Published in The Sunday Times, 1 June 2003
The secret battle that has been raging in the secret world over the way the British government is trying to politicise our intelligence services is now in the open. The outcome will decide the path that the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will take for the rest of this century.
At the heart of the fight is a simple question: what are intelligence services for? The traditional view is that since they owe allegiance to the realm and not the government of the day, they are there to report as objectively and as dispassionately as possible what they believe to be the state of the world? The government’s view is that, like any other department, they are there to do whatever is required of them to support government policy.
The problem is new, a direct result of 9/11, the American government’s reaction to it, and President Bush’s declaration about the war on terrorism: “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” It has turned out that he meant this stark choice to apply not only to other countries but to all Americans as well.
The Bush administration believes that once the President has decided upon a policy, then every government department in the United States should be bound to back that policy to the hilt. This includes the intelligence services which should, if necessary, skew their reporting to help Washington’s aims.
Changes in intelligence philosophy tend to cross the Atlantic very quickie–KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn’s paranoid view that the Western services were riddled with Soviet moles, infected MI5 and MI6 in the 1970s and nearly ripped them apart.
So British intelligence officers have been aware for some time before the Iraq war that leading figures in the Bush administration have been trying to impose on the CIA a major shift in the way the agency operates.
The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his team want the agency to concentrate on the gathering intelligence and slim down its teams of analysts. They feel that there should be a doctrinal shift in the CIA and that the analysing of intelligence material and the use made of that material should be decided not by CIA officers but by outsiders, preferably by politicians.
The British intelligence community naively believed that there was little danger of any such move here. A long tradition of raw intelligence material being examined, weighed and processed by groups such as the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), set up as long ago as 1936, ensured that what eventually reached the government represented the considered view of the intelligence community as a whole. However, it arrived with an implicit agreement that the government would not tamper with it, twist it, or abuse it for political ends.
That is now all in doubt. First there was the fiasco of an intelligence report on Iraq’s weapons programme that turned out, as presented by the government, to have been partly plagiarised from a student’s thesis. Then there was the Prime Minister’s Tony Blair’s assertion that some of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready within 45 minutes of an order, a time scale offered without any convincing source, but nevertheless attention-grabbing because it is so precise. This followed Blair’s frequent hints that he was revealing only a fraction of intelligence reports he was receiving.
Now earlier this week there was a leak (almost certainly from the intelligence community) that the government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons programme, based on MI6 reports, and used to bolster the case for war, had been rewritten “to make it more exciting”, and that this was done against MI6’s wishes. If this is not the politicisation of the intelligence services, what is?
It is now clear to the British intelligence community that Blair’s spin doctors like the American idea that the assessment of intelligence material should be in the hands of politicians and its presentation to the public done in a manner best suited to bolster government policy. That master of presentation, the government’s chief spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, director of communications at 10 Downing Street, apparently sees no reason why intelligence reports should be treated any differently that any other government material prepared for public release. It can be tweaked, made more compelling and its images enhanced for stronger human interest appeal.
Warren Reed, a former Australian intelligence officer who worked with MI6, describes the intelligence process as like a thin and delicate thread running from the gatherers to the consumers. “The gatherers have to be trusted and protected, even if their reports sound wacky at first–they often do if you’re thinking from inside a terrorist’s head. But–and here’s the crux of the problem–the nearer that thread gets to the top, the more likely it is that it will be cut or twisted for politicial purposes.”
In its fight-back, the British intelligence community has the example of a group of former CIA officers in Washington called VIPS–Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. VIPS has openly accused the Bush administration of manipulating CIA intelligence about Iraq to fit President Bush’s political agenda, the same charge levelled against Tony Blair.
Ray McGovern, a 27 year CIA veteran who gave intelligence briefings to top Reagan officials before retiring in 1990, said that the administration had not made its case that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda so was engineering the release of intelligence material to push its plans for war. McGovern urged serving CIA officers to break the law and leak to the media information that would help to prove this, an appeal some MI6 officers are also considering.
There was a quick response in the United States. When President Bush claimed that Iraq had trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases, Bob Baer, a former CIA officer who had tracked al-Qaeda’s rise went public to rebut this. “I’m unaware of any evidence of Saddam pursuing terrorism against the US,” he said. Another retired officer added, “The FBI has been pounded upon to make this link.”
Different laws relating to whistle-blowing make it easier for American intelligence officers to speak out than their British cousins. Here, frank and open criticism like this could lead to prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, even if the officer concerned had already left the service.
Instead we can expect unattributable leaks about government interference with intelligence reports, leaks that Downing Street finds easy to rebut. In denying that the government had “beat up” the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons, a Downing Street spokesman said, “Every word was down to the intelligence agencies”–an ambiguous statement at best. Blair himself says that the Joint Intelligence Committee approved the Iraq weapons dossier. Is it too much to hope that someone on the Committee will confirm or deny this?
The late Sir Dick White, one of the most respected chiefs of MI6, once warned that MI6 could only work within the moral climate of the day, and that British society would not for long tolerate any secret service going outside that moral climate. The same rule must also apply to government. It cannot be within the moral climate of Britain today for this government to misuse its intelligence service’s reports to back a political agenda.
Do we really want spin doctors interfering in areas they do not understand, “beating up” intelligence reports to fit a politicial agenda, exposing yet again their corrupt belief that the perception conveyed to the public is more important that the truth?
Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession, a history of intelligence services.
