It is impossible to ignore the continuing Iraq story but difficult to decide to what, of the mountain of information we are being presented with, we should pay attention. The general drift of the British state’s policy has been clear: concede a little; maintain what’s left of the cover-up; concede a little more; maintain what’s left and so on – in the hope that we don’t notice what they’re doing. Thus the admission that important intelligence information was kept from Lord Hutton (but given to Lord Butler);(1) and the absurd spectacle of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announcing in October, after the Iraq Survey Group had officially declared Iraq innocent of WMDs, that certain intelligence to the contrary, which had been known to be a fraud for at least a year, had been ‘withdrawn’ by MI6.(2)
The American-British-Australian relationship
Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit-9/11 is great propaganda but, like all propaganda, it isn’t about the truth. In a section mocking the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ which supported the US invasion of Iraq, Moore listed several very small countries – but omitted Australia, the UK and Spain. For Australia and the UK the political decision to support the USA caused major ructions within their intelligence systems. Most of the intelligence analysts of those countries, along with sections of their countries’ foreign and diplomatic services, resisted the drive to invasion and their political masters’ desire for ‘intelligence’ with which to justify it. This resistance manifested itself in an unprecedented series of leaks of official information, anonymous briefings to journalists, resignations by some serving diplomats, and public protest by retired diplomats and intelligence personnel.(3) Most striking was the – presumably co-ordinated – publication of open letters of dissent by British, American and Australian diplomats and defence chiefs. The American event was in June,(4) the Australian in August,(5) though the latter got little attention in the Anglo-American media.
In the USA, UK and Australia the senior intelligence personnel ultimately capitulated to the political pressure, in different ways. The British and American systems’ senior intelligence personnel used last-minute information which purported to show that Iraq was a threat. In the USA the Director of the CIA and the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Colin Powell, used the now notorious ‘uranium from Niger’ scam – based on crudely forged documents (6) – to get support for the war from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and thus ensure that the President got a mandate from Congress for the attack on Iraq.
The moment of conspiracy
In Britain, at the 11th hour very senior MI6 and Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) used a human source who claimed – falsely, of course – that Iraq had been developing chemical and biological warfare capacities. But to use this new ‘source’s’ intelligence in this way, the expert in the field, Dr Brian Jones, of the Defence Intelligence Staff, was simply not told about the source or his ‘intelligence’. As Lord Butler commented dryly in his report:
‘It would have been more appropriate for senior managers in the DIS and SIS [MI6] to have made arrangements for the intelligence to be shown to DIS experts rather than making their own judgements on its significance’.(7)
By keeping Jones out of the loop the senior MI6 and DIS people showed that they knew the intelligence was bogus. Here, if you will, is the moment of conspiracy – something we don’t normally see.
In Australia a different system produced the same result. The Australians had two units producing intelligence estimates, one civilian, one military. It was the civilian version, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), which finally buckled under American pressure to come up with the goods: the military analysts in the Defence Intelligence Organisation, never did.
The British and Australians signed-up to the American line at the same time. The Australian parliamentary committee’s report in March 2004, headed by former Howard cabinet minister David Hull, noted a sudden and unexplained shift in the intelligence assessments provided to the government in mid-September 2002. Up until September 12, both the ONA, which is part of the prime minister’s department, and its military counterpart, the DIO, were cautious about American and British claims of Iraqi WMD, describing them as ‘scarce, patchy and inconclusive’. But on 12 September President Bush delivered an ultimatum to the UN General Assembly that it either endorse a US invasion of Iraq or become ‘irrelevant’; the next day, the ONA (Office of National Assessments) was asked to prepare another assessment; and in the new one its language changed dramatically. While the DIO (Defence Intelligence Organisation) continued to express reservations, the ONA declared it ‘highly likely’ that Iraq had WMD. (8)
The parallel British process shows that the shift between the JIC’s cautious assessment and the government’s upbeat statements took place between 9 and 24 September. Lord Butler’s report (p.73 para 294) noted that the JIC assessment of 9 September ‘reflected a significant change from previous JIC judgements on Iraqi possession of chemical and biological weapons’. This change was based on ‘new intelligence’ from secondary and tertiary sources (Butler p.74 paras 300-303). Butler commented (p.75 para 304) on ‘the relative thinness of the intelligence base supporting the greater firmness of the JIC’s judgement’.
The price of the ‘special relationship
The British and Australian intelligence people grumbled and leaked in an unprecedented way, covered their arses and let us all know that this wasn’t their idea; but in the end how could they resist? They have go along with the Americans because they need to keep the ‘intelligence relationship’. As erstwhile Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings put it:
‘It has been a fundamental tenet of British foreign policy since 1945 that the value of our intimate intelligence exchange with the US is so great that we must be prepared to do almost anything including joining Republican military adventures, to sustain it.'(9)
One of the Australian analysts said of an earlier episode:
‘We had strong reservations about the evidence that was being provided to us, but that was never carried forward because the deputy director at the time thought that the intelligence relationship [with the US] was more important.‘ (emphasis added) (10)
Former British government intelligence analyst Crispin Black’s call – ‘It’s time, once again, that we had a fully British intelligence process, British intelligence collected by British means and put together by British analysts to produce a British judgement’ – is the first of its kind I can recall.(11) But it won’t happen; at least not for a while. There is no serious lobby within the British political system for an intelligence service independent of America: this is, almost literally, the unthinkable and unsayable. Voices like those of Black and Peter Oborne – ‘It is time to ask whether the French ambition for a separate European military and diplomatic capacity, capable of defying the US is also right. It is time to ask whether we should now break with our alliance with the US, before it breaks us.’ – are a tiny minority.(12) (However, my guess would be that a significant section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the British military thinks this but is unable to say so publicly.(13)
Real political power
When I began reading about the relationship between the intelligence and security services and the British political system in the early 1980s, it was widely believed on the Labour left that the intelligence and security services were all-powerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in any real sense: their accountability to Parliament is notional. But is clear that real political power in the UK rests with the Prime Minister. That the PM’s men got to rewrite the intelligence estimates was the climax of New Labour’s curiously apolitical assault on the British state. The events of the past two years show that ‘The Prime Minister wishes….’ still commands virtually absolute authority; at least it does if you’re going with the Americans. But how absolute would that power be was the Prime Minister’s wish to – say – withdraw from NATO?
We have seen this absolute Prime Ministerial power before. Edward Heath’s wishes prevailed in 1972-3 when, without telling his party or his cabinet, he decided to try and reconstruct the British economy to make it fit for EEC entry. In Heath’s day the major co-conspirator in the project was the Cabinet Secretary Sir William Armstrong. With Blair it was his chief media wallah, Alistair Campbell. Thus the world has changed.
Casualties
So, after two reports by noble Lords and thousands of critical column inches, the only person to be fired as a result of the Iraq inquiries was the investigator employed by the Parliamentary Intelligence Security Committee, John Morrison, a former number two at Defence Intelligence.(14) Morrison’s offence? He pointed out, in a television interview, what all observers knew: that a large proportion of the foreign policy establishment in Whitehall did not believe Tony Blair when, in the Commons, he declared on 24 September 2002, on the publication of the now famous ‘dodgy dossier’, that Iraq posed ‘a serious and current threat’ to the world. Morrison said: ‘When I heard him using those words I could almost hear the collective raspberry going up around Whitehall.’
Among the most prominent whistle-blowers has been retired American Lt.-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowsky, whose views on the role of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, a unit within the Pentagon created to find or manufacture intelligence which would provide the pretext for invasion, were quoted in Lobster 47. Kwiatkowski was the subject of an assault by David Rose in The Observer 30 May 2004, ‘Iraqi defectors tricked us with WMD lies, but we must not be fooled again.’ His quotations in the next section are in italics; my interspersed comments are in plain text.
David Rose: ‘One of the most contentious claims is the story about an “intelligence cell” in the Pentagon called the “Office of Special Plans”. Its job, it was widely reported, was to debrief INC defectors, “cherrypick” this and other intelligence about WMD, and “stovepipe” it direct to Vice-President Dick Cheney, bypassing the intelligence community. The OSP was thought to have been run by ideologically motivated neo-conservatives calling themselves “the cabal”. This may not be true. The OSP had nothing to do with producing intelligence. …’(emphasis added) (15)
RR Oh, really? See, of the many, Hersh (in note 15); the new book by James Bamford, reviewed below; and the section under the names of Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, Senator Carl Levin and Senator Richard Durbin at the end of the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community and Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.(16)
David Rose: ‘and its real job – for which it can be severely criticised – was planning Iraq’s postwar future. All the stories about it appear to share a single source, Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who worked in the Pentagon – but not in the OSP – in North Africa. So how would she know what went on there? The answer she gave me was that she regularly had “conversations in the hallway” with someone who did, an official called John Trigilio.’
RR: This is a complete misrepresentation of Kwiatkowski, OSP, and the reporting of the story. On the first page of her big early story Kwiatkowski described how she was – reluctantly – transferred from the Pentagon’s North Africa desk to Near East South Asia (NESA); and how within NESA what became the OSP began to form. She didn’t claim to have been in OSP.(17)
David Rose: ‘Trigilio denied any such conversations took place, saying neither he nor his colleagues ever met an INC defector. Why would Kwiatkowski make it up?’
RR: Why believe Trigilio? There are dozens of substantial stories on the OSP, (and dozens which were in print when Rose wrote his piece); none of those I have looked at are sourced to any one individual; and most refer to the OSP’s relationship with Chalabi and INC.(18) Rose then does a classic series of guilt-by-association smears.
David Rose: ‘On the one hand, she [Kwiatkowski] has written for Pat Buchanan’s extreme right-wing journal, the American Conservative ....’
RR: I wonder if Rose has ever seen American Conservative? I hadn’t, so I looked at the on-line issue displayed in August and saw articles by the journalist and Middle East specialist Charles Glass; Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University; Eric Margolis; and Buchanan himself, on the falling real wages of the American working class. This is the ‘extreme right’? Buchanan is an isolationist and a populist.(19)
David Rose: ‘….and described herself to me as a “conservative anarchist”. Meanwhile, her story first surfaced – with her name concealed – in a dubious outlet: the Executive Intelligence Review, a virulently anti-semitic magazine run by conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche.’
RR: Kwiatkowski writes widely for the American libertarian press and was described to me as being on the isolationist wing of the libertarian movement by Dr Chris Tame of the Libertarian Alliance. LaRouche is a conspiracy theorist, and most of his ideas are nonsense; but is EIR ‘virulently anti-semitic?’ I haven’t seen it for several years but the issues I have seen didn’t seem that way to me. But we get Rose’s drift: Kwiatkowsky is a hidden anti-semite.
David Rose: ‘Kwiatkowski told me she admired LaRouche’s work and admitted giving his editor, Jeff Steinberg, an interview. However, she also needed an echo chamber. She got one in Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who supplied quotes endorsing her story.’
RR: ‘Echo chamber’? ‘Supplied quotes’? Why not ‘support from’? Because Rose is trying to distract us from seeing that Kwiatkowski was supported by a former senior figure in the DIA. What is Rose’s agendum?
Not oil but democracy and feminism!
OSP’s existence is widely credited to Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, (20)one of a group of pro-Israeli defence intellectuals who have been around the Washington scene since the 1970s, the self-styled ‘cabal’.(21) To Wolfowitz’s defence came The Sunday Telegraph and Philip Sherwen’s ‘Revealed: the special relationship behind America’s Middle East policy’ (1 August 2004). Sherwen’s article ‘revealed’ Wolfowitz’s relationship with ‘his closest companion and most valued confidante….. a middle-aged Arab feminist whose own strongly held views on installing democracy in her native Middle East has helped bolster his resolve.’ This is a Saudi called Shaba Ali Raza who works as ‘senior gender co-ordinator (sic) for the Middle East and North Africa’ in the World Bank and previously worked for the National Endowment for Democracy.(22) So the invasion of Iraq was part of a drive to democratise the the Arab world and advance the cause of women in it!
Notes
1. Colin Brown, Kim Sengupta and Andrew Grice, ‘No 10 admits Hutton cover-up’, The Independent 17 July 2004.
2. A similar process is happening in education policy where, inch by inch, the government is backing away from the absurd policies towards schools of its first term, while trying not to acknowledge it is happening.
3. At <www.btlonline.org/btlthosewhotold.html> is a list of the public dissenters.
4. ‘Committee of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change Releases Statement on Need to Replace Bush Administration’, at <http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=137-06162004>
5. <http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/7608FF24-9C52-40FA-A793-5E007EB3E14A.htm>
6. The documents seem to have originated within French intelligence, as some kind of wheeze to plant dodgy documents on the Anglo-American alliance and then expose them as fraudulent. See, for example, Bruce Johnston, ‘Agent behind fake uranium documents worked for France’, The Sunday Telegraph 19 September 2004.
7. Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, July 2004, p. 137. Jones, now retired, gave an interview to The Washington Post in which he described the Iraq intelligence fiasco from his viewpoint. <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36903-2004Aug26.html>
8. This report does not appear to be available on-line but it is discussed at <www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jul2004/intel-j30.shtml> from where the quotes were taken. The Australian equivalent of the Butler Report, the Flood Report, officially titled Report of the Inquiry into Australian intelligence agencies, is available in PDF form at <www.fas.org/irp/world/australia/>
9. Max Hastings, ‘The Iraq intelligence fiasco exposes us to terrible danger’, The Guardian 20 September 2004.
10. <www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1046367.htm>
11. Crispin Black, ‘Any Iranian plot to dupe the CIA will affect Britain for the worse’ The Guardian 26 May 2004
12. Peter Oborne, political editor of The Spectator, in his Evening Standard column, 10 May 2004.
13. I had quick flip through Douglas Hurd’s recent memoir. Hurd is FCO Man, personified. There are no index references for US, USA, United States, America.
14. Adam Nathan and David Leppard, ‘Top official sacked over Blair jibe’, The Sunday Times 25 July 2004
15. The major early story on ‘the cabal’ was by Seymour Hersh, his ‘Selective Intelligence’ in the New Yorker in May 2003 <www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact>.
The OSP’s existence is a testimony to the resistance of the CIA’s intelligence analysts. Kwiatkowski’s claim that one of the major reasons that the US invaded Iraq was the need to prevent Iraq switching its oil receipts from the dollar to the Euro was endorsed by former senior (assistant secretary) British civil servant John Chapman in ‘The real reasons Bush went to war’, The Guardian 28 July 2004.
16. <www.gpoaccess.gov/seriwalset/creports/iraq.html>
17. See her 2003 account, reprinted in Military Week in 2004, at <http://militaryweek.com/kk120103.shtml>.
18. See, for example, ‘The Lie Factory’, <www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html>
19. See <www.antiwar.com/spectator/spec396.html> for his October 2004 thoughts on the war on Iraq.
20. In Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9-11, he’s the one who licks his comb. OSP was not the first such unit set up in the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence in support of the war lobby. See James Bamford’s A Pretext for War (reviewed below) p.289.
21. Several of this group were graduate students together. On the very interesting blog <www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/001067.html> one of the correspondents wrote that ‘Chalabi, Wolfowitz, and Shulsky (the Director of OSP) all went to graduate school together at the University of Chicago. Chalabi and Wolfowitz studied with the same man, Albert Wohlstetter. The ties between these guys are very deep indeed’ and cites <http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0306/alumni/lines.shtml> as evidence.
22. Further on in the article we discover that Shaba Raza and her divorced husband, Bulent Ali Raza, who now heads the Turkish programme for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, studied at the MI6 annex St Antony’s College, Oxford, in the early 1980s.