blair

There are no tanks at Heathrow - yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district - yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.

Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.

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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”.

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On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it.

It’s a sexy, well paid job, certainly not nine to five, with a reasonable pension and, like the mafia, secret recognition from those in the know. There are downsides: lots of moral dilemmas, the shame of using people, bitter bureaucratic infighting and the constant nagging doubt about whether it makes any difference to the bigger picture.

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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.

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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.

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Before Tony Blair joins the new crusaders trying to impose a “regime change”, a Western “settlement” on Iraq, he should at least look at the historical facts that explain the rise of nationalist leaders such as Saddam Hussein. And while he is at it, since he is good at empathy, he might try looking at Britain through Iraqi eyes. Seen from Baghdad, the British have bombed and invaded their country, lied to them, manipulated their borders, imposed on them leaders they did not want, kidnapped ones they did, fixed their elections, used collective terror tactics on their civilians, promised them freedom and then planned to turn their country into a province of India populated by immigrant Punjabi farmers. Small wonder that the author Said Aburish said to me recently: “If you think Saddam Hussein is a hard man to deal with, just wait for the next generation of Iraqi leaders.”

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We forget too easily that governments wage war to win and do not greatly worry how they do it. Their ideal would be: “Tell the people nothing until a war is over and then tell them who won.” In the meantime they are prepared to lie, suppress, manipulate, distort and spin to try to keep the media - and thus the public - on side. But every now and then they get caught out. Four months ago the Prime Minister told us that the Taliban had collapsed and the war in Afghanistan was as good as over. Then on Monday the Blair government announced that a force of 1,700 British commandos was being sent to Afghanistan to fight a resurgent al Qaeda. No wonder Blair scuttled out of the Commons moments before Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon made the announcement.

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