The New Spymasters (26 page)

The interrogation of Latif was conducted by the same SIS officer, G—, and by Dr Peter. But it was incomplete. To avoid giving away who their source was, the pair could not ask any specific questions about Alwan. So the two interrogators failed, for example, to get from Latif that Alwan had been fired from the CEDC in 1995. If they had asked him and clarified this point, they could have alerted the UK and Germany before the war that Curveball's claims to have witnessed up-to-date germ weapons production and the accident in 1998 were fanciful. This is an example of how the secrecy involved in source protection can prove very costly.

Nevertheless, what Latif did tell G— and Dr Peter made the story about Latif's son seem doubtful. As Latif said after the war, ‘I don't know what he [Alwan] said. But in 1995 my son was sixteen years old and in that year he came to the UK to do his GCSEs and he's still here. How could he be involved in these things? I heard [Curveball] mentioned several things about my family, my son. But he's clearly not that clever. If people lie they should fabricate it well! My son was sixteen in 1995.'
20

It was after this trip that SIS penned a report in April 2002 that summarized their conclusions about Curveball and rather neatly hedged their bets. The classified cable to the CIA said that SIS was ‘inclined to believe that a significant part of [Curveball's] reporting is true' in the light of his detailed technical descriptions. But also they were ‘not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source' and said that ‘elements of [Curveball's] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators'. Despite all this, the CIA noted that SIS ‘continued officially to back Curveball's reporting throughout this period'.
21

Whatever the doubts that emerged, Dr Peter kept faith with Curveball, even if, as a professional, he emphasized that he was a single source that needed confirmation. One way he and colleagues rationalized growing contradictions was by developing a theory that some of Curveball's intelligence might be hearsay from a ‘sub-source'. They knew he was speaking to people in Baghdad by telephone. Dr Peter asked the BND to tap Curveball's phone. He was told they lacked both the resources and the legal authority. The way some in the BND came to see it, if Curveball's information was second-hand but still accurate, did it really matter?

It was not just the Germans who found a way to rationalize their doubts. As the WMD Commission exposed, while analysts at the hugely resourced US agencies had been hired to be sceptical, they instead viewed intelligence like movies, constantly suspending disbelief. One CIA analyst had remarked, ‘Mobile BW [biological weapon] information comes from [several] sources, one of whom is credible and the other is of undetermined reliability. We have raised our collection posture in a bid to locate these production units, but years of fruitless searches by UNSCOM indicate they are well hidden.'
22
The WMD Commission report notes caustically, ‘The analysts appear never to have considered the idea that the searches were fruitless because the weapons were not there.'
23

Eventually, after every corner of Iraq had been searched and nothing found, and after even Curveball admitted he had lied, Dr Peter finally accepted that Alwan's story was a fabrication, according to friends. But, they added, the retired BND scientist continued to puzzle over where the information had come from. He apparently sensed a darker conspiracy. ‘My feeling is that he was being fed by someone else,' he told an ex-colleague. Curveball had had so much detail on so many places, but so little on others. ‘Only two countries in the world have the capability of it,' he would say – and by that he meant Israel and the United States. No one had the heart to suggest to Dr Peter that the man who had really been feeding Curveball all his lies – perhaps unconsciously and without malice – was Dr Peter himself.

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As it turned out, Curveball was not a spy who single-handedly took the world to war, but his story did illustrate how even honest men could construct lies. It also showed that good human intelligence needed to start with a healthy and professional relationship between an agent and his handler, and for the ultimate consumers of intelligence to verify that it was being gathered in a professional way.

At a higher level, Curveball's story also exposed the arrogance of a tick-box approach that qualified intelligence as sufficient to justify political action simply because several sources appeared to suggest the same thing. Brian Jones, a senior intelligence analyst on Britain's Defence Intelligence Staff, was one of the few who had challenged the intelligence case before the war. But, when asked why SIS had set aside its own concern that Curveball was a ‘possible fabricator', he said that most intelligence officers in Britain and the US had always been ‘uneasy' about the story of mobile weapons laboratories. But that had changed when suddenly new sources appeared to corroborate the story, as well as new pressure to publish evidence.

‘There was always plenty of caution around about “Curveball” on both sides of the Atlantic until certain critical documents were required,' Jones said, meaning that pressure to produce public documents had encouraged the intelligence chiefs to throw caution to the wind. ‘The bottom line on what went wrong is that forceful political leadership in both the UK and US left no doubt about what they believed the assessment on Iraq should say.'
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The intelligence agencies were in transition, ‘still adapting to an alien and nonsensical culture of satisfying the customer to stay in business', and it was this effort that had killed their better judgement.

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One of the sources that appeared to back up Curveball's account was run by SIS and code-named Red River. According to the WMD Commission, this source ‘provided a single report that Iraq had mobile fermentation units mounted on trucks and railway cars'. He was mentioned when Colin Powell spoke of how a source ‘in a position to know' had reported that Iraq had mobile production systems mounted on trucks and railway cars.
25

A secret annexe to the WMD Commission report accused SIS of misleading the CIA on Red River. Though supposedly ‘in a position to know', the agencies had dealt with this source second-hand: it was someone whom SIS officers had not directly met or vetted. According to the Commission, classified material discussed the ‘CIA's discovery (after the war) that the fourth source, whose reporting the Director of Central Intelligence [Tenet] stated corroborated Curveball's reporting, was not the direct source of the reporting sourced to him on Biological Weapons'.
26

That criticism is disputed by some of those involved at SIS. At the time, said one officer, Dearlove and Tenet were constantly in touch. They had a special one-to-one ‘cipher phone' to maintain a direct, personal channel. According to a senior SIS figure:

Red River was indeed a sub-source, but it is out of the question that our reservations were not shared with the CIA … He was a valid sub-source who, because of the sensitive position he was in, fled Iraq in the build-up to the war and settled in another Arab country. His intelligence about biological weapons has not been discredited, nor the source's whose sub-source he was.
27

As other highly experienced officers argued, the point was not that Red River was a useless source, it was just that, like other Iraq sources, his evidence had been overplayed. This was a lesson in how the word of secret agents, even in combination, could rarely be presented as proof. HUMINT by its nature, as the modern spy agency should have known from decades of experience, was rarely conclusive. ‘The best readers of human intelligence are artists not scientists. HUMINT is about texture. And so we did not expect our reports to lead to some great reversal of policy,' said a senior British spymaster.

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Little by little, the unravelling of the intelligence case for war in Iraq had shown how, despite all the technical means of intelligence collection at the West's disposal, so much still depended on the fragile nature of human intelligence, and it had been found wanting. Those few good spies that Britain and America had in place in Iraq did not offer the clear indication of a threat from Saddam Hussein that the political leadership wanted.

As some former American and British officers argued, the real problem proved not to be the shortage of agents inside Iraq but a shortage of professional intelligence officers who would dare, to use the old Quaker adage, to ‘speak truth unto power'.

Dearlove, said one ex-colleague, had extraordinary self-confidence and was the ‘classic bullshitter extraordinaire', but, according to another former SIS officer, his weakness was that he was a ‘failure on the sofa' in Downing Street. ‘He was just too eager to please. He had no experience of really upsetting people.' A retired SIS officer, speaking to the official Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War, described ‘wishful thinking' from the service's leaders that ‘promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow'.
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Elsewhere, a former senior SIS figure said the main point was that the agency's then leadership had ‘tried too hard. They wanted to make a difference, to change policy, change the world. That is always a mistake.'

Dearlove rejected the personal accusations. ‘I'm well aware of the criticisms of me, that I had too close a relationship with the Prime Minister and all this. This is complete rubbish,' he told the Chilcot Inquiry. His subordinates could not be relied on to judge that relationship. ‘If you are looking up from underneath, you have no idea what the job of Chief is like, particularly when the world is in crisis.' He then added:

I challenge anyone to show me any single document that that was somehow improper. I mean, [Stewart] Menzies [the wartime chief of SIS] had a close relationship with [Winston] Churchill during World War 2. During any crisis, the head of intelligence, particularly when a crisis is so angular and difficult, is going to have to deal frequently with ministers. I wasn't sipping Chardonnay in the evenings with Tony Blair, or nipping off to have breakfast with him in Chequers. I was going to meetings, as the head of SIS, to discuss SIS business in relation to the development of national security policy.
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But there were dissidents in SIS who accused its senior leadership of not only overselling intelligence about the Iraq case externally, but of dragooning case officers and sources internally to follow a ‘party line'. One former British intelligence insider claimed that case officers were sent back again and again to revisit their agents and ask them once more to dig up information on WMD. ‘Eventually their sources might come up and say, “Well, if he had WMD, it might be kept here” [mentioning some location in Iraq], and then that was dressed up as real intelligence.' The former officer added, ‘There were people sent home, dismissed outright, for refusing to play along.'

Given how much secrecy surrounds SIS, it is hard to assess such claims. One former senior spymaster, no friend of Dearlove, said it was an exaggerated picture. But, he added, ‘there was real concern by some of those who actually dealt with the sources about the way their intelligence was being hawked about, being exaggerated'. An officer told Chilcot the problem was too much interference in cases by leadership. ‘You cut out expertise, and perhaps you also disable that element of challenge which is, I think, a very important part of operational life in the Service.'
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In short, there had been insiders who thought that while Saddam might have had WMD there was not sufficient intelligence to make that case. These critics, few in number, were drowned out. But, as the Curveball case showed, the rot went deeper. Too many were thoroughly convinced of the argument and most of their actions can be explained by zeal. It was a case of self-deception. And it underlined how, despite their hubris, the modern spymasters, living cloistered like monks in the seclusion of their Top Secret world, could be desperately vulnerable to group-think.

One veteran said, ‘SIS was painfully arrogant before Iraq. It's a dangerous game because when you strut around like that, then no one was going to care when you go down. We had the sh*t ripped out of us.'

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Few at SIS felt proud of this episode. The role played in their own building by Dearlove and his successor, John Scarlett, who had chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee in the pre-war period, was a source of painful division, even if Scarlett would later win back the trust of many with a self-effacing approach.

In the US and Britain, Tenet, Dearlove and other professional intelligence chiefs would forever be forced to live with having signed off on an unprofessional intelligence assessment. Its biggest flaw was not to have been wrong, but rather to have lost sight of the caveats: to have portrayed judgements as clear-cut when the business is, in reality, always grey. But even now it would be just as naive to assume that the failure to find WMD proves that there never were any, as it was naive pre-war to be so certain that they were there. Before the war, there was a whisper of warning, a disquieting note that those in power decided to tune out. After the war, the pendulum of opinion has swung right over, to the point that loose ends, such as indications that Saddam might have actually had some WMD, were brushed aside. The official inquiries, as one former senior SIS officer said, ‘found no room for intelligence that remained unexplained'. What, he asked, about:

• Signal intelligence about Iraqi military's large-scale purchase of atropine (the antidote to nerve gas)?

• A significant line of reporting on the trickle production (in laboratories not industrially) of VX (nerve agent) and its limited weaponization in field artillery rockets?