Spymasters or spinmeisters?
Jul 16th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
SourceBritish and American inquiries into intelligence failures over Saddam Hussein’s supposed illegal weapons have both found that their countries’ spy chiefs hyped up questionable evidence, which happened to help their political masters make the case for warSADDAM HUSSEIN’S supposed active pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear “weapons of mass destruction” was the main justification that President George Bush and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, gave for launching the invasion of Iraq last year. However, when America’s then chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, gave his interim report to Congress earlier this year, he had to admit that months of post-war searching had turned up precious little evidence of such weapons programmes. The American intelligence reports claiming they did exist were “almost all wrong”, he admitted. By implication, so were the similar claims made by British intelligence. Mr Bush, and in turn Mr Blair, were thus forced to launch separate inquiries into where their spies went wrong.
On Wednesday July 14th, five days after its American equivalent, the British inquiry, led by Lord Butler, a former senior civil servant, announced its findings. Both inquiries reached essentially the same conclusion: that spy chiefs’ reports, on which the case for war was based, had reached unjustifiably strong conclusions and failed to admit that these were based on pretty shaky evidence. This means that the two intelligence dossiers presented to the American and British people by their leaders, just before the war, exaggerated the likelihood that Saddam’s regime was a serious threat to the West.
However, there were notable differences in the tone of the two inquiries’ reports. The American report, written by a bipartisan committee of senators, was quite scathing. A few weeks before its publication, George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, announced his resignation, for “personal reasons”. By contrast, Lord Butler’s report, in characteristic British civil-service fashion, went out of its way to insist that no individuals could be blamed for the misleading contents of the now-notorious “September dossier”, since its failings were “collective”. Lord Butler specifically recommended that the government reject any calls for the resignation of John Scarlett. As the chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), Mr Scarlett was the dossier’s lead author. He has since been appointed director of the Secret Intelligence Service (familiarly known as MI6).
Lord Butler was not asked to look at how politicians and their advisers used the reports provided by the intelligence agencies—the American Senate inquiry, by contrast, will now go on to look into this question. However, both inquiries have said that they found no evidence that spy chiefs had been pressured to produce assessments that suited policy decisions their political masters had already taken.
No direct pressure, perhaps, but as the Butler report noted, the Blair government’s desire for a dossier that supported its policy on Iraq “put a strain” on the JIC as it tried to uphold “normal standards of neutral and objective assessment”. Furthermore, the Butler inquiry’s assertion that spymasters had not been under political pressure is somewhat undermined by its failure to question Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s former chief spin-doctor. An earlier official inquiry, by Lord Hutton—into how one of the September dossier’s main assertions had led to the suicide of David Kelly, a British expert on Iraqi weapons—had expressed concerns about the closeness of the working relationship between Mr Campbell and Mr Scarlett.
The British dossier’s most controversial assertion was that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes. At the time, the Blair government did little to discourage the widespread assumption that this meant long-range weapons could reach British targets, such as the military base on Cyprus. However, the Butler inquiry (like an earlier inquiry by a parliamentary committee) said the dossier ought not to have included the 45-minute claim without making it clear that intelligence chiefs thought it in fact referred to short-range, battlefield weapons—or at least it should have admitted that it was unclear what sort of weapons it referred to.
In general, both the British and American inquiries criticised their countries’ intelligence chiefs for omitting the strong caveats and doubts they ought to have attached to their assertions, especially in the dossiers. Another example of this was the aluminium tubes that Saddam had been seeking, supposedly to make centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. The Butler inquiry criticises the British dossier for failing to admit that the tubes would have had to be substantially re-engineered to make them suitable for centrifuges. The American Senate inquiry criticised the CIA for implying in the public version of its dossier that the tubes probably were for making bomb materials, whereas in a second, secret version of the dossier shown to congressmen, it admitted that the Department of Energy had concluded they probably were not.
The two inquiries reiterate some of the weaknesses of intelligence-gathering that have become widely recognised since the September 11th 2001 attacks in America. The CIA, MI6 and other agencies had a poor reading of threats because they had too few first-hand sources in the region. Those sources they did have were not properly confirmed. Since both British and American intelligence were found to have underestimated Saddam’s weapons programmes in the run-up to the first Gulf war in the early 1990s, they may have over-compensated for this by overstating the evidence this time round.
Over to the votersThe latest inquiries—which will be followed in the next few days by a separate inquiry report on the intelligence failures relating to the September 11th attacks—will give opponents of Mr Bush and Mr Blair plenty of ammunition. The failure to find any illegal weapons programmes in Iraq has helped undermine Mr Bush’s reputation and he now faces a struggle to get himself re-elected in November. Mr Blair, who will probably face the voters’ verdict next year, is also weakened—in the days before the Butler report there was renewed speculation that he has been thinking of stepping down. The day after the report, in two by-elections in hitherto safe parliamentary seats for Mr Blair's Labour Party, it lost one to the anti-war Liberal Democrats and only narrowly held the other.
However, the two leaders' principal opponents are not in such a strong position to attack: Senator John Kerry, Mr Bush’s Democratic challenger, read the more detailed, classified version of the CIA dossier and yet still backed the war. Michael Howard, the leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative Party, also supported the war.
Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of America’s version of the Butler inquiry, said he did not know if Congress would have let the war go ahead if it had known what is now known about the quality of the intelligence. If the British dossier had been more frank, Mr Blair might also have been unable to persuade Parliament and the British public of the case for war. But both leaders have responded to their respective inquiries by arguing that, illegal weapons or not, the world is better off without Saddam’s regime.
And, who knows, the fabled illegal arms might yet turn up. A senior official in the new Iraqi government suggested this week that some materials for making such weapons may have been shifted into neighbouring countries. Meanwhile American inspectors continue to search for them in Iraq, which Lord Butler noted is a very large country, with “lots of sand” in which to hide things.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.