Thursday, Jan 08, 2004
Our lives are in the hands of the men and women in the shadows. We can board an aircraft only when the secret agencies have checked and re-checked the manifest to pronounce each passenger a solid citizen. Electronic eavesdroppers scoop our conversations from the airwaves; satellites scour every inch of the Earth's crust. Visitors to the US must now add their thumbprints to a biometric database. Anticipating a terrorist catastrophe, the British government lays plans to suspend the nation's democracy. In this war, intelligence rules.
Yet even as we surrender our civil liberties, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq diminishes the credibility of the warnings. Intelligence chiefs will tell you that a serious terrorist attack - perhaps another airline hijack, maybe a "dirty bomb" - is a certainty. Osama bin Laden is at large and al-Qaeda is everywhere. This is no time to quibble about personal freedoms.
But why should the watched believe the watchers? This week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that the US administration had "systematically misrepresented" the threat from Iraq's unconventional weapons in the run-up to war. For all the brutal intent of Saddam Hussein's regime - which was a long-term threat to global security - the danger was neither clear nor present.
The Carnegie report adds substance to the charge that George W. Bush's administration manipulated raw intelligence to make the case for war. We know now that the Pentagon bypassed the usual channels to ensure that secret reports on Iraq's weapons were stripped of vital caveats.
All this, of course, provides comfort for those who opposed the war. The occupying forces in Iraq have not turned up any evidence for the simple reason that weapons of mass destruction were an invention of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. We need not worry about a failure of intelligence, because this was a simple case of political deceit.
It is a neat answer and one that, in Europe at least, fits the mood of the times. Washington's ineptitude in administering postwar Iraq has reinforced the sense of a conflict fought under false pretences. In Britain, the government waits anxiously for the outcome of the Hutton inquiry into the apparent suicide of David Kelly, a weapons scientist. It was Mr Kelly's conversation with a BBC journalist that prompted the charge that Mr Blair had doctored intelligence in the government's own published dossier on Baghdad's WMD armoury.
Neatness, however, is not synonymous with truth. Those who have not waited for Hutton to accuse Mr Blair of falsification must also explain why the heads of all three British intelligence services testified to a parliamentary committee that they were content with the infamous dossier. Were these distinguished public servants and experienced spooks all suborned by the prime minister?
More generally, the important and legitimate argument about how far politicians "glossed" or wilfully misinterpreted information should not be conflated with the real failings of intelligence. For a decade, the west's secret agencies looked at Iraq through a giant magnifying glass. The image, it now turns out, was badly distorted.
The warnings about Iraq's remaining WMD did not start when Mr Bush decided to go to war. As the Carnegie report says, they were consistent throughout the 1990s. On the published evidence, the think-tank concludes that the assessments of the vast US intelligence establishment were simply wrong when it came to Iraq's chemical and biological weapons capabilities. (The record on the nuclear and missile programmes was much better.)
The all-party security and intelligence committee of senior parliamentarians conducted a still more detailed scrutiny of the British intelligence. The committee had access to both the raw and the processed intelligence on Iraq from 1990 onwards and cross-examined both the spymasters and the politicians on its interpretation. It reports that, well before Mr Bush made it to the White House, the agencies had concluded that Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile programmes were still active. To take just one of many examples, the committee says that in April 2000 the government's joint intelligence committee reported that the "intelligence indicated that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place".
I have heard many explanations for such misreadings. Even as Mr Hussein was forced to abandon WMD production, perversely, he wanted the world to believe otherwise. Alternatively, the Iraqi leader's own scientists and generals preferred to deceive him than to admit failure. More prosaically, I have heard one former British intelligence officer argue that the watchers simply got stuck in a rut. Long-held assumptions about the regime were never challenged even after aggressive sanctions and the United Nations inspection regime transformed the environment in which it operated. The British and Americans, of course, were not alone. Israeli agents made the same mistake. France and Russia gave many reasons for their opposition to war. The absence of WMD was not one of them.
None of this is to say the intelligence agencies set out to mislead. Pre-war Iraq, with its Stalinist security regime, was a hard target. But the implications are obvious. Mr Bush is wedded still to the concept of pre-emptive war but, as the Carnegie Endowment notes in the case of Iraq, "the world's three best intelligence services proved unable to provide the accurate information necessary for acting in the absence of imminent threat".
We must recognise intelligence for what it is: fragmented and imperfect, one element among the many on which politicians should draw before making vital judgments about war and peace, domestic security and civil liberties. It has been said often during the past few months that the spymasters in London and Washington were too willing to bend to the wishes of political leaders. The equal and opposite danger is that the politicians are mesmerised by anything stamped "secret". I am told that one person in London more hawkish over Iraq than the prime minister was the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. The best advice I have heard came from a former spook: it would be churlish not to be grateful for intelligence; and foolish not to be sceptical.
philip.stephens@ft.com
Philip Stephens
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