Published in The Khaleej Times.

With the war in Afghanistan taking place in a news vacuum — when did you last read in the mainstream media a report on what is happening there — journalism academics have turned their attention to previous wars to see what lessons, if any, have been learnt.

In the current edition of the journal Media, War and Conflict, Michael Griffin, visiting professor of Media Studies at Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota, blows away some of the media myths that have grown around the war in Vietnam.

He writes: “For the last thirty years the media myth of Vietnam has proved a constant touchstone against which the media coverage of every new conflict has been compared. According to this popular version of history, Vietnam was an “uncensored war”. Reporters, photographers and cameramen were allowed unprecedented freedom of movement and the ability to dispatch their material to outlets all over the world, which reproduced them on a daily basis.

Griffin then exposes this as simply untrue and partly responsible for the story that this coverage was responsible for the accusation that it undermined the US war effort and was eventually responsible for America’s defeat in Vietnam.

“It is part of the myth that a liberal American media, as well as British and European reporters, were highly critical of the war and routinely presented stories and images that emphasised American casualties, civilian suffering and lack of US military progress towards victory that eroded public support for the war at home and effectively undermined the US war effort, eventually leading to America’s defeat. Often one or more of the iconic images of that war is given special responsibility for the undermining of American morale.”

Griffin says that a more condensed version of this myth is that Vietnam was the first “living room war” watched on television in the living rooms of American homes and that the onslaught of horrific images turned the American people against their own military. “The media lost the war,” is a slogan still repeated by many and taught as a cautionary tale in military and public relations training programmes.

Griffin says that facts show otherwise. Firstly, the portrayal in the media of the American soldier remained sympathetic right to the end of the war. Next, an analysis of US television coverage of the war in Vietnam showed network news programmes neither depicted the horror of war nor did their reports play a leading role in the collapse of American support for the war at home. But what about the My Lai massacre? According to a recent study of American reactions to news of the massacre, the revelations had little effect on overall American public opinion concerning the war, as did other evidence of Vietnamese civilian suffering, visual or otherwise. Many Americans simply refused to believe the news of the massacre.

Photographic evidence of the truth of the war, evidence that could have shifted the American consensus concerning US involvement, was never allowed to accumulate because there was little desire on the part of the public or the media to confront such realities, says Griffin. Yet, since Vietnam successive Western governments have devised strategies to avoid a repeat of the kind of media success they felt was detrimental in Vietnam. They have adopted a plan for managing the media in wartime that has been amazingly successful in the Falklands war, in the invasion of Panama, the invasion of Grenada and in both Gulf wars and Afghanistan.

Basically this is to deny the media access to the war unless it accepts the military’s conditions, and to ensure that journalists and photographers identify with “the cause” by “embedding” them with a military unit. Even the most independent-minded war correspondents have found it difficult not to identify psychologically with the soldiers on whom they rely for their safety, lodging, food, supplies and information.

This success in controlling the media represents the ultimate victory of the military over a free press.

It is nearly nine years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not called a war on terror anymore. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.

But whatever it is termed, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight—some military men talk of victory in 25 years—but Osama bin Laden, the man America vowed to get “dead or alive”, is as elusive as ever.

Britain and the United States claim that terrorism has grown into an international force that threatens all those who stand with the US. But wait a ?minute. This growth in terrorism has occurred during their colossal war against it, using all the military, political and intelligence powers at their disposal.

So as Saad al-Fagih, director of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, pointed out, “the logical conclusion must be that the so-called war ?on terror in its present form, is yielding precisely the opposite results to those intended.”

Further, as Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, charges, “War is itself terrorism… that taking away people and subjecting them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give us more security but less.”

The main front in the war, now Afghanistan, remains a disaster. The British Army is taking casualties at a level not seen since the 1950s. The United Nations reported recently that Afghan civilian deaths doubled in 2009.

Two thirds of the British public believes that the war is unwinnable and all the troops should be brought home by Christmas. The hawks urge the Pentagon to put even more troops into the war, forgetting that General Westmoreland had a million soldiers in Vietnam but said he needed a million more in order to win.

At home there has been a shift in the public mood. Insiders are said to be telling President Obama he should follow the advice given to President Johnson in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire – “Declare victory and leave.”

And abroad the United States slides steadily downwards in the Anholt-GMI Nations Brand Index, the equivalent of a world popularity contest.

Some knowledgeable Americans recognise the danger. Robert Baer, a former top CIA officer, says: “Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it is an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere.”

The unpalatable fact is that Britain and America are fighting an unwinnable war against an unidentifiable enemy. How can they fight terrorism when they cannot even agree what terrorism is?

That seems unlikely but either way what journalists should certainly be doing is reporting the views of terrorists so as to try to understand their motives. Would it not be more productive to try to understand what the terrorists want and what they would be prepared to accept to end their operations.

Instead acres of newsprint and hours of TV time have been devoted to condemning them as “evil”, a word which absolves us from thinking about the problem: if they are evil (born evil; grew up to be evil; taught to be evil? Which is it?), then it is useless to try to understand them.

But as David Clark, the former British Labour Party adviser points out, those who condemn terrorists as evil cannot answer the question: why is there more evil around today than there used to be? And they have nothing to contribute to the debate about what needs to happen next.

Published in The Khaleej Times.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 13 August 2006

We have been conned for years over our airport security.

There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.

Their assets have been seized, they are being questioned, and, after a security alert at the highest level and enormous disruption at our airports, we are getting back to normal. But consider this. Instead of celebrating the undoubted skill and dedication of MI5 and the police, the Government should also admit that the affair has revealed that we have been conned for years over our airport security.

We had been led to believe that every possible precaution had been taken to prevent a terrorist carrying a bomb on to a plane in hand luggage. This turns out not to be true. Against the type of attack the group was allegedly plotting, we would have been defenceless.

Original ideas for terrorist outrages are hard to dream up. There is a limit to what is effective, headline-grabbing and yet feasible. Al-Qa’ida’s destruction of the twin towers in 2001, by turning civilian airliners into enormous missiles, set a standard that terrorists have been trying to replicate ever since.

They have been frustrated by new anti-hijacking security measures (armoured doors to the flight deck, the banning of sharp objects from hand luggage and passenger profiling). But did no anti-terrorist officer step into a terrorist’s mindset to think, “OK, I can’t hijack the aircraft and fly it into a building. But I can still turn a plane into a missile by blowing it up from the inside while it’s over a densely- populated area of London or New York”? Then the officer would have moved on to the problem of how to get the explosive on to the aircraft. The most effective explosive made from ingredients available to amateurs involves large quantities of agricultural fertiliser. This sort of bomb, once favoured by the IRA, could be quickly ruled out because it is bulky and is hardly the sort of substance one could explain to an airport security officer searching hand luggage.

But there are other explosives that can be made from ingredients available at any chemist’s shop. The amounts needed are comparatively small and can be disguised as cosmetics, drinks or medicine. Police say that this is what the group arrested on Wednesday and Thursday was planning to use, taking the ingredients on board separately and then mixing them in the aircraft’s toilet.

Amazingly, it turns out that this had been done before. So not only did the anti-terrorist authorities fail to think like terrorists, they could not have taken sufficient note of the earlier event and the lessons it held.

In 1994, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Pakistani linked to al-Qa’ida, carried the ingredients for a bomb on to a Philippine Airlines flight bound for the United States. They were in his hand luggage in innocuous-looking containers, including a bottle of contact lens solution. He mixed them together in the plane’s toilet, attached a timer, put the bomb beneath a passenger seat, and then got off the plane at the next refuelling stop.

Soon after take-off the bomb exploded, killing a Japanese businessman occupying the seat and tearing a two foot hole in the cabin floor, revealing the cargo hold beneath. But the fuselage of the plane remained intact and the pilot managed to land safely at Okinawa, with the Japanese the only casualty.

But Yousef’s success in getting a bomb through security and on to a plane highlighted serious security weaknesses. While all luggage that will go into a plane’s cargo hold is screened for explosives, few pieces of hand baggage are. They go through X-ray machines which can pick up the wires of a bomb’s detonator, but X-rays and metal detectors cannot show whether a bag contains explosives – or the ingredients for explosives.

The technology is there – “puffer machines” blow air over passengers and hand baggage to detect whether either have come into contact with explosives. But Peter DeFazio, a member of the US Congress Aviation Subcommittee, says, “We have done nothing at checkpoints to detect the kind of bomb that Yousef designed and which is available to be copied on the internet. That is just unconscionable.”

The unanswered question is whether it is possible to make a chemical bomb of the kind Yousef used that would be big enough to bring down a modern airliner. Experts say that it would depend on the location of the device. If it were to destroy structural elements of the plane, or its fuel lines, then it would crash. But most planes could survive if the bomb blew out only the aluminium sheeting of the fuselage.

How much of all this did our anti-terrorism forces know? They must have studied the Yousef case. But then why did they leave it until last Thursday to implement measures to prevent bomb ingredients being carried on to aircraft in passengers’ hand baggage? And then announce it in such a dramatic manner?

The most obvious reason is that they received last-minute intelligence that the plot was reaching a climax. And without knowing much more about the plotters’ background they were unable to assess how technically competent at bomb-making they might be.

For although the ingredients for a chemical bomb are reasonably easy to obtain, it turns out that successfully mixing them is much harder and more dangerous than it at first appeared. Some of the ingredients may be commercially available but they are too diluted to be of any use in a bomb. Others require chemical refining to purify them. The terrorist could end up blowing his fingers off or setting fire to himself but leaving the aircraft toilet intact. The authorities had to assume, however, that they were dealing with skilled bomb-makers.

As for the dramatic way the news was announced, there is more than just a sneaking suspicion that it suits governments to ramp up the terrorist threat because a sliver of fear makes its citizens easier to lead and control. They can always argue, as the Prime Minister has, that it would be irresponsible not to act on warnings or unverified information – even if these turn out to be wrong – because what if they turn out to be right? In short, we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

And yet we stubbornly refuse to be moved by them. On Thursday, no one panicked. Passengers at airports, interviewed about their reaction, showed a marked reluctance to cancel their flights. The stock market shivered but recovered. On Friday the pubs and restaurants were as crowded as ever. Why aren’t we more afraid? One answer is that, although the authorities seem confident that they have thwarted a well-organised and dangerous conspiracy, we have seen previous “threats” crumble away. Since 9/11 there have been more than 600 arrests in Britain to do with terrorism matters. Only 100 of these people were charged and fewer than 20 have so far been convicted. Rightly or wrongly, there is a feeling that the security services and the police, both with increased staffing levels and better funding, want to be seen to be doing their job. Raids and arrests generate good publicity.

A journalist once put it to Dame Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5, that the threat of terrorism had been overcooked. Surprisingly, she agreed. “You are more likely to be run over by a bus,” she said.

“It’s difficult for me to say,” she continued, “because I’ve been out of it for 10 years. I’ve no doubt, though, from what people who do know say, that there are a large number of plots. But at the back of all this, I feel we are tending towards this sense that we must all be 100 per cent safe, and I suppose my feeling is that a better way of presenting it is to say the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and we have to make choices about how much of our civil liberties we want to give up.”

So what will happen next? It’s a safe bet that the era of easy, carry-on cabin baggage is over. Security checks will get tougher and check-in times longer. We might even have to contemplate CCTV cameras in airline toilets.

And, hopefully, our anti-terrorism forces will adopt one of the few pieces of good advice that the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ever given. Once, when seeking to shake up the CIA, he called for a more intuitive approach to anti-terrorist intelligence. Our security services, he said, should “put themselves into the other guy’s shoes and think like him”.

Phillip Knightley is author of ‘The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century‘.

Published in The Sunday Times, 2 October 2005

After watching the England v India one day cricket match at Lords last summer, I had a drink with Peter O’Toole and then walked with him to his car. Outside Lords Tavern we passed a large group of young Indians having a few beers to celebrate their team’s victory. The moment they spotted O’Toole they broke into a chant of “Lawrence. . . Lawrence . . Lawrence.” Thinking about it later I realised how extraordinary this was. It was not O’Toole’s presence as an actor that excited them but the image of Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had lived and died before they were even born.

So 70 years after his death–an anniversary marked by a exhibition in his honour at the Imperial War Museum and the publication of a lavish new book packed with illustrations, some of them not seen before–Lawrence of Arabia rides again, exercising his fascination for yet another generation in an age where heroes are noticeably scarce.

Thomas Edward Lawrence, soldier, author, politician, secret agent, creator of nations, friend of the famous–the list could be almost endless–was only 47 when he died after crashing his motor cycle near Bovington military camp, Dorset. He was already famous for his role in fighting with Arab insurgents against the Turks in the Middle East in the First World War.

His death in circumstances which remain mysterious to this day only fuelled his fame. He became one of the most-written about Englishman in the world, almost as well-known as Winston Churchill. A list of the books and articles about him comprise books in themselves. Jeffrey Meyers’s “T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography” (New York and London, Garland. 1974) lists 760 books and articles about him; another Lawrence bibliography by Philip O’Brien runs to 894 pages. He inspired an internationally successful play, Terence Rattigan’s “Ross”, and one of the first blockbuster films, David Lean’s epic “Lawrence of Arabia, which starred Peter O’Toole as Lawrence and Omar Sharif as the Arab leader Feisal. It remains one of the most successful money-makers in cinema history. A BBC documentary on Lawrence by Malcolm Brown, author of the new book, had ten million viewers at its first showing.

Lawrence’s own account of the Arab revolt, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” is one of the best-known books in the English language, published and re-published in many languages and many editions, the rarer ones changing hands for large sums. Collectors vie to buy Lawrence ephemera, admirers retrace his journeys in Arabia, military historians lecture on his tactics.

To many Lawrence represents all that is finest in the English Imperial Hero, a man of integrity who took up his country’s burden in the Middle East and led his faithful Arabs to victory over the Turks. Then, the legend goes, believing that politicians had betrayed the Arabs, that his word pledged as an Englishman had been dishonoured, he retired from public life and buried himself in the ranks of the army and then the Royal Air Force, living a spartan life, dying tragically young, a white Arab, Prince of Mecca, uncrowned King of Arabia.

This is a difficult reputation to dent, although many have tried. When in 1968 the then associate editor of The Sunday Times, Leonard Russell, masterminded an investigation which revealed that Lawrence led a bizarre sexual life, and had persuaded a young soldier, John Bruce, to thrash him with a birch, the newspaper serialised the material in its pages not once but twice. Russell admitted that he enjoyed the idea that Lawrence had “fooled” so many eminent people–Winston Churchill, Lord Curzon, George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte. “Pity they’re all dead,” Russell said. “Imagine their faces if they could have read that their old chum T.E. paid rough trade to flog him.”

Lawrence then became the subject of not one but two post-mortem psychoanalyses, one by a distinguished psychiatrist from Yale University, Dr. John Mack, and the other by an equally distinguished consultant psychiatrist from Maudsley Hospital, London, Dr. Denis Leigh. Needless to say, they reached different conclusions. Mack decided that Lawrence had tried to take the guilt and troubles of the modern world on to his own shoulders, and in the words of the title of the book he eventually wrote, was “A Prince of our Disorder”. Leigh, who interviewed Bruce and examined Lawrence’s medical records, put all Lawrence’s troubles down to utter physical exhaustion due to his wartime service.

Lawrence’s supporters rushed to defend him. The thrust of their letters was that they could not believe that anyone would want to tarnish Lawrence’s name. They berated The Sunday Times for opening its pages to the John Bruce story. “It suggests the hate literature of Hitler and Nasser,” wrote one.

The reason they could not believe what they read was because the one thing we can say with certainty about Lawrence of Arabia was that he was an enigma. No one really knew or understood him, even his closest friends. Anyone so elusive becomes immune to criticism. As fast as his debunkers made new and damaging revelations about him–and I admit to being among them–the legend adapted and survived. Michael Yardley, whose interested in Lawrence began when as a young army officer he was posted to Bovington camp where Lawrence had also served, attempted to explain the fascination of the Lawrence legend.

“It has all the ingredients for several best-sellers–romantic and still-topical settings, a classic wartime adventure, political intrigue, secret agents, revelations about the famous, mysterious clues, royalty, a personal scandal, conspiracy, human interest, philosophy and a talented hero who is constantly trying to beat the system, who renounced high office to follow his chosen path among the humblest of men, and who dies in an accident which has never been fully explained. It is a dynamic story without a finite end.”

This goes some of the way to enlighten us but it fails to tell us how it is that the British, supposedly an unromantic race, have developed so big a passion for this diminutive man. I believe that the answer is obvious, but apart from a few perceptive authors, most have missed it. Lawrence of Arabia was the first modern celebrity, a creation of one of the smartest public relations promoters and propagandists of the 20th century, Lowell Thomas, an American whose skills, if he were still around today, would make Max Clifford look like a beginner.

To understand what Thomas did and to appreciate the political forces behind him, we need to look at where Lawrence’s life stood in the early twenties and how he had arrived there–a mini-biography. Lawrence’s father, heir to an Irish baronetcy, had left his wife and four daughters and run away with the governess, one Sarah Junner, also known as Sarah Madden They could not marry, but they had five sons, the second of whom was T.E. Lawrence, born in Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire in 1888.

The family eventually moved to Oxford and “Ned”, as he was known, won a scholarship to Jesus College. While there he came under the influence of D.G. Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, but also a political intelligence officer specialising in the Middle East. Hogarth believed in those ideas of enlightened imperialism formulated by the Round Table, a club of influential Britons who wanted a union of all white, English-speaking nations.

Under Hogarth’s influence the young Lawrence began to study military tactics and to train his body to resist pain and exhaustion. He amazed his fellow students by walking his bicycle downhill and riding it uphill and by making a 1,000 mile walking tour of Syria. With Hogarth’s approval, he spent his summers increasing his knowledge of the Middle East, noting likely allies and enemies in the event of war with Germany. In 1914, Hogarth got him into British military intelligence and when Turkey joined the war against the Allies, he was posted to Cairo, where he ran an intelligence operation, recruiting his own agents.

In 1916 Lawrence, although only 28 and still nominally a junior intelligence officer with the rank of acting-Captain, was sent to Mesopotamia (now Iraq) to contact the commander-in-chief of a Turkish army which had surrounded a British expedition at Kut and offer him £1 million to release the British soldiers. His mission failed but while he was in Basra he spent some time trying to find an Arab nationalist who might be prepared to lead an Arab revolt against the Turks.

He was scarcely back in Cairo when Hussein, the Grand Sherif of Mecca, raised his banner in just such a revolt. Lawrence had written a paper outlining his views on the politics and strategy of the Revolt, was sent as liaison officer to Emir Feisal, the Sherif’s son and military leader of the Arabs, to ensure that it ran in Britain’s favour. To inspire the Arabs to fight, Lawrence promised them freedom and independence, all the while knowing that Britain’s Middle Eastern policy was to divide the former Turkish territories with France and Russia, leaving little worthwhile for the Arabs. Worried by this deception, he tried to work out a compromise acceptable to his conscience. But since he was above all a dedicated British officer serving his country, he carried out his mission.

He immersed himself in the ways of the Bedouin Arabs, wearing their clothes and adopting their customs so as to be able to influence Feisal. He was so successful that Feisal linked himself and his followers to Lawrence and the British for the rest of the war. Lawrence and the Arabs captured the Red Sea port of Aqaba and defeated a superior force of Turks at the battle of Tafileh.

But it was their guerrilla tactics, such as hit and run raids on Turkish supply trains on the Damascus-Medina railway, blowing up locomotives and viaducts, for which Lawrence became known. According to the military historian Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the widespread use of guerrilla warfare in the World War II can be indirectly attributed to Lawrence. But on an intelligence-gathering mission for such a raid, Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars, he was taken prisoner by the Turks and before he could escape was sexually abused and raped by the Bey of Deraa and/or his troops.

The Arabs played an important part In the British army’s drive on Damascus. They had been enthused by a new British declaration that any territory the Arabs liberated themselves would become independent. But when Damascus fell, ending 400 years of Turkish rule, the British commander, General Edmund Allenby, told Feisal that the Arabs were to have nothing to do with the civil governing of Damascus. Lawrence, after hard words with Allenby, suddenly packed up and returned to Britain, his military career effectively over.

He now devoted his time to pushing for a political settlement in the Middle East, no easy task. The Zionists were preparing to hold Britain to its promise of a national home for Jews in Palestine. But the Arabs understood that Palestine had been promised to them, so a campaign was mounted with Lawrence to the fore, to persuade the Arabs to accept this new situation. In 1919 Lawrence went with Feisal to Paris for the Peace Conference, where Britain and France began to divide the spoils of victory. As a member of the Colonial Office team he accompanied Churchill to the Cairo Conference in 1921 where the Middle Eastern question was finally “settled”. France was to have Syria, Britain Mesopotamia (Iraq). Palestine was to remain a British mandate . Feisal was “elected” King of Iraq, the chief opposition candidate having been kidnapped by the British. All the promises to the Arabs had taken second place to the Britain’s hunger for oil.

Although Lawrence said publicly that all promises to the Arabs had been fulfilled, he was depressed by his failure and wrote to a friend saying, “{T]he balance after all is in being quit of things, and as soon as I can get the nomad out of me and be quite peaceful, I shall not want to hear of the East again.”

There was no chance of that happening. For while Lawrence had been fighting a tenacious rearguard action to implement his plan for the Middle East, the American journalist Lowell Thomas was turning Lieutenant-Colonel T. E. Lawrence, a soldier most people had never heard of, into the Prince of Mecca, the Deliverer of Damascus. Almost overnight the newly-elected Fellow of All Souls, Oxford University, a saddened recluse at work on his manuscript, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, became as Lawrence of Arabia, the centre of a great fashion, the first modern celebrity.

When the United States had entered the First World War in April 1917, it was not with the whole-hearted approval of he American people. Historically reluctant to be drawn into Europe’s troubles, most Americans wanted to remain neutral. Even after the United States had declared war, enlistments were so poor that the government had to raise a conscript army. To inspire the nation to fight, a propaganda campaign was needed to inspire what President Wilson’s private secretary called “the people’s righteous wrath”.

So in the summer of 1917 the Administration approached Lowell Thomas, a Chicago reporter, and asked him to go to Europe, find material there that would that would encourage the American people to support the war, and hurry back with it. Thomas was well-known for his talent for writing simple but exciting stories and Washington thought stories of war heroes would change the national mood.

Thomas liked the idea but had bigger plans. He was intrigued by the possibilities provided by the rapidly-developing art of documentary film and dreamed of not only writing about the glamour of war but filming it as well. An indication of his ambition is that he budgeted his expedition at $75,000, nearly a million dollars in today’s money.

This was too much even for the American government, so Thomas turned to a group of eighteen wealthy Chicago meat-packers. It seems that these businessmen owed him a favour because he had exposed in his newspaper a confidence trickster who had been trying to blackmail them–without publishing the damaging blackmail material. Grateful for Thomas’s discretion, they readily agreed to finance him and he rewarded them with his enigmatic dedication in his book With Lawrence in Arabia: “To eighteen gentlemen of Chicago this narrative of a modern Arabian knight is gratefully dedicated”.

Thomas arrived in France in the summer of 1917 accompanied by his recently-acquired wife, Fran, and a skilled cameraman called Harry Chase. It did not take Thomas long to realise that he had come to the wrong war. The mechanised slaughter of the Western Front did not offer the sort of propaganda images the American government had in mind.

He moved to Italy hoping to find something better and it was there that he first heard about General Edmund Allenby and his campaign against Turkey in the Middle East. Thomas wrote later that he decided that Allenby’s war was what he wanted to cover and that he had immediately sent off a letter to the Foreign Office in London asking that he be allowed to go there. By chance, Thomas wrote, the letter came to the attention of John Buchan, Director of Intelligence in the British Ministry of Information. Buchan realised that the then untold story of Allenby’s fight to drive the Turks out of the Holy Land, aided by Arab tribes revolting against centuries of Turkish oppression, was just the sort of material Thomas was seeking, and although Buchan himself did not meet Lawrence until after the war, he had heard of him and his guerrilla campaign. He quickly arranged for Thomas to be accredited as a war correspondent to Allenby’s army.

Thomas and Chase filmed Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and it was there, in the spring of 1918, that Thomas first met Lawrence. The story of the meeting is almost too good to be true and readers will have to make up their own mind whether Thomas might have allowed his talent for journalistic exaggeration to get the better of him.

He says he saw a mysterious blue-eyed Arab in the garb of a Prince wandering in the street and later asked the Governor, Ronald Storrs, who this might have been. Without a word, Storrs opened the door to an adjoining room where Lawrence sat reading a book on archaeology. Storrs then said, “I want you to meet the Uncrowned King of Arabia”.

Thomas soon learnt that Lawrence could provide him with exactly the sort of story he had been looking for–a slight, blue-eyed Englishman who wore Arab costume, lived with Bedouins, and directed their guerrilla warfare against the occupying armies of the Turks. What was more, he had the story to himself. At that stage no one outside the Middle East had heard of Colonel T.E. Lawrence.

Thomas and Chase joined Lawrence in Aqaba and spent time with him there and in the desert. How long is disputed–Thomas says several weeks, Lawrence says only several days. The two men differ too on whether Lawrence co-operated with Chase, who has never received the credit he deserved for his photography. The popular image of Lawrence in his costume as an Arab leader is directly due to Chase’s evocative photographs.

Lawrence later claimed that he had been “tricked” into being filmed and photographed. Thomas said that Lawrence was a willing model (and the nature of the images bear this out) but that to please Lawrence he had gone along with the “trickery story” while Lawrence was alive. But in 1937, two years after Lawrence’s death, Thomas admitted in “Lawrence by his Friends”, that when asked by an acquaintance if Lawrence had posed for the photographs, “I gave the same cock-and bull story I had put about in my book. Harry Chase and I had tricked ‘Aurens’ . . . Now that he is gone, no such rot is necessary.”

With the war drawing to a close, Thomas decided not to rush back to America with his Lawrence story but carefully kept it to himself. He had big plans for it. Early in 1919 he began to work on an illustrated lecture about the war. The idea was that he would tell “dramatic stories” while Chase’s film was shown to the accompaniment of “appropriate music synchronised into the background.” The lecture opened at the Century Theatre in Central Park West in March 1919. It included accounts of the American Expeditionary Force in France, the Italian front, and Allenby and Lawrence in the Middle East.

The British impresario Percy Burton happened to see one of the performances and offered to bring Thomas to London to repeat it there. On the ship crossing the Atlantic, Thomas, his wife Fran, Chase and Dale Carnegie (later famous for his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”) wrote “a tight, swiftly-moving show” called “With Allenby in Palestine”. It opened at Covent Garden on 14 August 1919 and combined an appeal to all the senses in a manner that was years ahead of its time.

The band of the Welsh Guards warmed up the audience and provided the musical accompaniment. When the curtain went up, several exotically-dressed young women performed the Dance of the Seven Veils in front of a set which portrayed the Nile with the distant pyramids faintly illuminated by the moon. A lyric tenor then sang a haunting musical pastiche of the Islamic call to prayer. As Thomas himself came on stage, braziers in the theatre aisles poured Oriental incense into the air.

Thomas began with, “Come with me to lands of mystery, history and romance” and went on to lecture for two hours while up in the projection room, Harry Chase employed a new technique he had developed to illustrate Thomas’s words. This involved using three arc-light projectors simultaneously and a fade-and-dissolve device that no one had seen before.

Audiences loved it – and they loved the parts about Lawrence best of all. Thomas called Lawrence, “Shereff Lawrence, the uncrowned King of Arabia” and described the “triumphant twentieth Crusaders sweeping back the Turks on the plains of Sharon where the Moslem hordes of Saladin vanquished the flower of feudal chivalry.”

Following its success at Covent Garden the show moved to the Albert Hall, then to the Queen’s Hall where it had a Royal Command performance. Lawrence went to see it and left a note for Thomas which read: “Saw the show last night and thank God the lights were out.” But he became a frequent visitor to it. The show went on a nationwide tour then to Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, India and then the United States and Canada. It is estimated that four million people went to see it and that it made Thomas at least $1.5 million (more than $20 million in today’s money).

But there was more to the whole business than was realised at the time. The impresario Burton was encouraged to produce the Lawrence of Arabia show by the English-Speaking Union, of which Thomas was a member and whose committee included Winston Churchill and the newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe. The union’s aim was to emphasize the common heritage of Britain and the USA, to draw the two countries closer together and to forge a common sense of future destiny. If Lawrence could be portrayed as an old-style British hero and, more importantly, a representative of the new benevolent British imperialism, then the American liberal misgivings, now ironic, about Britain as an oil-hungry , greedy, oppressive power in the Middle East might be dispelled.

Lawrence knew nothing of this. All he knew was that the Lowell Thomas spectacular show turned him an international star. Even his own country had not previously heard of him and now, suddenly, he was “an imperial hero, a young archaeologist who without a day’s military experience had become the idolised leader of a Bedouin army, driven the Turks from Arabia and restored the caliphate to the descendants of the Prophet, the most romantic figure of the war”.

Thomas was inundated with commissions for articles about Lawrence. The first appeared in the American Asia Magazine in September 1919 under the heading “Thomas Lawrence–Prince of Mecca”. Others followed (some written with Lawrence’s help) and they eventually evolved into a book, “With Lawrence in Arabia”, the first edition of which was published in 1924, two years before Lawrence’s own book, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”. Thomas’s book was the first to tell Lawrence’s story and despite its exaggerations and hyperbole, its simple, popular and immediate style makes it an exciting and illuminating read.

Later Lawrence, like many a celebrity, made it clear he did not appreciate all the benefits of stardom. He instructed Robert Graves to write in Graves’s potboiler “Lawrence and the Arabs”, “The advertising of his Arabian adventure, both by the Press and Mr. Lowell Thomas’s cinema-lecture, proved most unwelcome to him.” He told Charlotte Shaw that Thomas was the man who made “my vulgar reputation”. Lawrence’s bitterest critic, Richard Aldington, maintained that all this was a ploy. “Lawrence was always careful to foster the illusion that he was frantically avoiding publicity, which created the illusion that he had something of great public interest to conceal.” If it were a ploy, then it worked because it created such curiousity about Lawrence that it continues to this day.

There are two views about what happened to Lawrence in his remaining years. The first, held by the majority, is that he was psychologically scarred by whatever happened to him at the hands of the Bey of Deraa, that the beatings he sought from John Bruce (and others) were, as his brother the late Professor A.W. Lawrence, believed, “to achieve a subjection of the body by methods advocated by the saints whose lives he had read.” All that he sought was a quiet life but tragically this was denied him by the celebrity status created for him by Lowell Thomas and the British press.

It is certainly true that trying to hide in the ranks of the Army and the Air Force under other names did not help because the press sooner or later winkled him out. Even a posting by the RAF to Miranshah on the North-West frontier of India, a bleak fort with a detachment of Indian Scouts and a few airmen, did not work. The British press found him and decided he must be on a mission. “Lawrence of Arabia Fights Soviet in India”, the headlines said, “British Hero Said To Be Leading Secret Crusade Against Bolshevists”.

The other view, to which I subscribe, is that Lawrence was torn by the guilt he felt at Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs and his role in it. That said, these emotional wounds were incurred in the service of is country and he did his best to further Britain’s aims and thus he was not only representative of his time and class but also of the policy and tactics adopted by a great power to protect its interests.

In short, he was what he always wanted to be: the Imperial Hero. But he was more than that. If he were merely an Imperial Hero then he would be like those generals whose bronze statues litter London, men no one recognises or remembers. But T.E. Lawrence was a tragic hero and tragic heroes endure for all time.

Phillip Knightley is the author of The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia.

Published in The Independent in Sunday, 16 May 2004

The Daily Mirror’s admission that its photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were fakes only highlights the importance of images in this war. It was the Mirror’s demand for visual evidence to support its informants’ claims of abuse by British soldiers – claims which are likely to prove correct – that led to the faking of the photographs. We should have seen it coming because in no other war have iconic images played such a major role in the outcome or changed public perception so radically.

Of course, each side has had different icons. For the Americans it was the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and the “rescue” from an Iraqi hospital of Private Jessica Lynch. For the Arab world it was an Iraqi woman scratching a shallow grave with her bare hands so that she could bury her dead husband and son. And the Iraqi boy who lost his mother and father and his own limbs to a Coalition bomb.

But until now what the public knew of the face of battle was dictated by Western news organisations, often in collusion with governments. There was an unwritten agreement that nothing too horrific made it on to the screen or the front pages. Take the photograph of a weeping Iraqi grandfather cradling in his arms his little granddaughter, severely injured in a Coalition bomb attack on Basra on 22 March 2003. You cannot recall it? I am not surprised. The shot, which showed the girl’s horribly mangled feet, ran in the Arab press in its entirety. But in the West, editors took it upon themselves to crop it – on the grounds of taste – so that the bones and shreds of flesh that were once the little girl’s feet were not visible.

So, although the Western media were good at covering the military side of the attack on Iraq, it deliberately refrained from covering the “shocked and the awed”. There were lots of images of missiles taking off, but few showing what happened when they arrived. The first sea change was the arrival on the scene of Arab TV networks, especially the Qatar-based al-Jazeera with its BBC-trained reporters. These networks concentrated on covering the victims of the war and had no qualms of showing the dead, wounded and maimed. “Why not?” says Maher Abdallah Ahmad, an al-Jazeera correspondent. “It’s time people learnt what war is really about. It’s about killing and maiming people.”

This attitude infuriated the Pentagon, whose media strategy was to concentrate on the heroism of war as seen through the eyes of its soldiers. It did its best to discredit and shut down the Arab TV networks. Then came the second historical development. Only the most naive believed that the Coalition troops observed all the Geneva conventions on the treatment and interrogation of prisoners of war. That they might torture and humiliate them and that this might be confirmed by photographs taken by the Americans seems incredible. But these demeaning images were published around the world.

An American woman soldier is photographed leading a naked and injured Iraqi man on a dog leash. The same woman soldier is shown gesturing at naked Iraqi men forced to form themselves into a mound on the floor. A woman is depicted forming a gun with her hand and pointing it at an Iraqi man’s genitals. And these are the milder images. Others held by the Pentagon and yet to be released are said to include the sexual assault of Iraqi women. The Iraqis struck back with their own terrible images: the execution by beheading of the American hostage Nick Berg.

Again we have a media landmark. The Iraqis choose beheading as the means of execution because they knew this method of murder caused most distress to Westerners, and that by recording it on video and posting it on a website they were assured of a huge audience. So all parties in a modern-day conflict know the propaganda value of iconic images, no matter how terrible. The result could be a period of atrocity and counter-atrocity, a descent into barbarity. But something positive has occurred. Despite the Daily Mirror’s unfortunate lapse, the veil is being lifted on the real face of war. With any luck, people’s natural anti-war sentiments will be strengthened.

Published in The Bulletin, 29 April 2004

The bottom line at the top of the intelligence pyramid is protect your patch at all costs. It is a mindset that has cost many lives to terror attacks because of a lack of communication. And, amazingly, no heads have rolled, as Phillip Knightley reports.

The furore about Australia’s intelligence community – its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers – is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.

Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.

How to avoid enquiries into their efficiency? How to avoid the budget cuts which governments were demanding as a “peace dividend”? And, above all, how to avoid anyone asking:“Do we now need these organisations at all, and if so, how best to organise them?”

The CIA’s reaction was to suggest in the early 1990s that it should take over the war on the international drugs trade. It was quickly seen off by the Drug Enforcement Administration which, from years of experience, knew how to handle trespassers on its turf.

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) persuaded the government to expand its mission statement to include the protection of the nation’s economic well-being. It then turned to commercial and industrial espionage and took to spying on Britain’s trade rivals even if, like France and Germany, they were technically friends.

And all the while Osama bin Laden was out there plotting away, putting the finishing touches to 9/11, doing it in languages and dialects no one in the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, GCHQ, JIC, CIS and all those other alphabet soup services could understand—even if “the listeners”, the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, had been able to intercept them in the first place.

As for infiltrating bin Laden’s group, forget about it. Back in the 19th century the intelligence officer and Arabist Richard Burton, might have got into Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. But can anyone imagine a 21st century CIA officer, used to his office comforts, passing himself off as a bin Laden follower?

So it is accepted that 9/11 came right out of the blue and the intelligence services are blameless. President Bush says no one had any idea that terrorists might hijack a plane and fly it into a building. And even if America did, the argument goes, how could anyone have known where and when such an attack would take place?

Wait a minute. Can our memories be so short? The hijacking of aircraft by aggrieved Arab groups goes back to the 1970s – remember all those hijacked aircraft lined up on an airfield in Jordan before they were blown up? The use of trucks or boats loaded with explosives and driven by suicide bombers goes back to the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (a truck with a suicide driver), the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in August 1998 (a truck with a suicide bomber), and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 (a boat with a suicide bomber). Did no one in the US intelligence community paid to think about these things put it all together and say, “What if instead of a truck or a boat a terrorist hijacked a plane and used it as a suicide bomb against an American target?”

What target? Well, Arab terrorists had already tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Did it not occur to American intelligence officers that terrorists night try it again? That leaves “When?” It has now been revealed at the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the US that there was a stream of reports between April and July 2001 that said that bin Laden was preparing a big attack.

If some bright intelligence officer had put it all together, the world might today be a different place. The sort of heavy security now in force at all American airports might, just might, have stopped the 9/11 hijackers before they got on the planes. So post Cold War western intelligence was off to a dismal start but since then has it been catching up?

Unfortunately no. Two years on, what do we really know about al-Qaida? Is it an organisation or an idea? If it is an organisation, how is it organised? How big is it? What are its aims? Where is it based? How is it controlled? (The idea that the ailing bin Laden runs the whole show from a mountain cave in Afghanistan is ludicrous.)

We are constantly told that certain terrorist organisations have “links” to al-Qaida but we are never told what these links are and how they are maintained. The only answer to any of these questions I have been able to elicit came from Professor Amin Saikal of the ANU Canberra when he spoke at the Sydney Institute on 1 April. I asked him:“What is al Qaida?” and he replied, “It’s a franchise operation.”

So the West had this catastrophic intelligence failure over 9/11. Then we had the intelligence failure of East Timor. Even though Lieut.Col. Lance Collins, probably the best and brightest military intelligence officer this country has ever produced, got it right, no one would listen to him.

Then all the intelligence services got the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq wrong, probably because they were looking the wrong way. Here the point is that there are WMD in Iraq and they HAVE been found. They are called small arms. Most wars since World War 2 have been fought with them and every year they kill more people than the casualties caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

One of the last acts of the dying regime of Saddam Hussein was to throw open Iraq’s arsenals and the largest transfer of small arms from a state to its citizens in the history of modern warfare took place. Iraqi citizens queued up to help themselves to the Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, grenades, and pistols they are now using with such deadly effect against the Coalition forces. Philip Alpers, of the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, estimates that there are now between eight and fourteen million small arms in civilian hands in Iraq: “They have the best claim to be a weapon of mass destruction.”

He says further that efforts by the Coalition forces to tackle this huge problem are being hampered by the United States gun lobby which is pushing the view that any constitution for a new Iraq must have an American Second Amendment type clause giving citizens the right to bear arms. So we have had this long string of intelligence failures and a series of pathetic excuses – “The FBI and the CIA weren’t talking to each other… FBI agents weren’t even talking to fellow agents because they were worried that their conversations were being recorded and might be used by defence lawyers… A war game in which a plane was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon was vetoed because it didn’t fit the game’s objectives.”

And how many intelligence heads have rolled? None. Not a single one. Not here. Not in Britain. Not in the United States. The only casualties – and fatal ones at that – have been foot soldiers: Merv Jenkins in Australia and David Kelly in Britain. Each took his own life because he had been made a scapegoat. Jenkins, a Defence Intelligence Organisation officer, suicided after the Australian government discovered that, in addition to passing to his American counterparts doctored reports about the imminent turmoil in East Timor – as ordered by his bosses – he was also giving them the truth.

And in Britain, Dr. David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence intelligence intelligence expert, suicided after he was reprimanded for being too frank with a BBC journalist about the lack of evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence community and its political masters have to be called to account. At the moment they are centres of power at the heart of democracies but responsible only to themselves.

How each country tackles this problem will vary. But Australia could set the trend by an early Royal Commission into the issues that Lieut.Col. Collins has so courageously raised.

Phillip Knightley is an award-winning Australian journalist who has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of several books including The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents, and Philby: KGB Masterspy.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 1 February 2004

The Hutton inquiry has confirmed what we all should have guessed– Britain ’s secret intelligence services are untouchable. It does not matter how badly wrong they were on Iraq and how often they have got things wrong in the past. They will continue to go from strength to strength because, as Lord Hutton realised, they are in bed with the government and a major power in the land.

Lord Hutton’s narrow terms of reference did not allow him to examine the intelligence services’ role in making the case for war and the accuracy of the dodgy dossier. This was, he said, “beyond my remit”.

So let us do it for him and look at what was happening in the intelligence services at the time and what their relationship was with the Prime Minister.

Intelligence officers, particularly those on the security side, are by nature anti-Labour. But the Prime Minister made his peace with them early on and won them over just as he won over big business. He increased their budgets, spoke up for them in public and convinced them New Labour could be as ardent a defender of the Realm as any Conservative government.

In return they gave him what he wanted to help achieve his political ends. John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and probably the next director general of MI6, was a “mate” of spin doctor Alastair Campbell. And even Lord Hutton thought Blair’s desire to make a strong case for war might have “sub-consciously” influenced Scarlett’s JIC dossier.

There’s not much anyone can do about this relationship because of the fascination that intelligence holds for many world leaders, from Winston Churchill through John F. Kennedy to Tony Blair. This, and the many works of spy fiction, from James Bond to John le Carré, have made the intelligence officer one of the most potent images of our age.

There was a fleeting hope that the collapse of communism and the loss of their major enemy might have weakened the power of the intelligence services. But then terrorism gave them a new lease of life with new names, new faces, new acronyms, almost limitless funding and the power to direct our lives and define reality for us. And they are brilliant bureaucrats.

The last time I looked at the reporting procedures of MI6, MI5, the listening service GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) it went like this: SIS reported to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the Overseas Economic Intelligence Committee (OEIC) and the Co-ordinator of Intelligence and Security (CIS) in the Cabinet Office. MI5 reported to the OEIC, CIS and the Official Committee on Security (OCS). GCHQ reported to the JIC, OEIC, CIS and the London Signal Intelligence Board (LSIB). DIS reported to the JIC, OEIC and CIS. JIC, OEIC, CIS, LSIB, and OCS reported to the Permanent Under-Secretaries Committee on Intelligence Services (PSIS). OEIC reported to the PSIS and the Prime Minister (PM). CIS reported to the PSIS and PM. LSIB reported to the PSIS and PM, as did the OCS. What politician in this right mind would want to tangle with that lot?

They are not only skilled at bureaucratic in-fighting but flexible. They can sense new political trends and attitudes and adapt to meet them. So British intelligence officers were aware for some time before the Iraq war that leading figures in the Bush administration had been trying to impose on the CIA a major change in the way the agency operates.

The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his team felt 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 politicians.

The traditionalists in British intelligence thought that this was a bad idea and could lead to trouble–as indeed it did. But the Young Turks here saw in such an idea a way of expanding their service’s influence. They could say to a government: “Look, in the twenty-first century, knowledge is power, information a weapon. We have the skills to use information we accumulate to manipulate people and achieve the political result you want. Let us develop plans to get the best mileage out of the material we gather.”

So instead of secret reports for ministers’ eyes only, the intelligence services began producing “dossiers” calculated, in this instance, to help the government’s case for a war against Iraq . One of the traditionalists appalled by this was the former chairman of the JIC, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.

“In the first months of this year [2003] we were bombarded with warnings that British cities might at any moment face a massive terrorist attack,” he wrote in a letter to the Financial Times. “Housewives were officially advised to lay in stock of food and water. Tanks were sent to Heathrow.”

Sir Rodric said that in this atmosphere of near hysteria, people began to believe that Britain itself was under imminent threat and that we should get our blow in first. “So the Prime Minister managed–just–to swing Parliament behind him.”

The information on which the government based its warnings and its decision to send tanks to the airport came, of course, from the intelligence and security services. It does not matter to them that their warnings turned out to be wrong. They have stock replies. The first is that that the terrorists realised that we were on to them so they aborted their plans. The second is that it is better to be safe than sorry. Both cannot be challenged.

But frightening us is not the only use that the intelligence services make of their material. A former American intelligence officer says that a member of the UN inspection team who supported the British position on Iraq arranged for “inactionable” (read “dodgy”) intelligence reports to be quietly passed on to British intelligence which would feed them to newspapers in London and elsewhere.

The New Yorker magazine quotes the intelligence officer as saying: “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world.”

And former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims that MI6 actually ran a campaign called “Operation Mass Appeal” designed to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction.

Why would British intelligence have done this? Because a number of senior officers were convinced that Iraq was a threat to Britain and that Saddam Hussein should be toppled.

And to this end they were prepared to go beyond their traditional role of reporting their intelligence findings in an objective way and instead help the government make a case for war. In short, they were prepared to play a political role. This caused other intelligence officers deep unease and split the service.

I think the new politicised intelligence service is here to stay. In the interests of its own survival and the maintenance of its own power it has adapted to fit the new political suit created for it by the Prime Minister.

This is not to say that either Tony Blair or those intelligence officers who helped him make the case for war did it cynically. As Rodric Braithwaite aptly put it: “Fishmongers sell fish; warmongers sell war. Both may sincerely believe in their product.”

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 31 August 2003

One of the Hutton Inquiry’s little surprises concerns the relationship between the Labour government and the top ranks of the British intelligence community. They are in love.

Downing Street’s Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell, regards John Scarlett, once our top spy in Moscow and now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as “a mate”. Tony Blair is immensely grateful for the help the intelligence services gave in the preparation of the dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. At the urging of an unnamed spymaster, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) empties its files trying to find a few nuggets to help make the dossier even stronger.

All parties concerned have nothing but flattering comments to make about each other. Mr. Scarlett says there were “no rows” with Mr. Campbell or anyone else. Mr. Campbell passes on the Prime Minister’s congratulations on the dossier–“a very good job”. Mr. Scarlett insists that there was no unease in the intelligence community about political pressure influencing the contents of the dossier. It is all sweetness and light–except for Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, who was apparently often kept in the dark.

What’s going on? Historically, the Labour Party and SIS have hated each other. The very nature of intelligence and security work makes most officers natural conservatives and wary of the Labour Party which, especially during the Cold War, they saw as soft on Communism. Two Labour Prime Ministers–Ramsay MacDonald and Harold Wilson–felt that the secret services had too much power, confronted them, and came off second best.

MacDonald, leader of Britain’s first Labour government, alarmed the intelligence services by telling them that if he won the election in 1924 he would consider suspending them and opening their files.

Four days before the election, the intelligence services produced the Zinoviev letter. It purported to be from the president of the Communist International ordering British party members to prepare for the revolution by using their sympathisers in the Labour Party. The letter was a forgery but Labour lost the election.

Moving closer to today, there was the case of a group of rogue intelligence officers and the Wilson government. At the height of the Cold War, a group of MI5 and SIS officers believed that their services had been penetrated by the KGB. When Roger Hollis, chief of MI5, refused to allow them to investigate their fellow officers, they decided that he too, must be working for the Russians.

It is a telling example of the power of individual intelligence officers that this rogue group was then able to then set about investigating their own boss. They devoted years to compiling a secret dossier on him and even after he had retired, managed to persuade his successor to allow them to conduct an official investigation.

No proof emerged and the investigating team was disbanded. But the rogue officers felt that the services were covering up to avoid a scandal, so one of them, Stephen de Mowbray of SIS, approached Number 10 Downing Street and sought an interview with Wilson. Wilson was stunned when he learned of the case against Hollis and arranged for Lord Trend, former Secretary of the Cabinet, to carry out yet another inquiry. It, too, found that there had been no cover-up and no evidence that Hollis had been a Soviet agent.

The rogue officers did not like this and when damaging rumours about the Wilson government–especially that Wilson himself and some of his circle had communist links–began to spread in Whitehall, Wilson decided that the rogue officers might be out to get him. Certainly some of them believed that Wilson was, if not a Soviet agent, then certainly a Soviet asset.

The rogue officers tried to put together a case against Wilson and some of his colleagues. Both Wilson and his Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, the highest legal officer in Britain, believed that they were under surveillance. Lord Gardiner said later, “I thought it more than likely that MI5 was bugging the telephones in my office.”

In August 1975 Wilson summoned the director of SIS, then Maurice Oldfield, and the head of MI5, then Michael Hanley, and asked them point blank if they were trying to bring down his government. Both replied that they were not. They admitted that there were officers who were strongly anti-Labour but both directors assured him that the services would remain under ministerial control regardless of which political party was in power.

Wilson did not believe them. He asked his publisher, Lord Weidenfeld, to undertake a mission for him. He gave Weidenfeld a letter to carry to Washington and hand to Senator Hubert Humphrey, a friend of Wilson’s. The letter named a number of MI5 and SIS officers Wilson believed might be plotting against the Labour government.

He wanted Humphrey to ask George Bush, then director of the CIA and future President of the United States, whether the CIA knew anything about these officers. Was it possible, for instance, that these British officers might be working secretly for the CIA. Bush took Wilson’s letter so seriously that he himself flew to London to assure Wilson that if he had indeed been under surveillance, then it was not the CIA which had been responsible.

Given this poisoned history, the really interesting question provoked by the Hutton Inquiry would be: how did Tony Blair win over British intelligence? How did he incorporate such traditional enemies of Labour into Blairism. A bigger budget, more officers, and more power are obvious answers. But there has to be more to it than that.

Spy bosses realised Blairism was so different from the soocialism of old Labour that it could be trusted to defend the realm as strongly as the Conservatives had. For its part, can it possibly be that the Blair government was seduced by the illusory glamour that the secret world holds for the uninitiated?

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 24 August 2003

James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are–for better or worse –here to stay.

Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the well-being of the nation they serve.

The one thing they do not offer is certainty. SIS lecturers at the service’s training school near Portsmouth draw the attention of recruits to a line from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” :

“Unless someone has the wisdom of a sage, he cannot use spies; unless he is benevolent and righteous, he cannot employ spies; unless he is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle, subtle.”

But the one quality the Western intelligence community has lacked since the arrival of the George W. Bush administration is exactly that–subtlety. Since September 11 Bush and the leading members of his administration have spoken of little other than certainty. Victory against terrorism is certain, the Coalition’s moral right to attack Iraq was certain, that weapons of mass destruction will be found is certain, that America will triumph over all its enemies is certain.

This soothing rhetoric is understandable; it counters the fear and uncertainty that Americans have felt since the al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. But in attempting to impose certainty on American intelligence gathering, the Bush administration risks crippling the CIA. And since the CIA is the lead intelligence service in the Western alliance and what happens in Langley sooner or later spreads here, British intelligence is now also at risk.

This is how it came about. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other neo-conservatives in the Bush administration saw no reason why the CIA should not be subjected to the same radical examination that has convulsed all other American government departments.

The examination had two main aims. First it would answer the fundamental question: should intelligence shape policy or vice-versa? And it would look for a whole new methodology for evaluating the danger posed by the monster out there.

Rumsfeld and his supporters tackled the latter problem first. Traditionally, the CIA had two different sorts of officers–collectors and analysts. They often crossed over but Rumsfeld felt that the relationship was too close and that the analysing of intelligence material should be done not by intelligence professionals but outsiders, preferably politicians.

Rumsfeld argued for a more intuitive (feminine, if you like) approach to intelligence analysis. He wanted a subjective judgement, “a connecting of the dots”, that involved “imagining what you would do if you were in the other guy’s shoes”. This led him to his byword about the threat from the monster, one repeated at every opportunity: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In other words, just because there is no intelligence that the monster is out there, does not prove that he is not.

Old-time intelligence officers were horrified at this approach and protested that without the professional objectivity that CIA analysts brought to the job, politics would take over, the intelligence product would be “bent” to suit the plans of politicians, and that this would be courting disaster. A group of retired officers even formed a lobby, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) which accused the Bush administration of manipulating CIA intelligence about Iraq to fit President Bush’s political agenda–shades of the accusations here about the Blair government and British intelligence and the controversial dossiers.

Like the CIA, British intelligence saw itself as running a service industry whose clients were the government, the Foreign office, various ministries and the armed services. It did not deal with these clients directly but through the Joint Intelligence Committee which consisted of intelligence professionals and high-ranking civil servants.

Before the events of earlier this year that have led to the Hutton Inquiry, any idea that intelligence provided by SIS would be used by the JIC to produce a dossier for public consumption would have been unthinkable. Former chiefs of SIS would have been apoplectic.

And there we have the answer to Rumsfeld’s question: should intelligence shape policy or vice-versa? Rumsfeld decided that policy should shape intelligence, that the work of America’s intelligence community should be directed to furthering administration policy, no matter how loudly the spies squealed.

The same thing is happening in Britain. The Blair government has decided that the intelligence service is just another Whitehall department, there to further government policy. It is as if it is saying to SIS, “We’ll decide who the monster is. Then you can give us the material to help make our case to the punters.”

If traditional spymasters do not like this, too bad. The government will find new ones who will do what they are told.