Art of Betrayal (67 page)

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

Kay returned within a few months to tell a stunned Washington they had been ‘almost all wrong'. The US and British administrations had wanted Kay to keep quiet and were furious. British officials had even gone to see the CIA head of station in London to complain about him. The CIA man had cabled Washington but Kay himself was copied into the traffic and asked the MI6 station chief in Baghdad to intervene. This led to another complaint from London to Washington, with Kay again copied in. Charles Duelfer was next up to lead the hunt, passing through London on the way where an eager Blair wanted to hear his plans.
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Those working on inspection reports sensed the anxiety in London. How can you be sure there isn't anything when you haven't covered the whole of the country? British officials kept asking. The inspectors explained they had not just visited sites but interviewed captive Iraqi scientific, military and intelligence officials who all said the same thing. Scarlett was among those keen to make sure that any report was as robust as possible. He emailed a series of ‘nuggets' to Duelfer asking if they would be included. These were unresolved items from an older classified report. Details had been unearthed of Iraqi intelligence doing work on poisons but inspectors said it would be disingenuous to describe this as work on chemical weapons. ‘I could not believe my eyes,' thought Rod Barton, one of the senior inspectors, when he saw the email. He told Duelfer it was unacceptable to include the nuggets since there was no evidence. Over a video conference, Scarlett backed away. ‘The nuggets were fool's gold,' Duelfer reflected. ‘It was obvious the game was up,' Barton, who soon quit, thought. ‘There was no WMD there. They were going to have to bite the bullet and say so.'
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Letting go was not easy.

One by one MI6's prized sources were melting away like mirages in the desert heat. As each oasis was approached, the weary travellers of the MI6 validation team sent out to check the sources, often escorted by special forces soldiers, discovered only sand slipping through their fingers. Some of the key sources did not last long. Just three months after the fall of Baghdad, MI6 interviewed the cherished new source in whom so much had been invested and who had dispelled so many doubts. He denied ever having said anything about accelerated production of biological and chemical weapons.
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With the forty-five-minutes claim, MI6 visited the military officer alleged to have supplied the report, who denied any knowledge of having ever said such a thing. So they went looking for the main source who had passed on the information claiming it was from the military officer. He proved hard to track down. ‘There was a lot of umming and aahing,' remembers one of the people involved. It was clear he had simply made it all up. He was the Baghdad equivalent of Graham Greene's Havana's vacuum cleaner salesman with an overactive imagination. MI6 reported the bad news back to London in 2004. ‘I particularly remember the moment when the Prime Minister was told that the forty-five-minutes intelligence was false,' one individual later recalled. ‘That felt like a pretty big moment in terms of the Prime Minister's trust of SIS and intelligence. Privately, I felt that he felt let down.'
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When an American team went to a key facility looking for Curveball's mobile trailers they found a seed-purification plant. They went back six times to make sure. A six-foot-high wall made it impossible for trailers to move in and out at the location he had described. A confused site manager said there had never been any doors where Curveball indicated.
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Curveball's own travel records revealed he could not have been in Iraq to witness an accident as he had claimed. His former boss admitted he had been fired from his position in 1995. A CIA team who finally got access to Curveball found that he simply refused to answer any more questions when they confronted him with the holes in his account. They also thought the British were doing their best to hold on to his intelligence. Perhaps the mobile laboratories were there just in case Saddam wanted a capacity to produce material in the future, MI6 argued defensively. The Germans and the British disagreed over who had introduced the disputed
technical details into the reporting. It transpired that Curveball had got much of his material by reading inspectors' reports off the internet and piecing it together with the little he knew.
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The British and Americans turned to each other. But we thought you had other intelligence to back everything up? Each realised the other side's material was less substantial than they had believed, and not just on Curveball. They had shared much but never everything. On the Sabri case and Curveball it was only after the war that each realised that the other side had doubts about intelligence the other had thought cast-iron. ‘If only you'd told us everything and we'd told you everything, maybe we could have pieced it together,' one officer told his American counterparts wistfully after the war. The American agreed, but would later wonder whether that would really have made any difference.
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The shutters at Vauxhall Cross came down. ‘It was like drawing teeth,' a Whitehall official said of the long-drawn-out process of MI6 rowing back on its sources and painfully reporting each time to a special JIC sub-committee. The nuclear and missile sources were not too bad, it was argued, but the latter in particular were never relevant to the public debate. Those senior officers who had invested most in the sources continued to argue they had not been wrong. They said the weapons, particularly mobile rocket launchers with weaponised VX, must have been moved to Syria before the war. They said their multiple sources (human and technical) on this were never disproved and were ‘very compelling'.
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But this was thoroughly investigated by the inspectors of David Kay and Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group after the war. They interviewed Iraqi pilots and ground crew to see if anything could have been smuggled on flights; they looked at the routing of trucks. They found no hard evidence. The absence of a clear Syrian motive for accepting such dangerous consignments and the failure of even the Israelis to push the line added to the case against. Some still cling to the fading hope that something will be proved to have gone over the border.

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

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

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

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

Dearlove, who continued to believe that war was the right decision, took a more nuanced line. ‘The policy was made to be over-dependent on the intelligence particularly in presenting the case in parliament,
when in reality there were many others factors contributing to policy decisions,' he told an audience a few years after the war. ‘I think it was feared those other factors would not carry the day with the parliamentary opponents of the war. This calculation turned out to have very undesirable consequences for the intelligence community. There were obvious risks involved, but at the time [they] appeared manageable.'
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It was the overemphasis on intelligence that was the mistake, in his eyes, and the failure to make more of the moral argument for removing Saddam. ‘I agreed with the policy. I still do. I still think it was the right decision to take at that time in the circumstances. But the reasons for going to war were not specifically intelligence based.'
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One of the reasons that Blair and others made the decision for war in the first place, though, was because they believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The two sides – politicians and spies – were so closely conjoined in the run-up to war that separating them requires an almost impossibly delicate operation. Blair was taking a risk, utterly confident in his own judgement. Icarus-like, the service had flown a little too close to the sun, it was said by many. It was an analogy rejected by those at the top of MI6. ‘The Icarus metaphor is used time and again,' argued the Arabist MI6 director who had observed Dearlove work so closely with the Prime Minister. ‘It has limited applicability because Tony Blair was not the sun and Dearlove was not a child with wax wings. They were consenting adults, wrestling with unprecedented policy riddles.' Was there another way? ‘I would have done it differently. I believe in a Chief who stays south of the river and is not so easy to get hold of,' he also said, before adding that this might not have been so easy to carry out in practice. ‘That's my daydream. But that's a … daydream. Real life … is different.'
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A few might have believed they had been left swinging by Number 10 but many more inside MI6 believed the organisation itself was to blame. Some simply acknowledged that their sources had been wrong. Others thought it was their own leadership who had left them exposed by getting too close to power. The unhappiness was palpable. During the Suez Crisis the official machinery of intelligence was largely ignored and bypassed; this time, in an attempt to avoid a similar fate, it had been sucked deep into the maelstrom. ‘The vehicle
of WMD as an argument for the war was incapable of sustaining the weight put upon it, given that we didn't have all the answers and we didn't have the sources,' reflected an MI6 director who had worried for the morale and integrity of his service.
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The impact on MI6's reputation – and its self-perception – was calamitous. The use of intelligence to sell a war to the public might not have mattered much if it turned out to be true. But once it was proved to be wrong, it left the public, and especially those who had been persuaded by the intelligence, feeling bitter, not least towards the spies.

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