should bury our concerns,’ Jones later said.⁵⁶ How could reports be so sensitive that they could not be revealed to the experts but could be shown off to the Prime Minister and used to harden up a dossier designed for public consumption?

‘They weren’t seen by experts. You forget this is a Secret Service. We have to protect our sources. We can’t allow documents like that to reach anyone who really knows.’ That was how the fictional MI6 employee in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana explained to the vacuum-cleaner salesman why no one had noticed that his technical diagrams for a new super-weapon were actually enlarged versions of a two-way nozzle and double-action coupling from an ‘Atomic Pile’ vacuum cleaner. ‘We haven’t shown them the drawings yet,’ the Chief explained in the 1958 novel, referring to the experts outside the service. ‘You know what those fellows are like. They’ll criticise points of detail, say the whole thing is unreliable, that the tube is out of proportion or points the wrong way.’⁵⁷

By mid-September the dossier, stiffened by MI6’s new sources, was nearly ready to face the outside world. Scarlett maintained that while he was in charge of the main text, the foreword was overtly political and therefore not under his control. Downing Street officials say it would have been important for Blair to have felt his JIC Chair was comfortable with it.⁵⁸ Scarlett did make a few small changes and then, in the words of one member, ‘flashed it round the JIC’, some members of which paid relatively little attention.59 The language was stark. ‘What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons,’ Blair assured the reader in his foreword. The idea that there were limits to the intelligence and even major gaps had been lost, along with so many of the other caveats.⁶⁰ The dossier’s foreword implied that there was more that the public could not see and had to be kept under wraps because of security. The reality was that the dossier ‘may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgements than was the case.’⁶¹

Blair rose to present his case before an expectant House of Commons on 24 September 2002. ‘I am aware, of course, that people will have to take elements of this on the good faith of our intelligence services, but this is what they are telling me, the British Prime Minister, and my senior colleagues. The intelligence picture that they paint is one accumulated over the last four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within forty-five minutes.’ Thanks to MI6 riding to the rescue with its new sources, the intelligence that in March had been ‘sporadic and patchy’ could now be claimed as ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’.

In the land of intelligence, like that of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The trickle of MI6 sources amounted to more than the Americans had managed and the fresh intelligence, including the new source of September, was quickly passed over the Atlantic. ‘Did this information make any difference in my thinking?’ asked CIA Director George Tenet when he later tried to explain why he had got things wrong. ‘You bet it did.’⁶² The Bush administration was preparing to make its case both to its own public and to the world and British intelligence would be closely involved.

An American National Intelligence Estimate was hastily cobbled together reflecting the fact that no one had assessed Iraq’s programmes properly for a long time. One officer said he could count the number of sources on one hand and still pick his nose. None of the four sources the US had on Iraq were inside the WMD progamme. ‘How come all the good reporting I get is from SIS?’ Tenet asked one of his staff once – music to British intelligence’s ears with their long-standing desire to show they could always bring something to the party.63 Each side would lean on the other, sometimes more than they realised.

The CIA and its Director George Tenet’s experience mirrored that in Britain. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,’ Tenet told President Bush when he worried that the public case for Saddam’s weapons was not strong enough (‘The two dumbest words I ever said,’ he later reflected). Tenet would see himself as the fall guy when it all went wrong, arguing that the dilemma for the spies was that if they did not get involved the intelligence would be misused, but when they did involve themselves they were drawn into a messy, political process of advocacy.

Tenet had the White House on his back, constantly pushing and probing, and Vice-President Cheney visiting Langley to check up on progress. No one, on either side of the Atlantic, could easily put their finger on direct pressure on analysts to come to certain conclusions. But it is also naive to think that analysts can close themselves off from their surroundings and the political context, however hard they try. How likely is it that junior staff will challenge assumptions to which they know their superiors have committed themselves in their relationships with politicians? The analysts also complained they were not told enough about the intelligence sources to understand their motivation and reliability or to realise that some of the material was going round in circles between different countries and being repackaged to look as if it was new when in fact it was old. The case for Iraq having developed mobile biological weapons was emblematic of much that what went wrong.

In an upmarket but anonymous hotel room in Amman, Jordan, a well-built, olive-skinned man nervously chain-smoked cigarettes, the ashtray overflowing as the hours passed. He was, he said, a former major in the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence service. He could talk in ghastly detail about the methods he and his colleagues used to maintain Saddam’s grip on power. But there was more, he explained. He knew something about biological weapons labs. His rapt audience consisted not of spies but two journalists. His back-story sounded plausible, but there was something in the way he glanced downwards when he talked about the mobile labs that did not quite feel right. And there was the fact that he had been introduced by the Iraqi National Congress, an émigré group run by the mercurial Ahmed Chalabi, dedicated to Saddam’s overthrow. So the story about the mobile labs languished through a lack of confidence in the source.64

A few weeks after that Amman meeting US Secretary of State Colin Powell stood before the United Nations, George Tenet literally and metaphorically covering his rear. ‘One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents,’ he explained. ‘Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories,’ he claimed, before outlining the four sources that backed up the case. ‘A fourth source, an Iraqi major, who defected, confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories.’⁶⁵ While one of the journalists listening wondered, but only for a few weeks, if he had missed a story, Powell did not know that parts of his own intelligence community had a year earlier deemed the major to be a fabricator. They had issued a ‘burn notice’, but never recalled his reports or amended the work based on them. Nor did Powell know that CIA officers had also been warned that the crucial main source about mobile labs, on whom so much in America and Britain depended, might also be a fabricator. ‘Curveball’ was the fitting codename for that main source.

In November 1999 a young Iraqi had arrived at Munich airport and requested asylum from the German government. It was well known in the barbed-wire-encrusted holding camp in which he was placed that one way out was by convincing German intelligence you had something they wanted. Streams of Iraqi defectors pimped their stories to the intelligence agencies. Many were entirely made up or wild assertions based on fragments of what they had heard or seen back home. Most, but not all, were weeded out. Like Golitsyn and the Cold War defectors, Curveball knew he needed something of value to avoid being discarded. He appeared reserved and calm as he told his interrogators that not only did he have details about Saddam manufacturing biological weapons on mobile grey metal trailers but that it was being done with German equipment. The Germans clumsily debriefed Curveball, asking him leading questions. Within a few months he had his own apartment and had been granted political asylum. The Germans passed the intelligence to allies including Britain’s MI6 and American military intelligence, the DIA, but not the CIA with whom relations were less close. The DIA introduced the stream of reporting into the American system – a total of 100 reports in less than two years. It was agreed the material was technically credible, but that was different from determining whether it was actually true. Because of the potential embarrassment centring on the involvement of their companies, the Germans decided not to allow direct access or reveal his true identity to their allies. He did not speak English and he hated Americans, they lied. They also, truth be told, were not too sure about him. Little did they know the vast edifice that would be built on the shifting sands of his meagre, unreliable intelligence. And it was not just America. ‘The vast majority’ of Britain’s case for believing in biological weapons production came from Curveball.66

No one likes being dependent on a source without knowing much about it, so MI6 did its best to get around German reticence and find out who Curveball really was. The Americans were angry that their ‘closest ally’ was not keeping them in the loop, at least initially, of their investigation. ‘People were really pissed off that the Brits were talking to the Germans about the case and they didn’t share it all with us,’ a CIA officer said afterwards.⁶⁷ CIA officials say that they later learnt that some MI6 officers began to have doubts about Curveball in 2002, saying they were not convinced he was a ‘wholly reliable source’ and ‘elements of [his] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators’. But despite these concerns, MI6 was never willing to reject completely his reliability (largely due to his apparent technical knowledge) and continued to use his reports, which would become crucial to the dossier.⁶⁸ From 2002, Curveball was also backed up by the major from the Mukhabarat, providing false reassurance, and MI6’s third new source, from an agent known as Red River. Red River, a long-standing MI6 agent, reported a new ‘sub-source’ in the summer of 2002 who talked of the possible use of fermenters on trailers and railway trucks. These were suspected of being for biological weapons production but the source could not be sure of their purpose. In London, it was said that this confirmed the Curveball account; in truth it was complementary rather than confirmatory, a subtle but important difference.

The CIA division chief rolled into lunch fifteen minutes late at the Sea Catch restaurant overlooking the canal in Georgetown. His lunch partner, an ever-prompt German spy, had been waiting. After small talk the CIA officer asked if his agency could meet Curveball. ‘Don’t ask,’ was the reply. ‘He hates Americans.’ That was not enough of a reason, the CIA man responded. ‘You do not want to see him because he’s crazy,’ the German said. ‘I personally think the guy may be a fabricator,’ he added.69 The Germans had begun to realise that Curveball might be critical to the American case for a war and that worried them. The CIA officer says he passed on these concerns at a number of meetings with senior officials. But some in the CIA and Washington did not seem to want to have a major source knocked out from under them.

A few months later the same CIA division chief received a late-night phone call from George Tenet. It was early February 2003 and Colin Powell was preparing to address the UN on the case for war. The Secretary of State and his aides had spent days and nights sweating over the files at CIA headquarters in Langley with officials scurrying around them trying to tie down loose ends. Twenty-eight items had been removed from his speech because they were too weak.⁷⁰ Powell wanted it to be accurate but he also saw this as his ‘Adlai Stevenson’ moment, a reference to the Secretary of State during the Cuban Missile Crisis who had brandished conclusive proof of Soviet actions inside the UN Security Council. Among the intelligence Powell wanted to use was some of the new material collected by MI6. An exhausted Tenet called the CIA officer who had met the German contact to get Dearlove’s home number to negotiate clearance. That officer says he told Tenet personally that there were problems with Curveball. Tenet says he does not remember being told this. The next afternoon, Curveball’s intelligence was in the Security Council chamber. ‘Mein Gott,’ a German intelligence official exclaimed as he watched Powell speak on TV. ‘I thought you said it wasn’t going to be used,’ the German officer in Washington said to the division chief the next day.⁷¹

On 28 January President Bush had walked up to the dais in Congress for his annual State of the Union message. A year before, he had warned of an ‘axis of evil’. This time he outlined the case as to why Iraq needed to be dealt with first. Among the charges was one that he leant on the British to substantiate. ‘The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,’ the President stated. This became the American equivalent of the British forty-five-minutes claim – the lightning rod for all the arguments over mistaken intelligence and how it had been used by politicians (the Americans always made more of the nuclear case, the British made more of the chemical/biological). The CIA had already carried out a quick investigation of the claim using a retired American ambassador, Joe Wilson, who was married to a CIA officer. He said he thought there was nothing to it. The British held the faith though, arguing that their own sources, separate from fabricated documents later found in Italy and including intercepted communications, suggested that on a trip to Niger an Iraqi ambassador had at least discussed uranium sales (even if no deal was actually done). The CIA never agreed and pushed the White House to keep the issue out of presidential speeches. They were none too pleased to hear it turn up in the State of the Union address, even if cleverly attributed not to them but to the British. MI6 officers were also surprised to hear what had been done with what they thought was a relatively innocuous piece of intelligence. As with Curveball, doubts had been buried and doubters sidelined.

On 27 November 2002, the UN inspectors strode through the doors of one of Saddam’s presidential palaces on the Tigris River. They had arrived in Iraq clutching valuable intelligence, much of it supplied by Britain, indicating potential sites housing the weapons programmes. The demand for their entry had been part of a British strategy. If Saddam refused to allow them in, the case for war, especially at the UN, would be stronger. If he did let them in, they would either disarm him or find something which could be used to justify regime change. Hawks in Washington, such as Dick Cheney, thought inspections might be a trap to divert them away from war, but the British plan, backed by Colin Powell, won out. Then came the problem. The inspectors were not finding anything. They scoured the presidential palace for stores of suspicious items and documents. They found only marmalade in the refrigerators.72 And so it went on as they went to site after site. No one in London seemed worried at first. That cunning Saddam is good at deception, they all agreed. It was his typical cat-and-mouse game. ‘When the inspectors started to report that they weren’t finding what we all thought was going to be found, the response, for example, in SIS, was simply to turn up the volume control to say, “That just proves how devious and duplicitous Saddam Hussein is, and how incompetent the inspectors are,” recalled Sir David Omand.⁷³ Nothing significant came of the British leads.⁷⁴ ‘We inspected a lot of chicken farms,’ one former inspector said later of the whole process. On closer examination they were, indeed, chicken farms.⁷⁵ The inspectors began to harbour doubts. Iraq was in a state of near collapse and it seemed unlikely that it could sustain and hide the necessary infrastructure. Hans Blix, the head of the UN inspecting body, told Blair he was grateful for the intelligence that had been provided, but ‘it had not been all that compelling’.⁷⁶ At another meeting between the two men over crumpets at Chequers, Blair told Blix that without ‘honest co-operation’ from Iraq there would be a decision to act by the start of March. Blix sensed that the brutal nature of Saddam’s regime weighed heavily on Blair’s thinking.⁷⁷ The US had begun to spy on Blix as they were convinced he was not aggressive enough. Even though he believed there were weapons and generally agreed with the conclusions of the British dossier, there were concerns that he was avoiding strong conclusions in order to prevent his reports being used as a justification for war. The distrust of the UN and its intentions meant that Washington saw no point in letting inspections run their course, even though this might have encouraged other allies to join the coalition.⁷⁸

By February 2003, the inspectors had conducted 400 inspections at 300 sites and found nothing. In London, they moaned that the inspectors were naive and were botching the process. Jokes started to go around British intelligence about how the inspectors had forgotten their spades. But as time went on a shade of fear began to attach itself to the humour. There was particular anger that the inspectors had failed to take the proper equipment, including ground penetrating radar, when they visited a bunker beside a military hospital based on a British tip-off. ‘There were some quite breathless moments when intelligence was rushed in saying “We found it”,’ a Downing Street official recalled, yet nothing materialised, despite the intense interest of a prime minister who was ‘desperate’ to see whatever there was.79 ‘The Prime Minister was interested in a silver bullet,’ recalled the Arabist MI6 director. ‘If there was a gleam of a silver bullet anywhere, he would want to know about it, and he would want to see the product.’⁸⁰ Meanwhile, the three to four weeks in which the new source on trial had promised to deliver intelligence on WMD sites came and went. Tony Blair and Jack Straw kept pressing MI6. What was holding it up? they asked.⁸¹ But nothing more was heard. The MI6 director, who believed any WMD would be no larger than something that could fit on a petrol truck, was now becoming increasingly pessimistic about the chances of finding anything. He knew it was now too late to change the argument for going to war. ‘We were on the flypaper of WMD, whether we liked it or not.’⁸²

Moving each day, sleeping in a different place every night, Saddam Hussein was in a bind. Like Khrushchev with his missiles in 1961, the secret Saddam was keeping from the world was that he was weaker than he appeared. He was conscious of Iran next door developing its own weapons and of the danger of seeming frail. Viewed from his isolated bunker deep underground, Iran always felt a more immediate threat than the US.⁸³ But at the same time Saddam was not quite bluffing about his ability since he was also telling the US and UK privately and publicly that he had no weapons (consistency is not necessarily required if you are a dictator). The problem was that he did not know how to convince them. After the 1991 Gulf War, the nuclear facilities had been damaged and Saddam had decided the country did not have the resources to continue while under sanctions. Orders had come down to Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, the erudite British-trained leader of the nuclear programme, to hand over everything to the Republican Guards so they could destroy it all. ‘Saddam decided to terminate the programmes in July of 1991, hoping that sanctions would be lifted soon because it was just far more important to lift sanctions than to continue with these programmes,’ Jaffar later explained.

The Iraqi leader had not given up all ambitions. Getting rid of weapons, he believed, would end inspections and lead to the lifting of the sanctions. Then he might be able to restart his programmes. There was an unexpected flaw to his master plan though. He could not convince people he really had got rid of the weapons. He would reflect that his crucial mistake had been to destroy the weapons unilaterally after 1991 without UN supervision.84 In order to maintain the illusion of power, only a handful of Iraqis had known of the destruction in 1991 – a decision which would ultimately cost Saddam. There was a push by Iraq to try and close the file with the UN in 1997 and 1998, according to Jaffar. But when it failed, Saddam concluded that whatever he told the US they would not lift sanctions so he might as well remove the humiliating burden of inspections. ‘Why have both sanctions and the inspectors? We’d rather have the sanctions and not the inspectors.’⁸⁵ He also never believed, right to the end, that the US would actually invade; air strikes were the most he expected. Had it not been for the 11 September attacks his gamble might have paid off, as the appetite for sanctions had begun to crumble.

Saddam’s regime was characterised, like many dictatorships, by a mixture of fear and incompetence. It was so chaotic that no one really knew what anyone else knew, including Saddam himself, which was why he called a Revolutionary Command Council meeting after the British dossier. Every general knew he did not have the special weapons but thought his counterpart down the road did. This has led to the Byzantine argument that intelligence agencies could never have known that Iraq did not have weapons. ‘There was clearly a great deal of confusion among the Iraqi leadership about what their own capability was,’ Richard Dearlove reflected later. ‘I am certainly of the view that there were probably no human sources in Iraq who could have told us authoritatively that they did not have WMD.’⁸⁶ In other words, no source telling the truth could have been believed.

Saddam summoned his Revolutionary Command Council and top military aides again in December. This time he told them that there were no WMD. Some of his generals were stunned by the news. Up until then he had always implied he had something up his sleeve. Morale plummeted (although he later dropped hints that led some commanders to believe there was still some kind of capability).⁸⁷ The Iraqi leader was now trying his best to convey to the outside world what had happened, though he never offered total co-operation, fearing it could be used to undermine his grip on power. That month he offered a vast declaration of what had happened to the weapons, as had been demanded. It was dismissed in Washington and London as offering nothing new, the critics not realising that this was because there was not a lot new to offer. ‘I don’t think that anyone would have been satisfied unless they had come up with a report that said “Here are the weapons,”’ noted Hans Blix. Blix’s approach, on chemical weapons particularly, was to focus on the so-called ‘unaccounted for’ materials, items which Iraq could not prove had been destroyed.88 ‘There were the reasons for that,’ explains Jaffar. Books were not kept properly and production and procurement were exaggerated to secure one’s position. ‘So when you come to these reports later you find that there’s a difference between what was said was produced and what actually exists. That was called material unaccounted for. That doesn’t mean it actually exists. It exists on paper perhaps. But it doesn’t exist in practice.’⁸⁹ Jaffar himself grew so angry with the failure of the UN to give Iraq a clean bill of health over its nuclear programme that when he met Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, the official in charge of nuclear inspections, in May 2002 in New York, the Iraqi had to be calmed down by another of Saddam’s close aides who had accompanied him. Blix would wonder if rumours that US intelligence agencies had approached Jaffar as he arrived to try and persuade him to defect might have contributed to his irritation.⁹⁰

There were explanations for everything, but no one was listening. The aluminium tubes the US (and for a while the UK) said were for centrifuges to make a nuclear bomb were for rockets. The trip to Niger was not for uranium – ‘We had 500 tons of Yellow Cake in Baghdad at the time, so why should we go and buy another 500 tons from Niger?’ explains Jaffar.⁹¹ Part of the problem, former inspectors argue, was the past behaviour of officials including Jaffar. ‘The failure to give Iraq a clean bill of health really relates to Jaffar’s own behaviour,’ argues David Kay who led inspections of the nuclear programme in the early 1990s. ‘They did not come forward with the evidence of their programme. We had to discover it, they lied, cheated and tried to deceive us, they tried to cover up and they tried to retain portions of that programme … So you can never be sure that you’d gotten everything because the Iraqis failed to be honest about it. They started out lying, they continued lying and so consequently the attitude among the inspectors developed: they never tell the truth, and so there must be something more there.’92

Iraq was saying the same thing secretly as it was saying publicly. One of MI6’s tasks is to conduct back-channel contacts when the British government does not want it known openly that it is talking to someone. This was the case with the first contacts with the Provisional IRA when the British government maintained a public policy of not talking to terrorists. The same kind of back-channel contacts also took place with Saddam’s regime (with British ministerial knowledge). The Controller for the Middle East met a senior Iraqi intelligence official secretly a number of times as war approached (it remained unclear to MI6 whether this was with or without Saddam’s agreement). The Iraqi official told him there were no weapons and there was nothing more to say. This was not the lost opportunity to avoid war, as some would later claim. The official was saying in private exactly what Saddam was saying in public. At the time everyone considered this statement, like those of Saddam in public, to be simply rhetoric and ‘just what he was expected to say’ and therefore deception.⁹³ ‘[He] failed to persuade his British interlocutors that he had anything new to offer … and the British – on their own – elected to break off contact,’ George Tenet later said.⁹⁴ The bar for intelligence that suggested there were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their existence.

At the same time in the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York, a strange sideshow was taking place. The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, had been in contact with French intelligence for some time through an Arab journalist intermediary and was now passing information indirectly to the US in response to questions. Even though he was Foreign Minister, Sabri was never in the tightest circle around Saddam and he may well have not known the truth. What he said and how it was reported remains contentious. By one account, he said that Jaffar had been summoned in to see Saddarn earlier in the year and told him he could build a nuclear bomb within eighteen to twenty-four months of receiving fissile material – a fairly meaningless statement since obtaining the material is arguably the hardest part of the process. Sabri is also supposed to have said that chemical weapons may have been dispersed but there were no serious biological programmes. Former CIA officers have suggested the reports of the contact were rewritten to strengthen the conclusions and imply that Iraq was still aggressively pursuing a WMD programme including a nuclear weapon. This was technically true but only at a real stretch since it was a long-term aspiration rather than a current project. In George Tenet’s later account he says (without naming Sabri) that the source said Iraq was stockpiling material for chemical weapons, had mobile launchers and was dabbling with biological weapons, though not with sufficient success to constitute a real biological weapons programme. That last point conflicted with Curveball and so was ignored while the more gloomy parts were highlighted. A more alarmist account of the Sabri intelligence was passed to MI6 which fed into their analysis. A CIA officer chased Sabri around the world to try and meet him and get a direct answer to questions but only got close to him just before the war. By then, he was told, it was too late to bother.

The train had left the station in London and Washington. ‘The books had been cooked, the bets placed,’ reckoned one CIA official.95 The accretion of scraps of intelligence had become impossible to disprove. This was the same error as the molehunters made. Every piece of evidence which seemed to contradict a deeply found belief was treated as a masterful act of deception by the other side. Or to put it another way, how do you prove a negative? How do you persuade someone that you are not hiding something? Donald Rumsfeld expressed this strange view best when he said ‘the absence of evidence is not absence of evidence.’⁹⁶ But what if sometimes the absence of evidence really is a sign that something is not there? Reports arrived late in the day saying that most members of the Iraqi leadership were not convinced that it would be possible to use chemical or biological weapons and that chemical weapons had been dispersed and would be hard to reassemble. The fact that intelligence now suggested Iraq did not have usable weapons able to attack, let alone in forty-five minutes, was never revealed to the public (although some ministers had been told by Blair). The intelligence picture now looked far more contradictory and complex than the public knew.⁹⁷

At 12.35 p.m. on 18 March, Tony Blair stood up in parliament. He had just failed in a desperate attempt to secure a second UN resolution to authorise war explicitly, one in which he had enlisted MI6 to brief swing members of the Security Council and try and convince them. He now needed to explain to an anxious parliament – and especially to his own Labour Party – why war was about to start when some voices called for more time for inspections, especially as there were signs the Iraqis were providing more co-operation. As he spoke, the first planeload of inspectors was arriving in Cyprus following a phone call Hans Blix had received two days earlier from US officials telling them it was time to get out. If Blair had lost the vote he would have resigned. An anxious President Bush called privately to offer him the chance to back down, and Jack Straw had told him a few days earlier that it was still not too late to change course, but Blair was committed. ‘The truth is that our patience should have been exhausted weeks and months and even years ago,’ he told parliament before reaching for an analogy with the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s.98 Blair also went on to place Iraq within the frame of his wider fears. He said he knew of some countries or groups trading in nuclear weapons technology and that he knew of some dictatorships desperately trying to acquire such technology. ‘Some of those countries are now a short time away from having a serviceable nuclear weapon.’

As the bombs were about to fall on Baghdad, a phone call came into MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. It was from a Palestinian who was an occasional contact for the service. He had a message from the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. The leader’s son, Saif, was ready to deliver it. The rendezvous took place in the private room of an upmarket hotel in London’s Mayfair. Present were two MI6 officers. Saif was nervous. He had not met with anyone from the British Secret Service before and had been brought up to think of its officers as a breed of half-man half-devil intent on destroying his father. He explained that Gaddafi senior wanted to talk about weapons of mass destruction. The MI6 officers called David Manning at Downing Street who told them to keep talking. On the day the first bombs fell on Baghdad, a plane took off for Libya.⁹⁹

The two British intelligence officers on board the plane headed for Sirte, desert headquarters of the Libyan leader, where the eccentric colonel held court in a huge Bedouin tent with camels roaming outside. Gaddafi was worried about being next on the list after Saddam and wanted to see if he could buy his way back into the international community by giving up a weapons programme that he thought no one knew about. What he did not realise was that MI6 already knew all about his secret nuclear weapons programme. It had been supplied by the Pakistani salesman A. Q. Khan and his network had been penetrated by MI6 for a number of years. Gaddafi told the leader of the MI6 team, Mark Allen, that his Libyan counterpart for the negotiations would be the intelligence chief Musa Kusa.100 It was made clear that the Libyans wanted the Americans on board and saw the British as the best way of achieving that goal.

Mark Allen went with Dearlove to Washington a few days later to discuss the offer. Dearlove briefed the President personally. Steve Kappes was assigned by the CIA to work with Allen on talking to Gaddafi. The mercurial Gaddafi would make it a difficult process. The Libyans were nervous about revealing what they had purchased from A. Q. Khan (even though it was still far from operational) because they feared that their old enemies could simply walk away from the secret negotiations and use the information as a pretext to attack. Libya’s evasiveness in turn inspired distrust from MI6 and the CIA, who knew how much the Libyans were hiding even as they kept on insisting they had to come clean. At one point, a retired British military figure had to be sent out as a gesture of good faith with the message that a deal was on the table. As months passed, Gaddafi may also have been watching the ‘victory’ in Iraq turn sour as roadside bombs began to detonate and he may have started to wonder if the appetite was still there for another war.

By the summer, a nervy, frustrating impasse had been reached. Plans to take down the A. Q. Khan network had been stalled in order not to compromise the Libyan negotiations. A risk needed to be taken. A source inside the Khan network revealed that a consignment of nuclear parts was going to be shipped to Libya. The boat carrying them, the BBC China (which had nothing to do with the BBC or with China) was diverted in the middle of the night to an Italian port, where a team quickly identified five cargo containers and opened them with considerable relief. Allen called Musa Kusa and confronted him. The Libyans folded. They agreed to allow a team of CIA and MI6 inspectors into the country to examine their sites.

A small unmarked plane carrying a joint CIA–MI6 team departed from Northolt airfield on 19 October for Libya. Only a handful of officials on each side of the Atlantic knew about the trip. The team, which consisted of specialists in nuclear programmes, chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles, was taken around previously clandestine sites by Libyan guides during the day and then filed reports back to Langley and Vauxhall Cross by night. But the Libyans continued to prove evasive on key details. After ten days, the group returned home frustrated. The enigmatic Musa Kusa (whose past links to international terrorism and especially in arming the IRA were well known to the British and American officials) was invited to Britain to discuss the problem with Allen and Kappes. Intelligence was literally laid out on the table before him to highlight the differences between what Libya was claiming and what was known to be true. This included playing a tape of a recording between A. Q. Khan and Libya’s nuclear chief from February of the previous year.

Kusa agreed a second inspection visit which began on 9 December. This time there was more co-operation but still not quite enough. The scale and ambitions of the nuclear programme were the main stumbling block. Rain fell on the last full day as the possibility of failure hung over the visiting team. In the dark before dawn the next morning, the team headed to the airport and their thirty-two-seat plane. As the British and American intelligence officers prepared to board, the Libyans announced that they had something for them. A stack of brown envelopes about a foot high was handed over. When the team opened the envelopes on board the aircraft they found inside the design for a nuclear weapon that had been given to Libya by A. Q. Khan. It was what they had been waiting for.

The final outlines of the deal were hammered out on 16 December in an all-day session in a private room at the Travellers Club on Pall Mall, a favourite haunt of Secret Service officers. Those Libyans who had forgotten to wear ties were quickly hustled inside before a doorman could stop them. Libyan resistance over just how much they would publicly admit proved the last stumbling block, along with questions over whether Gaddafi would humble himself by making the announcement. The Libyans continued to fear being double-crossed. Saddam Hussein had just been captured in Iraq and Gaddafi seemed to fear meeting the same fate. Blair spoke by telephone with the Libyan leader two days later to finalise plans. On 19 December the secret diplomacy finally became public, although only after a bizarre delay when Gaddafi decided to wait to make his announcement because a football match being shown on television ran over schedule. Within weeks, President Musharraf was pressurised to put A. Q. Khan out of business. These were crucial victories, but they were only a sideshow to the problem that was preoccupying London and Washington, as Saddam’s weapons proved to be a Banquo’s ghost, haunting them long after his regime had been crushed.

The war in Iraq had been won swiftly, the peace was another matter. The non-existent weapons of mass destruction were not the only intelligence failure. The political reporting before the war was paltry. Few, apart from some academics whose advice was ignored, were aware of the country’s tribal and social structures. Not only had there been a failure to understand Saddam’s mindset and ask if he was bluffing, but the focus on the weapons meant not enough work was done on how the country would stand up to invasion and what would come after. There was, however, a warning that war would lead to more terrorism against the UK and serve the narrative of Al Qaeda by providing a justification for more attacks.101 ‘Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad so he was able to move into Iraq in a way he wasn’t before,’ Eliza Manningham-Buller later reflected. But the intelligence community never predicted the extent of radicalisation in the UK, nor that foreign jihadists would flock to Iraq to fight the coalition within days of the war starting. When the Secretary General of the Arab League warned that a war would ‘open the gates of hell’ it was dismissed as hyperbole.

As the war had unfolded, a few people had also begun to wonder why Saddam had not used any of his ‘special weapons’, especially as troops approached Baghdad. Perhaps deterrence had worked or command and control had been disrupted, the military explained.¹⁰² When the war was over, the question of the missing weapons could no longer be ignored. ‘We were being warned of the possibility that Saddam had got rid of WMD and certainly most of the documentation, before the conflict,’ Alastair Campbell wrote in his diary as the war ended. A month later the panic grew as Donald Rumsfeld said weapons might not be found and his deputy dismissively stated that the focus on WMD had been a ‘bureaucratic convenience’.¹⁰³ When a BBC report claimed that the intelligence on the forty-five minutes had been included against the wishes of the spies and despite knowledge that it was wrong, Blair was angry. A struggle began between Downing Street and the BBC. The source for the story, weapons inspector David Kelly, would be caught in the crossfire and killed himself within weeks.

For a tense few days, the spies and politicians eyed each other nervously. Each wondered if the other side would break ranks and try to pin the blame on them. Every hint that this nuclear option might be pursued sent tremors through the system. Campbell called Scarlett on 1 June as stories of unhappiness among the spooks proliferated. Scarlett said the ‘agencies were pushing back and denying all this, but there was precious little sign of that in the Sundays,’ wrote Campbell.104 ‘He [Scarlett] said we were being made to accord to our stereotypes – you are the brutal political hatchet man and I am the dry intelligence officer. It’s not very nice but I can assure you this is not coming from the people at the top. He was clear I had never asked him to do anything he was unhappy with. I said it was really bad, all this stuff.’ Three days later, government ministers were talking about ‘rogue elements’ in the intelligence services and ‘skulduggery’. This time it was the spies’ turn to worry. Campbell’s phone lit up with messages from Dearlove, Scarlett and Omand.¹⁰⁵ Staring into the abyss of mutually assured destruction, the spies and politicians came to a fretful peace.

As time went on, and site after site was searched and hope after hope of finding weapons of mass destruction was dashed, an air of panic began to consume Vauxhall Cross. ‘People were going round saying “For Christ sakes, just find something”,’ recalls one individual.¹⁰⁶ Everyone understood how important this was politically. In Number 10, the Prime Minister became increasingly agitated.¹⁰⁷ The men given the job of finding something were drawing a blank. David Kay went out first, convinced there were weapons. The first warning sign came when he was briefed on the intelligence. Is that all there is? he thought. He had asked to see the underlying material behind the British dossier. The sources, it seemed, had been over-interpreted, perhaps misinterpreted. ‘I thought it was a pretty thin gruel.’¹⁰⁸ A couple of mobile trailers were heralded as a big find but then had to be discounted. There was excitement about containers on a river-bed but they disappeared. Some old chemical shells were discovered buried in the desert which the White House wanted to publicise but they were told they dated back to before 1991. Jaffar was among those interviewed by Kay’s team. He told them everything had been in the 7 December declaration. Tensions emerged between allies. At a meeting one person present recalls Tenet asking Dearlove outright if he could see the intelligence that lay behind the British claim on Niger. Dearlove declined, but said MI6 still believed it to be true. Tenet told colleagues later that Dearlove was no more forthcoming in private. The refusal was most likely based on the control principle, meaning the original intelligence was not Britain’s to share without permission.

Kay returned within a few months to tell a stunned Washington they had been ‘almost all wrong’. The US and British administrations had wanted Kay to keep quiet and were furious. British officials had even gone to see the CIA head of station in London to complain about him. The CIA man had cabled Washington but Kay himself was copied into the traffic and asked the MI6 station chief in Baghdad to intervene. This led to another complaint from London to Washington, with Kay again copied in. Charles Duelfer was next up to lead the hunt, passing through London on the way where an eager Blair wanted to hear his plans.109

Those working on inspection reports sensed the anxiety in London. How can you be sure there isn’t anything when you haven’t covered the whole of the country? British officials kept asking. The inspectors explained they had not just visited sites but interviewed captive Iraqi scientific, military and intelligence officials who all said the same thing. Scarlett was among those keen to make sure that any report was as robust as possible. He emailed a series of ‘nuggets’ to Duelfer asking if they would be included. These were unresolved items from an older classified report. Details had been unearthed of Iraqi intelligence doing work on poisons but inspectors said it would be disingenuous to describe this as work on chemical weapons. ‘I could not believe my eyes,’ thought Rod Barton, one of the senior inspectors, when he saw the email. He told Duelfer it was unacceptable to include the nuggets since there was no evidence. Over a video conference, Scarlett backed away. ‘The nuggets were fool’s gold,’ Duelfer reflected. ‘It was obvious the game was up,’ Barton, who soon quit, thought. ‘There was no WMD there. They were going to have to bite the bullet and say so.’¹¹⁰ Letting go was not easy.

One by one MI6’s prized sources were melting away like mirages in the desert heat. As each oasis was approached, the weary travellers of the MI6 validation team sent out to check the sources, often escorted by special forces soldiers, discovered only sand slipping through their fingers. Some of the key sources did not last long. Just three months after the fall of Baghdad, MI6 interviewed the cherished new source in whom so much had been invested and who had dispelled so many doubts. He denied ever having said anything about accelerated production of biological and chemical weapons.111

With the forty-five-minutes claim, MI6 visited the military officer alleged to have supplied the report, who denied any knowledge of having ever said such a thing. So they went looking for the main source who had passed on the information claiming it was from the military officer. He proved hard to track down. ‘There was a lot of umming and aahing,’ remembers one of the people involved. It was clear he had simply made it all up. He was the Baghdad equivalent of Graham Greene’s Havana’s vacuum cleaner salesman with an overactive imagination. MI6 reported the bad news back to London in 2004. ‘I particularly remember the moment when the Prime Minister was told that the forty-five-minutes intelligence was false,’ one individual later recalled. ‘That felt like a pretty big moment in terms of the Prime Minister’s trust of SIS and intelligence. Privately, I felt that he felt let down.’¹¹²

When an American team went to a key facility looking for Curveball’s mobile trailers they found a seed-purification plant. They went back six times to make sure. A six-foot-high wall made it impossible for trailers to move in and out at the location he had described. A confused site manager said there had never been any doors where Curveball indicated.¹¹³ Curveball’s own travel records revealed he could not have been in Iraq to witness an accident as he had claimed. His former boss admitted he had been fired from his position in 1995. A CIA team who finally got access to Curveball found that he simply refused to answer any more questions when they confronted him with the holes in his account. They also thought the British were doing their best to hold on to his intelligence. Perhaps the mobile laboratories were there just in case Saddam wanted a capacity to produce material in the future, MI6 argued defensively. The Germans and the British disagreed over who had introduced the disputed technical details into the reporting. It transpired that Curveball had got much of his material by reading inspectors’ reports off the internet and piecing it together with the little he knew.114

The British and Americans turned to each other. But we thought you had other intelligence to back everything up? Each realised the other side’s material was less substantial than they had believed, and not just on Curveball. They had shared much but never everything. On the Sabri case and Curveball it was only after the war that each realised that the other side had doubts about intelligence the other had thought cast-iron. ‘If only you’d told us everything and we’d told you everything, maybe we could have pieced it together,’ one officer told his American counterparts wistfully after the war. The American agreed, but would later wonder whether that would really have made any difference.¹¹⁵

The shutters at Vauxhall Cross came down. ‘It was like drawing teeth,’ a Whitehall official said of the long-drawn-out process of MI6 rowing back on its sources and painfully reporting each time to a special JIC sub-committee. The nuclear and missile sources were not too bad, it was argued, but the latter in particular were never relevant to the public debate. Those senior officers who had invested most in the sources continued to argue they had not been wrong. They said the weapons, particularly mobile rocket launchers with weaponised VX, must have been moved to Syria before the war. They said their multiple sources (human and technical) on this were never disproved and were ‘very compelling’.¹¹⁶ But this was thoroughly investigated by the inspectors of David Kay and Charles Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group after the war. They interviewed Iraqi pilots and ground crew to see if anything could have been smuggled on flights; they looked at the routing of trucks. They found no hard evidence. The absence of a clear Syrian motive for accepting such dangerous consignments and the failure of even the Israelis to push the line added to the case against. Some still cling to the fading hope that something will be proved to have gone over the border.

With the exception of the forty-five-minutes claim, Lord Butler’s inquiry said the original intelligence had not been misreported. There was no distortion, he concluded. The original intelligence was simply wrong. This, in many ways, is a far more damning conclusion for MI6 than the notion that the politicians had ‘spun’ the intelligence against the wishes of the spies. The politicians may have pushed and pressed, but ultimately, the problem was that MI6’s reporting was dud.

Bureaucratic explanations were proffered. For instance, the posts of requirements officers at headquarters, who were supposed to act as a quality control on reporting from the field, had been staffed by inexperienced officers because of cuts and their role had become subordinate to the production officers, whose job was to get as much intelligence to customers as possible.117 But few believed this really explained the disaster that had befallen the service.

‘There was a sense in which, because of past success – very, very considerable successes supporting this government – that SIS [MI6] overpromised and under-delivered,’ David Omand later reflected. ‘We were getting the promise,’ a Downing Street official agreed, ‘but it was only … after the military invasion that we realised just how much of their product was false.’¹¹⁸ The argument that they had overpromised is disputed by some who maintain that they always made clear the intelligence was scanty. Clandestine weapons programmes are the most closely guarded secrets of a state, their intimate details known only to a handful, the hardest target for a secret service. But stealing secrets from such a target is exactly what the service is there for.

A few of the spies implicated in the whole affair argued they had been left exposed by the politicians. ‘We got dumped on and we took it,’ is how one puts it. Their argument is that the intelligence was never the reason that Britain went to war. The decision was a political choice by a prime minister who settled on intelligence as the best means by which to sell that choice to parliament and the public. Their failing, these spies argue, was not to see the risk to the service’s reputation and get more political cover. ‘Blair promised to look after you and then dropped you in it,’ one said. ‘But he had never quite promised to do so nor quite dropped you in it directly. His DNA was never on the murder weapons.’ Secret services though are supposed to be smart enough to play these games and not get caught with their trousers down.

Dearlove, who continued to believe that war was the right decision, took a more nuanced line. ‘The policy was made to be over-dependent on the intelligence particularly in presenting the case in parliament, when in reality there were many others factors contributing to policy decisions,’ he told an audience a few years after the war. ‘I think it was feared those other factors would not carry the day with the parliamentary opponents of the war. This calculation turned out to have very undesirable consequences for the intelligence community. There were obvious risks involved, but at the time [they] appeared manageable.’119 It was the overemphasis on intelligence that was the mistake, in his eyes, and the failure to make more of the moral argument for removing Saddam. ‘I agreed with the policy. I still do. I still think it was the right decision to take at that time in the circumstances. But the reasons for going to war were not specifically intelligence based.’¹²⁰

One of the reasons that Blair and others made the decision for war in the first place, though, was because they believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The two sides – politicians and spies – were so closely conjoined in the run-up to war that separating them requires an almost impossibly delicate operation. Blair was taking a risk, utterly confident in his own judgement. Icarus-like, the service had flown a little too close to the sun, it was said by many. It was an analogy rejected by those at the top of MI6. ‘The Icarus metaphor is used time and again,’ argued the Arabist MI6 director who had observed Dearlove work so closely with the Prime Minister. ‘It has limited applicability because Tony Blair was not the sun and Dearlove was not a child with wax wings. They were consenting adults, wrestling with unprecedented policy riddles.’ Was there another way? ‘I would have done it differently. I believe in a Chief who stays south of the river and is not so easy to get hold of,’ he also said, before adding that this might not have been so easy to carry out in practice. ‘That’s my daydream. But that’s a … daydream. Real life … is different.’¹²¹

A few might have believed they had been left swinging by Number 10 but many more inside MI6 believed the organisation itself was to blame. Some simply acknowledged that their sources had been wrong. Others thought it was their own leadership who had left them exposed by getting too close to power. The unhappiness was palpable. During the Suez Crisis the official machinery of intelligence was largely ignored and bypassed; this time, in an attempt to avoid a similar fate, it had been sucked deep into the maelstrom. ‘The vehicle of WMD as an argument for the war was incapable of sustaining the weight put upon it, given that we didn’t have all the answers and we didn’t have the sources,’ reflected an MI6 director who had worried for the morale and integrity of his service.122 The impact on MI6’s reputation – and its self-perception – was calamitous. The use of intelligence to sell a war to the public might not have mattered much if it turned out to be true. But once it was proved to be wrong, it left the public, and especially those who had been persuaded by the intelligence, feeling bitter, not least towards the spies.

With the service still reeling, the appointment of John Scarlett as the new Chief was viewed with distinctly mixed feelings in some quarters. Dearlove, who was due for retirement, was well-known to be opposed and pushed his own number two forward for the job. A few others believed Scarlett was too much the quiet professional and lacked the vision to lead the service. The disquiet in some quarters at Scarlett’s appointment was expressed at staff forums. As one person remembers, it was strongest among the old-school ‘Tory backwoodsmen’ who thought a New Labour placeman getting the job was another sign of the service being subordinated to Downing Street and as a return favour for delivering the dossier. The response was that he was the best man for the job. One of the reasons Scarlett was appointed was that he was a traditionalist by instinct, a man who was seen as capable of restoring a focus on the core task of gathering intelligence. He was also seen as a hawk on Iraq’s weapons compared to some of the other candidates.

Two weeks before he left MI6 in the summer of 2004, Dearlove addressed staff in the Vauxhall Cross auditorium. Those who expected a fulsome apology would be disappointed. He gave a robust, even militant, defence of his approach. Don’t think you can keep away from Whitehall, he warned. Just because we were caught up in a controversial war does not mean the whole modernising approach was wrong. A couple of weeks before that address, he had been in Washington for a farewell dinner at the CIA on a hot summer’s evening. People who judge us have not done what we have done, he told the assembled spies with a nod to George Tenet, who would resign soon after. One CIA officer at the party thought the two spymasters looked ‘defeated’.¹²³ His supporters believe Dearlove had been taking MI6 in the right direction and had been the right man for the moment in the period after 9/11. It was only Iraq which blew the exercise off course. Others believed the direction itself was wrong, drawing the service too near to power.

On taking over, Scarlett knew he had to convince the sceptics and adopted a strategy of holding meetings and sandwich lunches with staff to listen to their concerns. Egged on by colleagues, a veteran asked at one of these whether Scarlett had any regrets over Iraq. Neither then, nor when asked publicly, would he explicitly say that he did.124 ‘It was a difficult time for the service obviously,’ he admitted in an interview. ‘The worry clearly at the time was that the reliability of our reporting had been brought into question … We had to carry on doing a good job, responding to the criticisms where you have to, put things right where it has been pointed out they’ve been wrong and over the passage of time the quality of your work will ensure that those questions move away.’¹²⁵

Scarlett was told by some staff that they wanted to keep their distance from policy, their fingers having been burnt by Iraq. A few who had been close to Dearlove worried that their careers were finished, but most of them stayed and adapted. They believed that, as time went on, Scarlett realised how much the service’s work had changed since his departure for the JIC before 9/11 and he began to restore the shift towards a more integrated approach with other services and other parts of Whitehall to cope with the challenges of terrorism and nuclear proliferation. The old Cold War world of gathering intelligence on static targets had largely but not totally passed away.

Scarlett also began edging the service once again into the public eye. The process had begun in the 1990s with avowal, and Dearlove had pushed the pace harder until the whole process was subsumed beneath the tidal wave of Iraq. With MI6’s reputation battered by Iraq and British intelligence as a whole deeply worried by allegations of complicity in torture, it was time to put aside a concern for maintaining the air of mystery. For its centenary in 2009, Scarlett went so far as being interviewed in his office, a Union Jack fluttering outside the window and a clock built by the founder of the service, Mansfield Cumming, tick-tocking steadily in the corner. A degree of openness was now necessary, but it had its limits, he explained. ‘What we brought out of the shadows rightly in my view is the fact that we exist when for the majority of my career we didn’t even admit the fact that Britain has a secret intelligence service … The role which we play in government … is also there for discussion; the kinds of people that we employ, the way in which we recruit our staff … But what we actually do, the operations we conduct, the particular intelligence we produce, the sources with whom we work, the people with whom we work, that remains secret. And those are the key secrets, the operational secrets, which have always remained secret and must remain secret.’ Scarlett’s traditionalism still shone through in some areas, particularly a deep-seated belief in old-fashioned patriotism. ‘If you wish to serve your country, and many people do, then this is a pretty good way of doing it,’ he said. Along with the armed services, the intelligence service was one of the few places where patriotism was still talked about openly in contrast to the more modern vogue for ‘shared values’ and the like. Spies, like soldiers it seems, are asked to do difficult things for the country that others might shy away from and so still need that deep-seated emotional sense of national interest and working for the Crown.126

At other times, the failure over Iraq might have raised questions about what the service was really for, but the continued threat from international terrorism provided an answer. A third of MI6’s work focused on the new world of terrorism. But there would have been offices in Vauxhall Cross whose work would have been familiar to Shergy as well as to Scarlett. Russians talk about a ‘third round’ in the duel between the two countries (the first being MI6’s ‘war’ against the Bolsheviks from 1917, the second being the Cold War) and continue to see MI6 as bent on subverting their country. The Russians for their part continue to try and penetrate Britain, never with quite the success of Lyubimov’s time, but still with plenty of vigour. ‘Since the end of the Cold War we have seen no decrease in the numbers of undeclared Russian intelligence officers in the UK at the Russian Embassy and associated organisations conducting covert activity in this country,’ Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, announced in November 2007. Between a third and a half of staff at the Russian Embassy in London are thought to have some kind of intelligence role.

The Russians’ prime target remains government and military secrets but also energy, bio-tech and high-tech industries. Their intelligence officers continue to look for individuals with access and some frailty or vulnerability. None will share Philby’s motivation. ‘Ideology doesn’t wash any more. It’s the far more human motivations,’ a present-day spy-hunter explains – usually money, sometimes ego, occasionally blackmail. Targets will be patiently cultivated and first asked to pass something innocuous like a trade magazine before the pressure is increased. Meetings will be arranged in person and not by phone, all straight off the pages of the 1960s warning booklet ‘Their Trade is Treachery’. Sensitive agents will not be run by diplomats but met abroad or by visiting officers using the old le Carré era techniques of brush contacts and dead-letter drops. The illegals still ply their trade, travelling the world on a stack of false passports with no diplomatic cover to protect them. In 2010, a large network of illegals run by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, was rolled up in the United States including one member, Anna Chapman, who had previously lived in London. MI5’s concentration on its new core mission of counter-terrorism meant it had fewer resources than it used to have to find out what exactly she had been doing. By 2008, it was spending only a paltry 3.5 per cent of its budget on trying to catch all the Russian (and other) spies running around Britain, many of whom target dissidents who have made London their home.127 The murder, using polonium-210, of a former officer of the FSB (Russia’s domestic security service) Alexander Litvinenko, who had been on the MI6 payroll at one point, was a reminder of old methods, but the investigation into his death also revealed how far the KGB’s successor had become intertwined with business and criminality, making it hard to know who exactly it was working for at times.

The ‘compromising situations’ of old were still in play, with some new twists. In the summer of 2009, the US Ambassador in Moscow lodged a formal protest about a covertly filmed video showing one of his diplomats on a darkened Moscow street, then alone in his underwear in a hotel room. The video then cuts to the same room with the lights dimmed and with two people apparently having sex in the near-dark. The individual concerned was adamant it was a fake and experts in Washington agreed. A month earlier, another video had surfaced showing a British diplomat caught in flagrante with two blonde women while drinking champagne. That diplomat failed to deny anything and promptly resigned. The speculation was that he had turned down an approach from the Russians.

It would be naive to think the traffic was all one way. The Russians cite the 2006 discovery of an MI6 ‘spy rock’ in a Moscow park containing a secret transmitter. An agent would walk past and press a button on a hand-held electronic device to transfer information. A British intelligence officer could later walk past with his own device and upload data. The Russians said that this was a sign that the old enemy had not lost its appetite. And so, alongside all the talk about collective security and globalisation, the old national games of power politics and spying persist. ‘The Cold War is long over,’ Scarlett said in 2009 with a hint of exasperation. ‘And it is important for everybody to take a realistic view of what the other side is doing.’128 In Moscow, George Blake, living in his four-bedroom flat, still lectured to new recruits of Russia’s intelligence services. He had finally developed a taste for vodka but conceded that life in the Soviet Union had ‘little to do with the idealised Communist society that I had dreamed of’. There were no regrets though. ‘I am 87 years old and to tell you the truth, it is no longer of particular importance to me whether my motivations are generally understood or not,’ he said defiantly when asked to reflect on how it had all begun.¹²⁹

At the end of 2009, Scarlett passed his green-inked pen to John Sawers. Sawers had joined MI6 at the start of his career but opted early to switch to the regular Foreign Office; he rose fast through senior positions there and in Number 10 and as ambassador to the United Nations. In MI6 terms he was an outsider. For decades, one of the prime responsibilities of a chief during his tenure was ‘succession planning’ to prevent an outsider being brought in to take over the club. Past chiefs had even delayed retirement in order to make sure a crown prince could be groomed. MI6 has a strong sense of its own culture and traditions and of being somehow different. It was felt that outsiders did not understand the rules and that their appointment sent the wrong signal. But Sawers’s arrival was a sign that the rest of government wanted to continue to draw MI6 into the mainstream. Sawers is smooth, in the Foreign Office manner, and is skilled in the ways of Whitehall and relaxed in the public eye. Given the choice between being a Moscow Man and a Camel Driver, he may opt for the latter description, perhaps reflecting a career spent in part in the Middle East, including Cairo and Baghdad, but also exhibiting a desire to do things rather than just to collect intelligence quietly and build up the files.

Sawers’s vision, befitting his background, was for a service more closely aligned with Whitehall. In the old days, it is said, the spies were like labradors dropping their bones of intelligence at the master’s feet and asking what they should do next. Now ‘customers’ in Whitehall want more than just intelligence and to be informed of a problem. They want to know what can be done to deal with it. It is about having impact, not just offering intelligence. It is not just about saying ‘Yemen is a risk’ but offering help to build up the capacity of the Yemeni government to deal with the problem. It is not just about saying ‘Iran is this close to a nuclear weapon’ but offering a way of slowing it down, perhaps by sabotaging some of its centrifuges which spin to enrich uranium (strangely, about half of them were breaking down in 2009, although a number of intelligence agencies might privately like to take the credit). Secret intelligence, Sawers explained, is ‘information that gives us new opportunities for action’.130

Sawers also believed that restoring reputation and public confidence as well as internal morale was a first-order priority. He found a climate of doubt among the public, unsure of the service’s efficacy and ethics, which in turn risked putting a brake on its work. Inside, he found staff still nursing their wounds. ‘Put two officers in a room together and the conversation quickly turns to Iraq,’ says one of his officers, although those two people will rarely agree on exactly what went wrong. An undercurrent of anger still flowed beneath the calm surface.

‘The most draining aspect of my job is reading, every day, intelligence reports describing the plotting of terrorists who are bent on maiming and murdering people in this country,’ Sawers said in his debut speech (and the first by a chief to be televised).¹³¹ Terrorism and proliferation may top the agenda but the notion of national security has now moved beyond the old ideas of preserving and protecting the state to encompass broader notions of cyber security and human security. Should an intelligence service be looking at banking crises or whether another country is trying secretly to evade its responsibilities under some future treaty to prevent climate change? In an era in which the post-9/11 year-on-year budget increases were becoming a memory, showing that intelligence had concrete value became a priority again, as it had done in the early 1990s. The threats were unpredictable and corrosive, Sawers warned. Economic intelligence returned to the agenda. If the taxpayer could be shown to have saved money through the service providing intelligence on threats to the financial system, then that would keep Treasury wolves at bay.

Afghanistan had also become a dominant focus for MI6, one which some feared risked tilting the balance of its culture too far. MI6 was criticised in some quarters for giving insufficient warning of what lay in store for the pitifully small force Britain sent to Helmand in 2006. The province had been quiet only because there had been no foreigners there before and it was quickly evident that narcotics, corruption and the insurgency offered a potent witches’ brew. In the 1980s, the covert war that Gerry Warner had initiated in Peshawar had been a sideshow to the bigger war against the Soviet Union; by Sawers’s time, support for military operations had become a dominant strain of work in which enormous resources were invested. This was not the world of long-term, patient agent handling but of quickly providing real-time tactical intelligence to the troops out in the muddy fields and dirt compounds. Human sources still needed to be recruited, but the security situation was so tight that different forms of tradecraft had to be used. There were also clandestine, back-channel talks with Taliban commanders to try and bribe or persuade those considered vulnerable to leave the fight, a move exposed when President Karzai angrily expelled two European officials for working with MI6 on a deal that he disliked and when it was claimed that MI6 had managed to facilitate the travel to Kabul for talks of a top Taliban leader who turned out to be a grocer from Quetta. There would be worry in some quarters that it would be harder later to switch away from such a large, static target and focus on new, emerging threats which could suddenly crop up elsewhere, as well as on more traditional targets like Russia and China which would require less rough-and-ready fieldwork and more of the old Moscow Rules.

There are still people doing dangerous things and taking risks, but when Sawers goes overseas to visit officers one of the first questions his staff ask is ‘How do I know in dealing with terrorism I won’t one day be hauled before the courts back home?’ This is a question that would have been unimaginable in the days of Anthony Cavendish and Daphne Park. The answer to the question is that everything with the slightest element of risk is now signed off by the Foreign Secretary or other officials. A typical authorisation begins by noting the specific JIC requirement for intelligence that will be served by an operation before going into the details of how that operation will be undertaken and ends with a description of the consequences if it all goes wrong. The threshold for those authorisations has lowered so much that now there are about 500 authorisations a year compared to fifty in the 1990s. This would have been a shock to George Kennedy Young and his Robber Barons who would have laughed the idea out of the Broadway bar. The primary reason is the legacy of the years after 9/11 and the accusations of complicity in torture. ‘Torture is illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ Sawers said. ‘If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.’ It was a message designed not just to draw a line publicly under the past but also to signal to ministers that they had to understand what their decisions would mean in practice.

There are those who say that what the service has lost in recent years is that air of mystique, the élan and sense of being different and perhaps even a touch dangerous. Without this, ‘it will look just like a sub-committee of the Department of Work and Pensions’, fears one former officer with a wistful look in his eyes. There are those who wish to see exactly this outcome. ‘I don’t believe in intelligence any more than I believe in little green men,’ Rodric Braithwaite, former Ambassador and JIC Chair, argues. ‘It is much better to look at intelligence as if it were another branch of government like the Inland Revenue doing a job which has to be done and is necessary but not particularly glamorous and which goes wrong from time to time – just like the Inland Revenue.’132 Old-time spies shiver at such thoughts.

Sawers inherited a service operating in more than a hundred countries and still aspiring, despite the years of Empire being long gone, to have a global reach. That was becoming harder, the focus on terrorism having made coverage patchy even in areas like Daphne Park’s old hunting ground of Africa.¹³³ But there are only a handful of secret services which aggressively practise the recruitment and running of human sources around the world – the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the French and the British. Others make do with analysing what they get from liaison partners and dealing with the odd defector and the like. But the game is also changing. The dividing line between technical collection and human collection is increasingly blurred thanks to cyber-techniques and complex eavesdropping. MI6 has evolved into a modern, professional bureaucracy integrated with other departments and closer to policy-making, focused on ‘knowledge management’. But beneath the shiny new exterior, the world of Daphne Park and Vienna, of Wynne and Penkovsky, of Philby and Shergy is still there if you look hard enough. Somewhere there is the agent and his handler alone in the room wondering if each can trust the other.