London, an evening in the mid-1990s.
The MI6 officer said he would be downstairs at The Coal Hole pub near the Savoy Hotel in central London. When I arrived, the officer glanced casually around the room, then carefully took out a document from a brown envelope.
It was my first face-to-face contact in London with an MI6 officer tasked specifically with communicating, ever so gingerly, with journalists. The document turned out to be a thirty-nine-page summary of the history of ‘Secret Operations’ from shortly before the 1789 French Revolution to 1909, the year MI6 was established. That was more than eighty years before our meeting in the Coal Hole.
For our next rendezvous, he went upmarket. He asked me to join him for a drink at the American Bar at the Savoy. That may be how MI6 officers arranged their first contacts with a prospective foreign agent, I thought, though here it was about sizing up a British journalist whose job was to write articles about his agency for publication.
At about the same time, the MI5 officer whose task was to liaise with journalists chose lunch at Rules for our first meeting. Established in 1798, it describes itself as London’s oldest restaurant ‘serving classic British food (especially game) in Edwardian surrounds’. It has appeared in novels by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and John Le Carré, among others.
I turned up on time; the MI5 officer was already ensconced, with his back to the wall, facing the room and looking rather nervous. His anxiety seemed to me rather curious at the time. He was an experienced spy, as were all the MI5 and MI6 officers I met who were responsible for liaising with the journalists. They had all run agents and undertaken dangerous missions, especially in Northern Ireland.
The only explanation for his anxiety that I could think of was that dealing with journalists was an altogether novel experiment, and for this reason alone risky. It had been imposed on him by his bosses in an attempt to give the security and intelligence agencies a better press. He was unsure about how I would respond to MI5’s overture. I was on my guard.
There had been a long tradition of journalists willingly cooperating with the security and intelligence, in particular with MI6 in the Cold War. David Astor, the editor of the Observer, appointed Philby the newspaper’s Beirut correspondent after a plea from MI6 to help after the spy was dismissed following Burgess and Maclean’s escape. In the 1930s, Philby joined the Times at the suggestion of his Russian handler, Arnold Deutsch, and his reporting on Franco’s national side during the Spanish Civil War was praised by his editors. Three distinguished Observer foreign correspondents had close links with British intelligence – Mark Frankland left MI6 to join the newspaper, Gavin Young was an MI6 officer for a time and Edward Crankshaw was a wartime MI6 officer. When after the war he was appointed the Observer’s man in Moscow, Crankshaw used the British embassy as a base. He regarded the British ambassador, Sir Patrick Reilly, ‘as a friend’ for whom he filed, among other pieces, a 2,000-word memorandum on Burgess (who had once done a stint as a sub-editor on the Times).
Sefton Delmer, the Daily Express correspondent in Berlin before the war, spied for MI6. Ian Fleming worked for the Times before joining naval intelligence during the war. He returned to journalism becoming foreign managing editor at the Sunday Times. The Observer’s Robert McCrum later commented: ‘In a world of nods and winks across Whitehall and St James’s, the line between the fourth estate and the defence of the realm was indistinct. An extraordinary amount of British journalism was still conducted in London’s clubland’.
I have mentioned how I used to meet former MI6 officers, notably the ‘Arabist’ gang, at the Travellers Club. Once or twice, an MI6 officer asked me to lunch at the Travellers or the neighbouring Reform Club in Pall Mall. But a new generation of serving MI5 and MI6 officers avoided clubland and cultivated contacts in more discreet surroundings.
My colleague, the Guardian and Observer journalist, Ed Vulliamy, recalled how he was summoned to hear ‘information’ gathered by British spooks about the war in Bosnia. MI6 was peddling an agenda: an apparent attempt, on behalf of the FO, to prevent NATO or the UN from intervening to stop Serbia’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims. Ed wrote: ‘British “UN officials” or “diplomatic sources” – usually coy – suddenly offered eager briefings to obfuscate that which was simple: the carnage that was taking place at the time in Sarajevo’s marketplace and bread queue. Their "information" was that the Muslim-led government was massacring its own people in Sarajevo to win sympathy and ultimately help from outside. Sarajevo’s defenders were dumb with disbelief; if there was any evidence for this satanic notion, the spooks never produced it.’1
The MI6 scheme worked beautifully, Ed reported. ‘The allegation – off the record, on the QT, hush-hush, old boy – became a clamour, started by the London Independent, and appearing in British, then American, then German and other papers.’
That year, 1998, I discovered that articles written by an alleged MI6 officer under a false name were published in The Spectator magazine while Dominic Lawson was editor. The articles, which included a bitter attack on British journalists, were written under a Sarajevo dateline under the name of Kenneth Roberts, during the civil war in Bosnia. The Spectator said the author’s name ‘has been changed at his request’.2 Roberts was described in the magazine as having ‘been working for the UN in Bosnia for over a year’.
Roberts was later identified in the media, including the British Journalism Review, as Keith Craig, an MI6 officer.3
When I pointed this out to Lawson, he told me: ‘I have no means of knowing if you are right and, if you are, it is news to me.’ There is no suggestion that Lawson knew either that Roberts was a pseudonym or that Roberts was an MI6 officer.
An unpublished draft in the National Archives at Kew of an official history of the D Notice Committee, which runs a system of voluntary self-censorship in cooperation with the media (see further), is redacted. However, one passage says that it was alleged in Parliament that Lawson was ‘on the SIS [MI6] payroll’, adding that Lawson ‘denied he himself had ever been an SIS agent.’
The articles appeared to be part of an attempt by MI6 to influence public opinion during the Bosnian crisis by suggesting that atrocities were being carried out by all sides – and not just Bosnian Serb troops. Two articles under the name of Kenneth Roberts were published in early 1994 – at the height of the civil war. In one article, under the headline ‘Salving Consciences in Hampstead’, Roberts argued that the UN ‘should pull out now’. A month later, in March 1994, Roberts wrote a second article under the heading, ‘Glamour Without Responsibility’.
Referring to Kate Adie, one of the BBC’s most respected foreign correspondents, the author stated: ‘The power of the modern journalist, especially the television journalist, is nowhere more apparent than in Bosnia.’ Roberts added: ‘Emotion rather than political or practical interest drives the public opinion that steels Western governments to send troops. … Unlike those governments, the press has no proper accountability for the consequences of its actions.’ In an aside rich in irony, The Spectator noted: ‘Kenneth Roberts, who works with the UN forces in Bosnia, says that journalists there should be held accountable for their actions.’
Roberts referred to two particularly controversial incidents during the Bosnian war: the attack on a bread queue in Sarajevo in 1992 and the attack on a Sarajevo market in 1994. ‘For some time now’, he told Spectator readers, ‘there have been UN mutterings about the Muslims shelling their own people in bread queues or markets.’ Journalists were accused of failing to investigate claims by the Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, later convicted of war crimes, that the sixty-six deaths at the market were in fact due to a Muslim attack.
The suggestion was that the Muslims had fired on their own people to provoke NATO into taking tougher action against the Serbs.
Officers from MI6 and intelligence agencies of other countries shared information with the UN. The Spectator articles were written at a time the British government, concerned about a Muslim backlash in Bosnia, believed Serbia was a force for stability in the region and when UN commanders were opposed to Western air strikes, arguing they would make it impossible to carry out humanitarian missions.
Both the UN and the Tory government in Britain were desperate to counter reports in the British and US media of attacks on civilians by Bosnian Serbs. Atrocities, they insisted, were being carried out by all sides, by Muslims and Croats as well as Serbs. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, was deeply concerned about the prospect of an independent Bosnia becoming ‘the first Muslim state in Europe’.
In an article entitled ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, journalist’, my Guardian colleague, David Leigh, described different sorts of manipulation, the most insidious of which was the way intelligence agencies planted stories on willing journalists who made no mention of their source in their reports. Leigh referred to a secret information operations section in the security and intelligence agencies called ‘I/Ops’ and an MI6-inspired article alleging that
Colonel Gaddafi’s son was connected to a currency counterfeiting plan (this was at a time Gaddafi was considered an enemy of Britain).4 ‘I/Ops’ stood for Information/Operations, covert measures designed to influence journalists.
MI6 had set up its own publications during the Cold War. The magazine, Flamingo, targeted African and West Indian communities, feeding them with anti-Communist propaganda.5 MI6 jointly sponsored with the CIA the literary magazine Encounter, which the poet Stephen Spender helped to found. Spender resigned when the magazine’s links to the CIA and MI6 was exposed in 1967.
Attlee’s post-war Labour government established an Information Research Department (commonly known as the IRD) to spread anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. It fed material to journalists well aware of the origin as well as the jejune and to those who did not bother to ask.
One file in the IRD archives, dated March 1966, showed how MI5 told the Cabinet Office it had been given ‘suitable material by our friends (a reference to MI6) from their student contacts’. The IRD, it added, ‘are ready to help place articles in newspapers which are widely read by students in particular – the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Observer and Sunday Times’.
Archives released thirty years later, in 1996, revealed that George Orwell warned the IRD about writers whom he regarded as fellow travellers. The IRD became increasingly aggressive, bullying the BBC over its struggles to defend the World Service whose reputation depended precisely on its independence from government. The IRD was finally disbanded by David Owen when he was appointed foreign secretary in 1977. It was inimical, he said, to Britain’s ‘national interest’.
Similar operations have been revived as part of the government’s attempt to counter the radicalization of British Muslims. GCHQ has also run an ‘information ops (influence or disruption)’ programme, intended to achieve ‘the 4D’s: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive.’6
The Soviet Union of course mounted extensive propaganda campaigns, with varying degrees of sophistication, directed at the West as well as developing countries in Africa and throughout the world. At least one, and sometimes more, Russians journalists posted in major capital cities worked for the KGB, directly or indirectly. Mounting their own undeclared and secret campaigns of their own, they made it harder for Western democracies to claim they had clean hands. Some British journalists may have done the KGB’s bidding, wittingly or not. But British journalists and writers muddying the waters by going along with MI6 or MI5 disinformation schemes did not help.
One particular infamous case continued for many years.
Colin Wallace, an information officer based at the British army headquarters in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, blew the whistle on a dirty tricks campaign involving MI5 and the MoD, code-named Clockwork Orange. It involved the planting of hoax bombs, fake CIA identity cards, the smearing of Edward Heath and leading Labour and Liberal politicians, and establishing covert links with ‘loyalist’ paramilitaries. Among the notes Wallace drew up in 1974 was a list of politicians under the heading ‘vulnerabilities’, and three columns marked, ‘finance’, ‘moral’ and ‘political’. Against Harold Wilson’s name, there was a tick under each column: for Heath, a tick under ‘moral’ and political’; and under Ian Paisley, ‘finance’ and ‘moral’.
Labour was the chief target of the smear campaign. A forged document from the ‘American Congress for Irish Freedom’ was purportedly sent to Merlyn Rees, then Northern Ireland Secretary, thanking him for his ‘generous donation on behalf of the British Labour Party for the Occupied Six Counties of Ireland’. A genuine leaflet advertising a demonstration to commemorate Bloody Sunday added the names of Rees, Tony Benn and David Owen. Intriguingly, shortly after he left his job, Wallace was approached by Airey Neave, one of Thatcher’s closest associates, later killed by a car bomb at the House of Commons, about a forged document entitled ‘Ulster – a State of Subversion’, purporting to be an analysis of Soviet influence in the Labour Party. It alleged that at least twenty Labour MPs were active Communists. Neave wrote to Wallace: ‘I read your material with great interest and wonder if it could be updated.’
Wallace blew the whistle after he was dismissed for leaking a restricted document to Robert Fisk, then the Times correspondent based in Belfast. He had apparently adopted a rather too cavalier approach to his job. An embarrassed MoD immediately turned on Wallace, accusing him of being a ‘Walter Mitty’ figure. He was subsequently framed, charged and convicted of manslaughter, a conviction that was later quashed.
It was in this murky world in Northern Ireland, where the security and intelligence agencies, the police and the army engaged in bitter and dangerous rivalry, that Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6 appointed by Thatcher in 1979 to coordinate security in Northern Ireland in the wake of the fatal attack that year on Lord Mountbatten and other bloody IRA attacks, was smeared by elements of the security services as a homosexual involved in rough trade. A story planted in the media by elements of the security services claimed Oldfield had spent an afternoon in a pub on the outskirts of Belfast, followed a man into the toilets and propositioned him for sex. The story seemed implausible, if only because Oldfield was always accompanied by police special branch bodyguards. A victim of out-of-control agencies he had tried to rein in, he was summoned back to London and hung out to dry. He died of cancer soon afterwards.
I had to be on my guard as MI5 and MI6, and later GCHQ, decided to develop contacts with the editors and the security and defence correspondents of national newspapers and broadcasters. The Guardian was a special potential catch for them, given its left-of-centre editorial line and a readership they would be delighted to catch. I have mentioned that the intelligence agencies had no official spokesperson. It was something I welcomed for the selfish reason that it meant I could not share my ‘point of contact’ in MI5 and the other agencies with my Guardian colleagues. I was in a ‘privileged position’ – an official spokesperson available to all-comers would be more restricted in what s/he could say than a senior officer whose role was to contact chosen journalists and editors more discreetly.
It was a relationship based on off-the-record, and therefore deniable, discussions. It was based on trust, a principle not easily associated with journalism. But I believed we had the upper hand. If MI5, MI6 or GCHQ deceived us, we would know we could not trust them. That was not in their interest. Equally, if they refused to guide us at all about the nature of a particular terror plot or the implications of a particular incident, then we could merely speculate, or get more information elsewhere, often and most easily from US sources. This view was not shared by all British journalists.
On a number of occasions, I was invited with a small group of journalists to unattributable briefings at MI5’s headquarters in Thames House on Millbank, not far from the Houses of Parliament, and to MI6’s HQ, Vauxhall Cross, on the south bank of the Thames opposite Tate Britain. The security arrangements were elaborate even though we were known personally to our hosts. We were asked, ever so politely, to hand in our mobile phones, empty our pockets and pass through single-person enclosed cabins that identified suspicious items.
The interior of Thames House was much lighter and much more modern than the grey exterior of the Edwardian block suggested. The interior of Vauxhall Cross is much duller – with the exception of the Chief’s dining room overlooking the river – than its extravagant exterior suggests. Inside, the corridors and offices are surprisingly conventional. Doors that were open revealed bland, simple rooms with desks and desktop computers. But behind this surprisingly bland interior that belied the building’s eye-catching exterior lay a certain nervousness. I was told that after the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Bond films with shots of attacks on Vauxhall Cross, some MI6 officers revealed an (unprofessional) anxiety – ducked, metaphorically – when helicopters flew over to their port in nearby Battersea.
On one occasion, we were greeted by a senior MI6 officer accompanied by a specialist sitting at a round table to discuss Afghanistan. They were clearly frustrated at the failure by the NATO-led coalition to attract hearts and minds, despite the attempts to bribe war lords and tribal leaders. There was little sense of excitement or frisson about being in a room with people who spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money trying to persuade warlords and other potential influential or powerful individuals to fight or spy for Britain and keep on doing so.
On another occasion, at the time of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, I went to Vauxhall Cross for a background briefing I had sought. I went through the same procedure as I had before – after being questioned why I wanted to enter the building. I was directed to a scanning machine and reception area where I was asked to hand over my mobile phone. I was asked to wait for an escort. It was all very polite. Then I was summoned to the main entrance. I was directed to a scanning booth whose door opened after I touched an individual plastic pass on to a pad. I was asked to wait until the officer chosen to see me arrived. He directed me to a small room just big enough for a round table and two chairs. This was the procedure, I thought, for one-to-one interviews, ensuring that the visitor was not entirely welcome, that he or she was being indulged by busy spymasters and intelligence analysts for a very limited time. It was very different to the occasions when I was one of a group of journalists and the invited guest of ‘C’ or an MI6 director anxious to get their message across.
My one-to-one ‘Arab Spring’ briefing, with one of MI6’s Middle East experts – soon to be promoted to a senior security position in the Cabinet Office – was short but illuminating.
I asked about the likely impact and consequences of the popular protests in Middle East capitals. The clear message was that given the strength of authoritarian governments in the region and their security apparatus – one was compared by Western intelligence agencies to ‘titanium’ – it would all end in tears. It was a correct assumption. This time MI6 intelligence was correct. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, had been toppled, only to be replaced after a brief interregnum by the Muslim Brotherhood with the hard-line head of the armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
These were civilized discussions. One went away understanding the challenges MI6 officers faced, but did not have to altogether sympathize with them just because they were being pretty open. The important thing for us journalists was mutual trust – a relationship that led to more openness, less secrecy. Up to a point.
A few days later, after one briefing, I contributed to an article for the Guardian and referred to the views of ‘Western intelligence sources’. An MI6 officer responsible for protecting the agency from leaks and at the same time liaising with journalists was furious. He angrily summoned me with a colleague to a meeting at the Crowne Plaza hotel, on the south bank of the Thames not far from Vauxhall Cross. We pointed out that the New York Times that very day had written a similar article to ours on the same subject, but with much more specific information all attributed to ‘Western intelligence sources’. The MI6 man, whose career did not progress, was suitably silenced.
Before the confrontation at the Crowne Plaza hotel, I phoned a Guardian colleague who was in Jordan explaining how the MI6 officer had hit the roof over our story and had summoned us to a meeting. The following day, an MI6 officer called, warning me not to talk about sensitive matters or refer to MI6 on phone calls to the Middle East. Our conversation had clearly been intercepted.
I had civilized briefings with MI5 officers, though these became rarer. MI5 was more on the defensive than MI6 because of the increasing number of terrorist attacks on British soil. MI6 operated abroad, further away from prying eyes and less immediately responsible for Britain’s security. There were a few, self-confident MI5 officers prepared to be open with journalists they grew to trust. One was Eliza (later Baroness) Manningham-Buller. She was a prime example of how an individual could influence my perception of MI5, albeit temporarily. Unfortunately for MI5, she was succeeded by Jonathan Evans, as reserved as Manningham-Buller was extrovert, and someone who as far as I was concerned undid much of the good work achieved by his predecessors, including both Stella Rimington and Stephen Lander. Across the river at Vauxhall Cross, Sir John Sawers wanted to open up MI6, but he soon fell victim to the revelations about his agency’s previous collusion in the abduction of terror suspects who were secretly detained, and in some cases tortured.
I have mentioned that the view that the security and intelligence agencies needed us in the media was not shared by all of my colleagues. Too many journalists reporting on the activities of the agencies remain on the defensive, too ready to believe they have to rely on the goodwill of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, and the official spokespeople of the agencies’ sponsoring departments, the Home Office and the FO. Reporting on Britain’s armed forces is much more straightforward than covering the spooks.7 Britain’s soldiers, sailors and air force personnel routinely score a high rating in opinion polls. In most controversies, the default position of the media, and especially the tabloid press, is to empathize with the armed forces, in particular squaddies, the lower ranks. In disputes with other Whitehall departments, the Treasury in particular, the military – though not civil servants in the MoD – are overwhelmingly supported by the media. Compared to civil servants and ministers, the military in my experience are also relatively honest and straightforward. And the lower you go down the food chain, the more open and direct they tend to be. Members of the armed forces have been a refreshing counterforce to the dissembling and secretiveness of Whitehall.
The military also delight in using and manipulating the media, passing self-serving stories to The Sun or The Telegraph in particular. Th e Sun is the squaddies’ favourite; The Telegraph is most popular in the officers’ messes. However, the military are often caught between wanting to blow their own trumpet and avoid embarrassing their political masters.
The first war I covered after I left Brussels and joined the Guardian’s office in London was the 1982 Falklands conflict. The Argentinian invasion of the islands was a gift horse for the Royal Navy, coming at a time the defence secretary, John Nott, was pushing through heavy cuts in its budget. They included the withdrawal from the South Atlantic of HMS Endurance, a survey ship used for spying on what the Argentinians were up to. The plan to withdraw Endurance was interpreted in Buenos Aires as a signal that Britain was no longer seriously interested in the Falklands.
As the British task force was on its way to evict the Argentinian forces from the islands, we soon became the victim of a classic, misleading, Whitehall briefing. The British counter-invasion would be nothing like the D-Day Normandy landings of 1944, briefed the top MoD official, Sir Frank Cooper. Defence correspondents faithfully recorded his comments which turned out to be thoroughly misleading. British forces established a beachhead at San Carlos in an operation echoing the Normandy landings.
Journalists covering the Falkands conflict were almost entirely dependent on MoD censors. They were thousands of miles away, cut off from independent means of communications. It was before the age of mobile phones and the internet. The MoD had asked editors of all main newspapers and broadcasters to name a correspondent who would be embedded with the British forces (the BBC had two: one for radio, the other for television). Once in the Falklands, they would send their copy via official minders to the MoD in London where the reports would be vetted. I was based in London, arguing with the censors over the unjustified suppression of information.
There were disputes among journalists covering the conflict. While Max Hastings of the London Evening Standard famously entered Port Stanley ahead of British troops, the Guardian’s Gareth Parry was marooned on an ammunition ship extremely vulnerable to Argentine air strikes. This just might have been the result of bad luck rather than a deliberate ploy by the MoD.
Hugh McManners, a Special Forces officer in the Falklands war, later accused the MoD of treating the media as an enemy to be thwarted.8 Embarrassing incidents, including friendly fire and the circumstances surrounding a fatal helicopter crash, were kept under wraps.
McManners described how he asked David Ramsbotham (the officer in charge of vetting copy in London during the Falklands conflict, later promoted to the rank of General) if he could write a book despite the official ban. ‘If only you would’, replied Ramsbotham. ‘I’d love to see something by a soldier to counter all these books being rushed out by the journalists. … Give it to me and I will get it cleared.’
The lengths to which ministers took to cover up the movements of the Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano, sunk by the submarine HMS Conqueror with the loss of 323 lives prompted MoD official Clive Ponting to leak the cruiser’s movements to the Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, leading to a celebrated official secrets case. The Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands the moment it was attacked by the Conqueror’s torpedoes, though it was still regarded as a potential threat. The Sun famously celebrated the sinking with the headline, ‘GOTCHA’, and dismissed peace proposals with such headlines as ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA’.
Some journalists on the front line adopted ways to get round the censors. The BBC’s Brian Hanrahan reported: ‘I’m not allowed to say how many planes joined the raid, but I counted them all out, and I counted them all back.’ Presumably the Argentinians would have been the first to tell the British public if they had shot down a British Harrier. If their claims were false, the MoD would have said so. Perhaps the MoD did not think anyone would believe it.
While the military were controlling the media on the islands, the MoD tried to avoid accusations that it was exaggerating successes or minimizing defeats through the deadpan utterances of its official spokesman. Ian Macdonald was brought in at the last minute after the ministry’s chief press officer at the time fell ill. (This was the very same Macdonald who, in his role responsible for promoting British arms exports, was later to tell the Scott inquiry: ‘Truth is a very difficult concept’.)
The attitude of MoD officials was eloquently reflected in Sir Lawrence Freedman’s official history of the Falklands conflict. ‘The crassest example of censorship cited’, he wrote, ‘was of a military PR officer, faced with the sentence “Only the weather can hold us back now”, and aware that the weather had been identified as an operational factor, deleted it and suggested as a substitute “politicians”’.9
A perceived need for a propaganda victory to boost morale led to the attack on Goose Green, with the deaths of up to fifty-five Argentinian and eighteen British troops. The Battle of Goose Green, the first major land engagement of the Falklands war, was dictated by public and political pressure rather than military necessity, Freedman makes clear. British troops had been diverted to Goose Green under pressure from London and despite serious misgivings expressed by their commander, Brigadier Julian Thompson. The government was impatient for a successful operation after a week in May 1982 when Argentinian aircraft attacked a number of British warships. ‘Delay’, Freedman noted, ‘would add to the political risks – a decline in support at home … and pressure for a ceasefire internationally, which could leave Britain in occupation of nothing more than a patch of the Falklands.’10
The 1991 Gulf War following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait (itself a consequence, partly at least, of poor intelligence and mixed messages) was swift, though forty-seven British troops were killed in the conflict. The MoD revelled in the publicity the conflict gave to the armed forces, including the tanks of the Desert Rats and frontline reports of the British media, the BBC’s Kate Adie among them.
That conflict was not free from controversy either. Hundreds of fleeing Iraqi troops and civilians were attacked by US-led coalition aircraft in what became known as a ‘shooting gallery on the Highway of Death’. In the United States, editors backed away from publishing a graphic photograph of the charred head of an Iraqi burnt alive as he was trying to get out of his truck. In Britain, the photo was printed on the front page of the Observer.
General Sir Peter de la Billière, a British commander during the conflict and former head of Britain’s Special Forces, subsequently wrote a memoir, Storm Command,11 in which he trumpeted the exploits of SAS troops. The MoD and the director of Special Forces, which had been engaged in an uphill struggle to impose a ban on publishing anything at all about the SAS, were furious, so much so that de la Billière resigned his position as chairman of the SAS regimental association. Officials in the MoD accused him of encouraging a spate of books by former SAS soldiers who took the line if that if de la Billière could write about their exploits, then so could they. The first and most successful of a series of books was Bravo Two Zero 12 by an SAS soldier using the pseudonym, Andy McNab. It quickly became a bestseller. Still the SAS hierarchy continued to impose its official blanket ban on first-hand accounts by special forces soldiers.
Journalists, notably the Guardian’s Martin Woollacott, helped to persuade Britain and the United States to operate a ‘no-fly zone’ to protect the Kurds in the mountains of northern Iraq.
The air strikes were justified on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was in breach of his post-1991 Gulf War disarmament obligations. While the Kurds were protected, beneficiaries of the media reports, Saddam remained free to attack the forgotten Marsh Arabs. The ‘no-fly zone’ there covered only fixed wing aircraft. Saddam’s helicopters fired on the largely Shia population of southern Iraq at will. The legality of the US-UK bombing campaign, later described as a useful ‘softening up’ operations prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, was dubious, an early manifestation of how the distinction between peace and war was becoming blurred.
The media was more decisive in what was to be NATO’s first armed conflict. War between Croatia and Serbia following the break-up of Yugoslavia left the Serbs in control of about a third of Croatia’s territory. ‘The propaganda war was won decisively by the Croats as pictures of the Serb and Montenegrin bombardment and shelling of Vukovar and Dubrovnik filled television screens and brought to the attention of western public opinion the reality of a major war on European soil for the first time since the end of the Second World War’, noted Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain’s former ambassador to Belgrade. The FO did not release Conversations with Milosevic, Roberts’ observations on the conflict, for publication until 2016.13
Graphic television reports of the victims of Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing, ridding Kosovars and ethnic Albanians from Serbia, aroused public opinion throughout the West. The British and other Western governments hesitated, demonstrating their pro-Serb bias. As we have seen, Whitehall secretly used MI6 to get one of its officers, writing under a pseudonym, to attack the British media for reporting on attacks on Bosnian Muslims.
Fresh from a resounding election victory, Tony Blair pressed the case for military intervention, eventually persuading President Clinton. (It was to whet his appetite for intervening in future conflicts.) In 1999, about a thousand NATO aircraft engaged in a bombing campaign that lasted more than eleven weeks. Gareth Williams, attorney general in the Blair government, privately warned that the bombing of Serbia was a breach of international law. It had not been sanctioned by any UN Security Council Resolution.
But it did not matter. Thanks to the media, the objective of the bombing was uncontroversial: the protection of Kosovo’s Muslim population. In marked contrast to the invasion of Iraq three years later, few questioned what was widely seen as a humanitarian necessity.
I wrote a piece in The Guardian (later re-published in the Daily Mail) saying NATO was fighting a ‘coward’s war’.14 I was summoned by George Robertson, the defence secretary. He asked Alan Rusbridger, my editor, to accompany me to his office in the MoD’s HQ in Whitehall.
Robertson brought along General Charles Guthrie, chief of the defence staff. He was sitting at a round table tightly hugging a red ring file marked SECRET with both hands for all the world as though we would try and run away with it.
Robertson and Guthrie put on a show of sorrow rather than anger. They explained the need to keep the coalition of NATO countries together and the widespread opposition to sending in ground troops. Alan and I were less than sympathetic; their efforts did not change the Guardian’s sceptical editorial line.
Evidence that NATO pilots were running out of targets mounted. Factories and bridges and even a Serbian TV station were described by NATO spokespersons as legitimate targets. The Chinese embassy was bombed on the grounds that it was helping Serbian intelligence, though NATO at first blamed the strikes on the CIA’s outdated maps of Belgrade.
Meanwhile, Alastair Campbell, Blair’s spin-doctor, became increasingly frustrated by the British media’s coverage of the war. After returning from Brussels where he attempted to shake up the way NATO officials were trying to conduct the information war, Campbell accused journalists of lacking the ‘daredevil spirit’ required to force their way in to Kosovo and to find out what was actually happening on the ground.15 Had they done so, they would have discovered that the bombs of the world’s most powerful military alliance had destroyed just thirteen tanks. Such was the Serbs’ success in hiding their real weapons and erecting mock tanks and artillery, a skill they had mastered in exercises during the Cold War.
The real story was not accidental attacks on civilian targets, Campbell insisted, but Milosevic’s ‘war crimes and atrocities’. He said broadcasters had fallen into the habit of thinking if there were ‘no pictures’ then there was ‘no news’. The situation was more complicated than that. Lt Gen. Sir Roddy Cordy-Simpson, a NATO commander in earlier operations in Bosnia, observed: ‘There is considerable discrepancy between what the NATO spokesmen were claiming and the reality on the ground of the damage being done to Milosevic’s war machine’.16
I joined Robertson on a visit to British troops billeted in an old shoe factory on Macedonia’s border with Kosovo. The factory’s owner made a small fortune selling his battered but extensive building to troops of the world’s most powerful alliance. It was June and stifling. That did not stop British squaddies from eating hearty breakfasts of sausages, bacon, eggs and even black pudding, as they watched Sky News on television screens set up in the cavernous building. The night was spent drinking with General Mike Jackson, the commander of NATO’s ground forces. He had just prevented the supreme commander of the alliance, General Wesley Clark, from starting Third World War, as he put it later. Clark had wanted Jackson to stop a small detachment of Russian troops from landing at Kosovo’s main airport at Pristina. Moscow simply wanted to make the point that it had much an interest in what was going on in Southeast Europe as NATO.
As the night wore on, I met a group of army medics. When they heard what newspaper I wrote for, they burst into song: ‘We want the Guardian, we want the Guardian!’ The only papers flown in from London were the Telegraph and the Sun. I was drinking with Jackson until the early hours of the morning, witness to his legendary constitution. He was up at dawn the next day, preparing to continue negotiating a peace deal with commanders of the Yugoslav Army in a huge tent close to Kosovo’s border with Macedonia.
Blair’s enthusiasm for military intervention was boosted by the popular acclaim he received in Kosovo after the war was over. It was encouraged further a year later, in 2000, by what was supposed to be a simple humanitarian intervention off Sierra Leone. The mission, code-named Operation Palliser, was originally set up to evacuate British and other Westerners from this former British colony of West Africa that was immersed in a violent civil war. It became a much more significant mission, thanks largely to its highly political, risk-taking commander, Brigadier David Richards.
In his memoirs, Taking Command,17 Richards says he remembers thinking, ‘bugger the orders’. He deployed guns and British troops from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, and with the help of a Russian helicopter flown by a South African mercenary, mounted what turned out to be a highly successful operation. Had he failed, Richards could well have been for the chop, his army career over.
‘I used the media whenever I could to help the chain of command in London and more importantly my political masters, understand that things were going better than they realised,’ Richards wrote. He described how James Robbins, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, reported that the government was tolerating ‘the liberal interpretation of the mandate that the Brigadier had taken… . Hearing about Robbins’ report from friends in PJHQ (the MoD’s permanent joint headquarters based in Northwood, Northwest London), I quietly chuckled to myself. My intentions were filtering through remarkably effectively’. Richards also described his relations with the BBC’s correspondent in Sierra Leone, Allan Little. Richards said Little asked him, ‘Are you telling me … that you used people like me in order to persuade the British government that you could do what you wanted to do?’ Richards added: ‘As he was framing the question, I was thinking, “What on earth can I say except the truth?” “Well, I suppose that’s how it might be interpreted”, I replied.’
Richards concluded: ‘Attending the media was time-consuming, but I learnt then, and benefitted from doing so many times later on in my career, that it was essential to work with the press during a campaign. I regarded it as another vital arm of activity to go alongside the military, political and humanitarian work we were doing’. The Guardian carried a headline for an article a colleague and I wrote about the Sierra Leone, with the words ‘A Good Man in Africa’.18 Richards never forgot it, frequently referring it to me in later conversations.
He was popular with the media, not least because he liked chewing the cud with journalists, something that was to provoke growing suspicion among his peers and political masters.
Widespread opposition in Whitehall, notably in the FO, to the planned invasion of Iraq was reflected in countless conversations I had with government officials. Alas, the conversations were all off-the-record, and so I could not name the officials. MI6 officers were split down the middle, but again my contacts would only talk to me if I promised not to name them in public. One MI6 officer was the source of my report that many MI6 officers were furious about attempts by the Pentagon – meekly supported by the CIA – to link Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda. The day the article appeared in the Guardian, my source received a phone call from a furious FO official. He was desperately worried that the article would upset Washington. ‘But the story was true,’ my source insisted. ‘Yes’, replied the FO official. He did not need to elucidate.
The FO did not have the guts publicly to question the CIA claims. Some experienced journalists who should have known better accepted the claims that were also enthusiastically peddled by Iraqi exiles, notably the Iraqi National Congress. The Observer’s David Rose wrote a series of reports claiming that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had close links with Al-Qaeda, despite the inherent implausibility of such an alliance between a secular dictatorship and an extreme Islamist group. Rose’s reporting strongly influenced his newspaper’s editorial line. The paper which had famously attacked the invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956, supported military action widely accepted as being even more disastrous. A year after the invasion of Iraq, Rose confessed in the Evening Standard that his enthusiasm for it had been ‘misplaced and naive’. He added: ‘I look back with shame and disbelief’. He later accepted in a piece for the Observer that he had been part of ‘a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda case for war’.
We have all been victims, at one time or another, of official propaganda. A few days before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, my Times colleague, Mike Evans, and I were given an on-the-record interview by Air Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, commander of UK forces, at his headquarters at Al Udeid airfield near Doha, the capital of Qatar. He told us Saddam Hussein was preparing for the Battle of Baghdad comparable to Stalingrad, deploying tactics bolstered by the capture of prisoners of war and the use of chemical weapons against civilians. Iraq’s military doctrine, he told us, was based on the Soviet model of defence in depth. ‘[Saddam] is going for a Stalingrad siege. He wants to entice us into urban warfare.’ When I asked if it turned out he did not have any such weapons, Burridge replied: ‘Come on, trust me. None of us are suggesting he doesn’t have them. He has chemical and biological weapons, that’s for sure.’19
Evans and I dutifully wrote up his words for the next day’s Times and Guardian. In the event, it could not have been more unlike Stalingrad. Saddam fled, his army vanished into the countryside – with its guns – and the US-led coalition forces quickly took over the Iraqi capital. The violence, mainly in the form of roadside bombs, came later. I am not sure how far Burridge was ‘doing a Frank Cooper’, adopting the tactics of the senior MoD official on the eve of the Falklands landings. It may have simply been professional caution, to imagine the worst and sharing it with the media. Better that than being too cocky.
Burridge did not mince his words about the invasion when I interviewed him ten years later. He pointed to the failure to gather any useful intelligence, after more than a decade, ever since the first Gulf War in 1991, even overflying Iraq at will. ‘It was a national disgrace that, having flown over much of the country for thirteen years, you could have not done better in building up a proper intelligence picture’, Burridge told me.
It had been a clever move by Simon Wren, the MoD’s chief press officer, before the invasion to flatter the Guardian by offering it special access to Burridge. I stayed at the Doha Sheraton, which reflected Qatar’s pragmatic approach to Western culture. Wine and beer were openly available in the hotel lobby, but the hard stuff could be consumed only in a bar discreetly positioned off the mezzanine floor. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Pint glasses of beer and Guinness, and the voices of semi-inebriated ex-pats, reminded me that similar establishments can be found almost anywhere in the world.
The MoD organized ‘embeds’, attaching British journalists to units of the invading British troops. The army hierarchy was less arrogant than the navy’s and less chippy than the RAF’s. Brigadier Matthew Sykes was then the senior military figure responsible for the army’s PR. He was bold enough to recommend that the Guardian – not the MoD establishment’s favourite media organization – should go to the front line with the scouts of the Household Cavalry. They accepted Audrey Gillan, whose graphic reporting came to be appreciated as much by the army as by the readers of the Guardian. She was made an honorary member of the Household Cavalry’s mess at their Windsor headquarters. But this example of creative access was an honourable exception. The MoD’s media minders in Iraq became increasingly nervous and restrictive, much more so than their US counterparts, as the Guardian’s James Meek discovered when he wisely attached himself to American forces in Iraq.
Relations between the MoD and the media seriously deteriorated after the initial military success of the invasion of Iraq. Irritated by a series of reports recording the military’s frustration with inadequate equipment, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, who had always adopted a niggling, hostile attitude towards journalists, demolished the MoD’s traditional media set-up in which senior officers from the three branches of the armed services operated alongside civilians. Hoon thought the military was getting a much better press than ministers in the MoD. He was right. Already bitter about the media’s reporting of the David Kelly affair and the bad press he had received during the Hutton inquiry, Hoon downgraded the military’s presence in the ministry’s press office by getting rid of all the ‘one stars’ – the Army brigadier and the Royal Navy and RAF commodores. The petty move angered military chiefs and defence correspondents alike.
Hoon’s determination to gag the military, shared later by David Cameron, suppressed debate and imposed even greater secrecy at a time when open discussion was desperately needed, in everyone’s interests, including the government’s. It was a prime cause of disillusionment, as much in the armed forces as among the general public, about Britain’s role in military operations. The lack of candour and transparency and the fear of open debate had unhealthy and damaging consequences that are still being felt.
Frustration among military commanders was already building up over the cavalier way Blair took decisions without proper consultation, not least over the deployment of thousands of British troops to Helmand in Afghanistan in 2006, and how under-resourced British troops were being hounded out of Basra. It burst open with the appointment of a new head of the army that year. General Richard (later Lord) Dannatt, who succeeded Sir Mike Jackson, first heard about the Helmand decision when he was on a visit to Germany. Dannatt, temperamentally very different to the extrovert Jackson, gave me his first interview after taking up his new post. He criticized, but only tentatively, the way the government had handled the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and how it was putting immense on the military, the army in particular.
Dannatt warned: ‘We are running hot, certainly running hot’, adding: ‘Can we cope? I pause. I say “just”.’ I should have pushed him further. My interview with him did not get the attention I thought it deserved for that very day a Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft crashed over Afghanistan, causing the death of fourteen military personnel. It was the result, an inquiry later concluded, of incompetence and complacency on the part of BAE Systems, the plane’s manufacturer, and senior RAF officers.
A few days later, Dannatt questioned the decision to invade Iraq in more forthright terms. He told Sarah Sands of the Daily Mail that the military campaign in 2003 ‘effectively kicked the door in. That is a fact. I don’t say the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.’20 Dannatt’s comments were hugely provocative and, in the end, probably counter-productive. But they were the consequence of excessive official secrecy, of the inability of the government’s most senior military advisers to discuss their concerns freely, first with ministers, then with MPs, and then with the media and the outside world.
A deeply religious man, Dannatt told Sands that Britain’s military presence in Iraq was ‘making things worse’ and that ‘moral vacuum at home breeds Islamic extremism’. He describes in his autobiography, Leading from the Front, how he discovered one evening that the BBC ten o’clock news was leading its bulletin with the headline: ‘We must quit says new head of the army’. He blamed the Daily Mail for what he called ‘journalistic weighting and interpretation’ that was ‘distorting’. Des Browne, who had taken over from Hoon as defence secretary, was not best pleased. The episode further aggravated relations between the country’s most senior military figures and their political masters, leading to even greater mistrust and, its bedfellow, secrecy.
Britain did not deploy enough troops in Iraq; would it make the same mistake in Afghanistan? The answer is a resounding Yes. Military commanders did not have the courage to tell their political masters they needed more troops and money. Afraid to express their concerns, they played down the difficulties they would face in Afghanistan.
Britain’s armed forces turned out to be even less prepared for Afghanistan than they were for Iraq. John Reid, Browne’s predecessor as defence secretary, had suggested that the troops could accomplish their mission without a shot being fired. It was a suggestion he was not allowed to forget. When his apparent optimism was repeatedly fed back to him as casualties mounted, Reid said he was being repeatedly misquoted. What he had actually said as he landed in Afghanistan on his first visit was that British troops would be ‘perfectly happy’ to leave ‘without firing a shot’.
NATO governments were desperately anxious to avoid any suggestion that British and other allied troops faced the prospect of coming under attack. I experienced this first-hand at a big NATO exercise held in Germany to prepare for the deployment to Afghanistan. I was talking to the ever-friendly David Richards, who was about go to Kabul to head the NATO-led international force. We were discussing the possibility of Western troops confronting Al-Qaeda fighters.
Richards said he did not discount the possibility. An anxious Mark Laity, now special adviser to George Robertson, NATO’s secretary general, urged Richards not to talk to journalists about the potential threats facing NATO troops; such was the extent of the concern and sensitivity at NATO headquarters about public and political opposition to the deployment.
But NATO, and the British government, could not keep the lid on the growing problems their troops were facing for long. In July 2006, Richards gave a speech at RUSI at a time when he was clearly frustrated by the lack of a coherent peace and stability strategy in Afghanistan. The speech was off-the-record, but I was told the general could be quoted if I checked with him. ‘No problem’, Richards told me.
Richards wrote in his diary for 22 July:
I received an email from Terry McNamee of RUSI … apologising for the Guardian misquoting my speech yesterday. The headline above my story referred to a state of ‘near anarchy’ in Afghanistan. It was an exaggeration, perhaps, but one common in headline writing. What I actually wrote [in his speech] was that the way some international organisations, PSCs [private security companies] and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] operated was ‘close to anarchy and that they needed to pull together and work to common aims’.
Richards added: ‘My concern is that the Guardian article will appear to Karzai [Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president] as if I am saying that he has no grip and authority. … It could damage my relationship with him at a crucial juncture in the operation.’ In his diary entry for the following Monday, 24 July, Richards noted that NATO’s supreme commander, US General James Jones, had called him from Washington saying that NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, had returned from his office from his ‘habitual weekend off’, read my Guardian article and was ‘very angry about it’. Mark Laity had the temerity to phone Richards, to quote the general’s diary, ‘warning me that things were bad in Brussels and that I was on a “yellow card”’.
Richards diary note read: ‘From the tone of his voice I sensed that he [Laity] was enjoying this little drama, especially when he made the mistake of telling me that if he had seen the speech before I had given it, he would have removed the offending sentence. No doubt this is what he had told his mischief-making pals in Brussels.’
Richards told nervous NATO officials that the Guardian had misquoted him. The headline may have been a bit strong, but it was the prominence of the story on the front page that irritated him and angered Brussels. The incident did not affect my personal relations with Richards. Far from it. It probably helped to shake up NATO’s relationships with private security companies and NGOs in Kabul. The episode was significant because it demonstrated the extreme nervousness in NATO and the MoD about the whole Afghan operation, nervousness suppressed by public assurances that everything was hunky-dory.
This was reflected in another episode sparked by a story I wrote for the Guardian later that year.21 Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of 3 Para Battlegroup (and grandson of the prominent former Tory cabinet minister, RAB Butler) had just returned from Helmand after six months in which British troops, far from not firing a shot as Reid said he had hoped, fired more bullets and shells, estimated to be more than a million, than at any time since the Korean War. Butler suggested that the invasion of Iraq three years earlier had prevented British forces from helping to secure Afghanistan, and left a dangerous vacuum in the country. As a result, British soldiers faced a much tougher task.
Asked whether the invasion and its aftermath had led to Britain and the United States taking their eye off the ball, Butler replied that the question was ‘probably best answered by politicians’. He added that British forces could also have attacked the Taliban more effectively and more quickly if they had had more resources, including helicopters – something that was to become an oft-repeated refrain from British commanders.
Butler’s implicit criticisms of the Blair government gave me a front-page splash in the Guardian. It coincided with a lunch Guardian editors had planned that day for the defence secretary, Des Browne. His press office cancelled the lunch because they thought, mistakenly in my view, that Browne would have been embarrassed to confront us. Browne was not the kind of person to shun criticism. He would have relished a conversation over lunch.
British commanders continued to vent their frustrations about the lack of appropriate equipment, notably helicopters and armoured vehicles, capable of withstanding the growing threat from IEDs. They did so in briefings to journalists embedded for short visits to Helmand. Brigadier Andrew Mackay, one of Butler’s successors as commander of Britain’s ‘Task Force Helmand’, described his troops as repeatedly ‘mowing the lawn’. What he meant was that after they ‘liberated’ villages from Taliban control, they immediately had to be deployed elsewhere because they were so thin on the ground. The Taliban soon retook the villages only for British troops having to return to ‘liberate’ them once more.
Mackay said he had felt like a student in Afghanistan, thinking about counter insurgency doctrine and the principles of managing a large organization. He was struck by the lack of clear direction from above. There was a sense of ‘making it up as we go along’, he said. Mackay signed what he called a ‘ground truth’ memo, which he sent to London. It included a list of serious problems with his soldiers’ equipment. Many of the engines of the Household Cavalry’s ageing Scimitar reconnaissance tanks did not work. Tanks labelled ‘working’ could not even get into reverse gear without the driver first having to restart the engine, a limitation ‘not helpful in combat’, the leaked memo noted. A quarter of the new Mastiff armoured vehicles were out of action for weeks because of suspension problems, and many of the new Vector armoured vehicles in Helmand were not being used because ‘the wheels just kept falling off’. Heavy machine guns and reinforced Land Rovers were also in short supply, the memo added.22
Other military commanders infuriated defence ministers and MoD spin-doctors on their return to Britain by telling us the truth, namely that the Afghan army and security forces were in a poor state and that delays in getting paid demoralizing them further. Many did not return to their units after going on leave. Absenteeism was rife. Blair had told other countries with troops in Afghanistan that Britain would be responsible for the opium problem. Afghanistan’s poppies were the source of most of the heroin which ended up on British (and other European) streets, and Helmand was where most of them were grown. Yet British troops knew that attempts to eradicate the poppy harvest would merely antagonize the local population whose livelihood depended on the crop.
The situation was aggravated by US plans to kill the poppies by spraying them with chemicals from aircraft, the means the United States had used in South America against coca plantations. I asked NATO’s top civilian representative in Kabul, who went on to become a very senior FO official, how the opium problem could be dealt with. ‘It is very difficult’, was all he could say. In 2007, a year after Blair sent in British troops to Helmand province, there was a record opium harvest. Ten years later, it had increased further.
Meanwhile, Richards always found time to respond to my emails asking him about his personal take on the situation. He normally replied late at night. ‘I will now go to bed , knackered but feeling better for doing this’, he ended one email to me in November 2011. ‘There is a growing feeling of optimism here’, he added. I am not sure he shared it.
Ministers and military commanders alike became increasingly fraught as casualties in Afghanistan mounted. There was no sign that the efforts of British troops, sometimes ending in deaths or terrible injury, were sustaining a stable country. At MoD briefings, military spokesmen resorted to increasingly desperate attempts, mainly by selecting facts and figures to advance their case, to increasingly incredulous defence correspondents. The briefings eventually dried up.
The best an alysis of what went wrong came from young officers who left the army soon after their deployment in Helmand. They included Emile Simpson, whose book, War from the Ground Up,23 is a brilliant expose of British ignorance of Afghan society and tribal structure (even after three disastrous wars in the nineteenth century), and Mike Martin, whose highly critical account, An Intimate War, 24 was initially banned by the MoD – a move that merely served to stimulate interest in his withering critique of Britain’s approach to the conflict. The MoD dropped its ban after Martin resigned his Territorial Army commission.
As casualties increased, first in Iraq then in Afghanistan, television pictures regularly showed pictures of flag-draped coffins being slowly driven through Wootton Bassett, the town, now with the moniker ‘Royal’ attached to its name, closest to the RAF base at Lyneham in Wiltshire, where aircraft carrying the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan landed. Morale within the armed forces was falling as more and more in the media, public opinion, and (privately) within the army, questioned the conduct and purpose of the military operations. Dannatt, with half-hearted support from ministers and the MoD, promoted the ‘military covenant’ – the notion that the unique, indeed ultimate, sacrifice made by members of the armed forces and their families should be recognized through better treatment from the State, including in housing and health care.
Responding to growing concerns among the military chiefs of staff about plummeting morale, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, in 2008 set up an inquiry into ‘National Recognition of Our Armed Forces’. Among its recommendations was the ‘relaxation’ of contacts between commanding officers and the media, particularly journalists based in towns with military bases. The proposed reforms made no difference. Senior officers did not believe senior civil servants or ministers would in practice accept such relaxed rules. They suspected they would still be in trouble if they spoke out.
They were right. It was not long before relations between military and government deteriorated once again. It started with the chaotic 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), including a last-minute decision to scrap the aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, the iconic fleet of Harrier jump jets, and the destruction of half-built Nimrod maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. Defence correspondents were phoned up by angry naval officers, anxious for us to report their fierce opposition to cuts that had been so chaotically imposed. We duly obliged.
David Cameron helped us on our way when his advisers let it be known he was deeply frustrated that the MoD had agreed a deal with BAE Systems, whereby the taxpayer would face huge penalties if the plan to construct the two large aircraft carriers planned for the navy was scrapped. A significant number of senior officers in all three branches of the armed forces, in the army in particular, made it clear in private conversations that they believed the carriers – and Trident too for that matter – were a huge waste of money.
Fierce arguments broke out into the open in 2011, prompted by Cameron’s decision, which exasperated the chiefs of staff, to attack Libya. Just when they thought the era of ill-thought through military interventions was over, Cameron, egged on by the French president, Nikolai Sarkozy, called for a NATO-backed campaign of air strikes to stop the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi from slaughtering his domestic opponents protesting in Benghazi.
Stung by complaints from senior military figures, Cameron told them: ‘There are moments when I wake up and read the newspapers and think: “I tell you what, you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking”.’25 The military were severely chastened.
In briefing notes leaked to The Telegraph newspaper, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant, Commander-in-Chief of the RAF’s Air Command, had complained that ‘huge’ demands were being placed on equipment and personnel. He added that morale among personnel was ‘fragile’ and their fighting spirit was being threatened by overwork. The RAF was already severely stretched by intense air operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
According to the briefing paper, Bryant had warned MPs that many areas of the RAF were ‘running hot’, while service personnel’s sense that the nation valued their efforts was being undermined by the government’s defence cuts. He said: ‘The true strength is in our people in continuing to deliver, despite all that’s asked of them, adding that it was time to listen to military advice, review the [defence] review and provide our forces with capabilities which match our foreign policy ambitions.’26
Meanwhile, the First Sea Lord, Sir Mark Stanhope, warned that continuing operations in Libya beyond September 2011 would mean taking ships away from other tasks. Concern among military commanders was compounded by Cameron’s suggestion that Gaddafi himself was a target and regime change the aim – objectives which were legally highly dubious, as the invasion of Iraq had demonstrated eight years earlier. David Richards, now promoted to the post of chief of the defence staff, made it plain he was deeply concerned about the statements by Cameron and other ministers implying that Gaddafi personally was the target of NATO’s bombs.
According to a paper published by the Chatham House think tank, entitled Depending on the Right People: British Political-Military Relations 2001–2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were concerned about the close relations between senior military figures and the media. That, the paper’s author, James de Waal, claimed, helped to explain how decisions about defence policy, and also military tactics, were made. ‘The battles are fought as much in Fleet Street as in Iraq or Afghanistan’, he wrote. Brown’s Downing Street was not convinced of the military need to send reinforcements to Afghanistan in 2009 but had agreed to do so only because it wanted to prevent hostile briefings by the military.
That may have been true. However, many British officers repeatedly told me that the real problem was that military commanders did not ‘tell truth to power’, a point later highlighted in the Chilcot report. These [junior] officers told me that the generals and brigadiers were reluctant to demand more resources and better equipment out of concern that, if they did so, ministers would respond by suggesting that if military commanders were so reluctant to participate in operations, the answer was to slash their budgets. There was a curious stand-off where ministers were apparently jealous of the close relations between the military and the media, while the military were worried about the consequences of telling ministers about their concerns.
The MoD, meanwhile, blocked the publication of essays by senior serving officers in a book, British Generals in Blair’s Wars,27 including those of General Sir Nick Houghton, chief of the defence staff, and General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander. Sir Huw Strachan, then Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University and long-time independent adviser to military chiefs, went so far as to accuse the MoD of endangering the lives of British soldiers by stifling debate and preventing serving generals from publicly expressing their views on the conduct of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Houghton had already raised eyebrows in Downing Street in 2013, in his first major speech as CDS, as he warned of the need to fund the military adequately in face of the danger of what he called ‘hollowed-out’ armed forces, with ‘exquisite’ equipment – expensive jets and ships – but not enough people to operate them.28 Early in 2015, Cameron went on the warpath again preventing Houghton from speaking at a Chatham House conference on the theme ‘Rising Powers and the Future of Defence’.29
The gagging came after Downing Street saw an early draft of Houghton’s speech. Cameron had already let it be known he was annoyed by remarks by Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, who warned that NATO must be ready for Russian aggression in ‘whatever form it takes’. A few days later, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, NATO’s deputy supreme commander, talked out of turn about ‘an era of constant competition with Russia’. Shirreff angered Cameron by claiming that his failure to be at the forefront of talks over Ukraine had turned the British prime minister into a ‘bit player’ on the international scene.
Cocooned in their closed mindset, top officials in the MoD included journalists in their annual threat assessments. Among those it warned were threats to the state were ‘subversive or terrorist organizations, and investigative journalists’. Worried about persistent leaks and the failure to get across their message that was all was sweetness and light, MoD mandarins in 2012 appointed Stephen Jolly, an expert in black propaganda and a former member of the army reserve’s Psychological Operations group, a former instructor at the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, and a former visiting fellow in psychological warfare at King’s College, London, as its chief spin-doctor responsible for strategic communications.
Such efforts to counter leaks and critical comments in the media about the state of the armed forces served only to make military commanders and defence officials less likely to speak truth unto power, thereby bolstering official secrecy by allowing those in power – ministers supported by Whitehall mandarins – to control the channels of communications with the public, the voters. Yet they did not stop leaks or criticism and so long as the MoD remains so secretive and loath to encourage open debate, they never will.
There is a strange and uniquely British institution which journalists writing about defence, security and intelligence matters have to cope with. The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, commonly referred to simply as the D Notice Committee after its original title, consists of top officials from the MoD and the Home Office and senior editors and executives from the major media organizations. They engage in a system of voluntary self-censorship. A list of ‘DA [Defence Advisory] Notices’ are published on the committee’s website as guidance for editors. They cover the activities of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and of new weapons being developed for Britain’s armed forces. They also cover the activities of the Special Forces – the SAS and SBS. Editors and reporters are supposed to contact the committee’s secretary when they are planning to write articles on such matters.
The committee has no legal status. However, clearance by its secretary – a post traditionally occupied by a recently retired senior military officer – on a particular story might make Whitehall think twice before recommending any Official Secrets Act prosecution or court injunction to prevent or delay publication of a particular article. Guardian editors, who previously paid little attention to the DA Notice system, thought it a good idea to embrace it in the wake of the Edward Snowden affair. The move was designed to show that the Guardian was responsible and at least understood how to ‘play the game’. A senior member of the Guardian’s editorial staff was appointed to the committee.
There is no certainty that clearance from the committee’ secretary for a particular story would prevent the security and intelligence agencies or ministers from seeking the intervention of the courts. There is also the very real possibility of the Whitehall members of the committee tipping off the cabinet secretary or ministers about an editor’s intention to publish politically unwelcome or embarrassing stories.
The DA Notice system became increasingly discredited over its failure to lift the blanket of official secrecy covering the activities of the Special Forces, an official ban undermined by the discreet authority given by military chiefs to senior MoD spokespeople to confirm details of Special Forces operations unattributably by nods and winks to trusted defence correspondents.
Even though the SAS and SBS are taking on increasingly significant roles, the government routinely insists in answers to questions from MPs that they do not comment on any Special Forces operation. A bland ‘no comment’ is the official response despite more and reports in the world’s media about the activities of British Special Forces in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Such official secrecy is unacceptable at a time when even the Commons defence committee has pointed to ‘significant legal obstacles to targeted killings’ by drones and Special Forces and the absence of detention facilities where the interrogation of terrorist suspects could be monitored.30
The official ban increasingly is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. To take one example, in the ITV ‘Kill List’ programme31 broadcast in 2015, Richard Williams, a former SAS commander, referred to a bunker called ‘the Death Star’. He recalled: ‘It was known as the death star because of the impression of a Star Wars type-technical facility that would … designate those targets for kill or capture missions. Its purpose was obviously the destruction of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and did deliver from it quite a lot of death’. The SAS was keen to be part of the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). When it was suggested that it had been described as ‘an industrial scale counter-terrorist killing machine’, Williams replied : ‘Well it was’. If targets on the kill list could not be engaged in combat or captured by any other means, they would be killed, remotely, by a bomb.
A spectacular example of the hypocrisy of the official secrecy surrounding the Special Forces demonstrated just how weak and ineffective the DA Notice system is. The minutes of the committee’s meeting on 6 November 2014 recorded that the naming of a former SAS officer by The Sun was discussed. ‘The journalist appeared to have been given the information by a briefer at No 10’, the minutes noted. They added: ‘It seemed that the release of the name was deliberate in order to make a political point’ – namely that David Cameron took military operations seriously. The committee chairman ‘accepted that, as this was not the first time that No 10 had shown a lack of understanding of the DA Notice System, the problem might be systemic and should be addressed.’
How did the committee address the problem? So anxious was it about not being seen to criticize 10 Downing Street, it simply removed the offending passages in the minutes from the record.
In his official history of the DA Committee, Rear Admiral Nicholas Wilkinson, its former secretary, observed: ‘Almost all the publicity which the UKSF (UK Special Forces) has attracted has been inspired directly by UKSF leakers or through ex-SF leakers.’32 Some passages in Wilkinson’s were initially censored for by the MoD even though they were cleared by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the FO. They included passages revealing how details about the role of UKSF, in an operation to free captured British soldiers held by rebels in Sierra Leone, were leaked in 2000 ‘to the fury of the Ministry of Defence’. British paratroopers involved in the Sierra Leone mission ‘felt under no inhibition about talking frankly about their part in a SF-led [Special Forces] operation’, Wilkinson noted. He added that ‘even The Officer magazine, supported by the MoD’, had carried an article on the SAS role in the operation, prompting the MoD to consider impounding’ the offending publication. Referring to an unidentified incident in the Iraq war, Wilkinson noted that ‘the inability of the MoD to say anything about the incident caused additional speculation and inaccuracy’.
Wilkinson also referred to the decision of Stella Rimington, the former MI5 director general, to publish her memoirs. ‘Senior officials had known this for some months and had been trying to dissuade her,’ Wilkinson wrote. ‘When it became apparent that this heavy collective (male) pressure was making her even more determined to publish, she was widely, and unattributably, briefed against.’ Sir Kevin Tebbit, then the MoD’s most senior civil servant, was described as being most opposed to the memoirs on grounds that his ministry was blocking SAS memoirs at the time. SAS commanders were furious. Their anger was to no avail. Rimington’s book, Open Secret, was published in 2001.
Bizarrely, some passages in Wilkinson’s original manuscript relating to the BBC’s entirely fictional spy drama, Spooks, were suppressed. One passage later cleared for publication reads: ‘The security service [MI5] was not only relaxed about the series, its members were very much hoping that Armani suits, plush offices and fast cars, as shown in the series, would somehow become a feature of their considerably less glamorous work, and that its recruitment would benefit (applications did temporarily increase, but those from women dropped, possibly because of the unrealistic level of violence).’
Mark Thomas, the comedian and political activist, exposed the absurdity of so much official secrecy by asking the committee why ‘well-known defence and security establishments’, including the early warning radar at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire, and the nuclear warhead plant at Burghfield, Berkshire, were absent from Ordnance Survey maps since they can be seen from any aircraft or, indeed, by a passing walker.
The official blanket ban on disclosing the activities of the Special Forces was increasingly ignored by the most senior military figures. ‘I’ve broken that rule’, David Richards told me, making it clear that in his view the ban was counter-productive. ‘The very knowledge of the special forces is a huge weapons system in itself’, he said.
War reporters and defence correspondents are not always at odds with the military or the government. They should be sensitive to any genuine need for operational security and to protect lives. Tension between the media and the military establishment may be healthy. Journalists cannot be expected to have the same perspective and share the same priorities as members of the SAS. But without greater transparency and a more enlightened approach such tension is in danger of turning into growing suspicion, even open hostility, as military operations become more hidden, when the boundaries between war and peace are becoming increasingly blurred and where traditional interpretations of the law and ethics relating to violent conflicts are breaking down. Scrutiny by the media will be even more necessary in the age of drones, robots and increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, and where media access to battlefields will be more and more difficult, if not impossible.