Intelligence

Key No 10 aides were split over war

Key No 10 aides were split over war - Sunday Times - Times Online

Robert Winnett, Whitehall Correspondent
THE SPLIT over the Iraq war, which ran through the Labour party, reached into Tony Blair’s innermost circle, according to an updated biography of the prime minister.

Key Downing Street advisers including Alastair Campbell, former director of communications, and Baroness Morgan, former director of political and government relations, are revealed to have had “private reservations” about the prime minister’s strategy.

The disclosures have been made by Blair’s biographer Anthony Seldon, who has benefited from insider accounts that the government is now seeking to suppress.

The disclosures have been made by Blair’s biographer Anthony Seldon, who has benefited from insider accounts that the government is now seeking to suppress.

At the outbreak of war, a gung-ho attitude seemed to pervade Downing Street. According to an interview with Morgan: “. . . he (Blair) wanted big maps on the wall of the den (Blair’s office) so he could follow the progress of the troops. We wouldn’t let him. He really would have liked a sandpit with tanks.”

Seldon is understood to have had access to the private unpublished papers of key officials. Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British ambassador in Washington; Lance Price, former deputy to Campbell at Downing Street; and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and then special envoy to Iraq, are all understood to have kept detailed records and were all interviewed by Seldon.

The updated version of Seldon’s biography of Blair draws heavily on their revelatory material — the publication of which Whitehall officials are now attempting to block.

The Cabinet Office has halted Price’s plans to publish his memoirs while Greenstock’s forthcoming book is to be edited before publication. Meyer intends to publish his memoirs in the autumn, after official clearance.

The most sensitive sections of Seldon’s biography detail the run-up to the war in Iraq during 2002 and 2003, Blair’s relationship with the White House, and attempts to persuade the United Nations to back action.

Decisions were made largely by a tight group of Downing Street advisers, diplomats and intelligence chiefs working with the prime minister. However, Seldon discovered that even within this group there was unease about Blair’s actions. “Even No 10 was divided, with Jonathan Powell (Blair’s chief of staff) strongly advocating closeness to the (American) administration, and Sally (Baroness) Morgan in particular pressing for the need to go down the UN route, ” writes Seldon.

“Many senior diplomats in the Foreign Office were deeply concerned but failed to speak out . . . Within his closest team in No 10, Campbell and Morgan had private reservations while (David) Manning (Blair’s foreign policy adviser) was often uneasy . . . The intelligence chiefs (Sir John Scarlett, Sir Stephen Lander and Sir Richard Dearlove) were not counselling caution.”

Seldon reveals the alarm of Blair’s inner circle when told that the invasion would not receive the backing of the UN, after diplomatic efforts had failed.

“On 11 March, Greenstock reported to Downing Street that the second resolution attempt was losing ground,” he writes.

“‘I’m not sure we are going to get it through,’ Blair told his aides in No 10, Manning, Powell, Campbell and Morgan. ‘Hell, we are stuck then!’ one of them said as they began to ask themselves quite how they ended up in this position. Some in No 10 were clearly shocked to find themselves in a box with no escape plan.”

The build-up to the invasion began in April 2002 when Blair travelled to George W Bush’s ranch in Texas. It was at this meeting that the possibility of invading Iraq in 2003 was first raised with Blair.

Over the next few months, Blair is understood to have backed the American plan but insisted on several conditions, including UN involvement and a push on the Middle East peace process. However, Seldon details how Blair’s negotiating position was quickly eroded.

Meyer told Seldon he had warned Downing Street officials that Britain was being “taken for granted” by the Americans.

The book notes: “Prior to the most important of his (Blair’s) frequent phone calls to Bush, in the run-up to the Iraq war and on other issues, pointed briefing notes would be prepared for Blair, urging him to tackle the president directly. ‘We’d then read the record of the conversation and see that Blair had gone off at a tangent,’ said one insider. ‘He just seemed oddly reluctant to confront Bush head-on.’”

Reports began to circulate round Whitehall that Blair did not read his briefs, and that he shied away from tough one-on-one encounters.

Seldon writes that during the autumn of 2002 British diplomats and politicians were involved in tense negotiations at the UN, but it seemed that Blair was being bounced into war. Dick Cheney, the vice-president, was hostile to Blair and the British and sat in meetings “like a lump”, according to one official present.

However, Blair was told by diplomats, thought to be Meyer and Greenstock, that he could have stopped America invading Iraq had he been prepared to use his influence.

“Advice Blair received from diplomats that autumn (in 2002) was that Britain could be the swing vote on whether or not the US would go to war.”

One crude remark assesses the scale of the political risk the prime minister took in backing the American invasion. Seldon quotes one close adviser telling Blair at the time: “Forget your contribution to public services. What you’ll be remembered for is winning two f****** great election victories and four wars.”

LEAKED DATA REVEAL REASONS FOR INCREASED BOMBING RAIDS WERE A SHAM

Figures released by the Ministry of Defence have shown the reasons given by Britain and America for stepping up bombing raids in Iraq in the run-up to war were a sham, writes Michael Smith.

Geoff Hoon, who was then defence secretary, and Donald Rumsfeld, his American counterpart, both claimed that the rise in air attacks was in response to Iraqi attempts to shoot down allied aircraft

However, the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair’s war cabinet on July 23, 2003, leaked to The Sunday Times, record Hoon saying "the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime".

Ministers have since insisted that the stepped-up attacks, which began in May 2002, were as a result of increased Iraqi activity and were not an attempt to provoke a response that would give the allies an excuse for war.

The figures do not support those claims. In the first seven months of 2001 the allies recorded a total of 370 "provocations" by the Iraqis against allied aircraft. But in the seven months between October 2001 and May 2002 there were just 32.

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, who obtained the MoD data in a Commons written answer, said it reinforced the need for an inquiry into ministers’ conduct in the run-up to war.
The leaked Iraq war documents
Michael Smith
The level of interest in the now famous Downing Street Memo, published in the May 1 edition of The Sunday Times, and in the leaked documents published over subsequent weeks, has been extraordinary
This new web page is designed to give our readers access to all the stories we have written about three highly classified documents on the Iraq war that were leaked to The Sunday Times ahead of the British General Election on May 5, 2005.

These three documents include the now famous “Downing Street Memo”, which contains the minutes of a meeting of what was effectively Tony Blair’s war cabinet held in Downing Street on July 23, 2002.

The meeting was a crucial one. President George W Bush was due to make a decision on which military plan should be used for the invasion of Iraq. The British had a number of deep concerns over the US plans which Blair would have to raise with the US president.

The Foreign Office was particularly concerned over US lack of interest in planning for the aftermath of the war and the lack of a legal justification for ousting Saddam. Regime change for its own sake is illegal under international law. It was therefore seen as essential that the allies went first to the UN to obtain a Security Council resolution backing the use of force to oust Saddam.

It was in this context that the main players on the British side met. Blair chaired the meeting, which was also attended by the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw; the then Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon; the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith; Sir Richard Dearlove, the Chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6); the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee John Scarlett; and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, who as Chief of Defence Staff was head of Britain’s armed forces.

The key quotes in this particular document came from:

Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington where he had talks with George Tenet, and was quoted as saying that there was “a perceptible shift in attitude” in the US capital. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, though military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

Straw, who said: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” Britain should “work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.”

And Geoff Hoon, who in what may yet turn out to be the most damaging quote of all, said that “the US had already begun “spikes of activity” to put pressure on the regime”. (See British Bombing Raids were Illegal, says Foreign Office, June 19, 2005)

An inside-page article set out the context for the publication of the leaked document (see Blair planned Iraq war from the start, May 1, 2005), and it was in fact the second of the documents, the Cabinet Office briefing paper, Iraq: Conditions for Military Action, on which we based our first front-page story (Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan, May 1, 2005).

This document distributed on July 21, 2002 two days before the Downing Street meeting was designed to brief the participants on the latest situation with regard to the US war planning. It gives an astonishing feel of the official concern felt within Whitehall over the way in which things were going, the lack of legal justification, the failure to prepare for the post-war situation in Iraq and most particularly the fact that there was no way that Britain could get out of going to war (See Ministers were told of need for Gulf War excuse, June 12, 2005).

For as the briefing paper made clear very early on “When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.”

At the time, this was the most damaging part of any of the documents. Despite Blair’s repeated insistence throughout 2002 that no decision had been taken to go to war with Iraq, political analysts had long believed that the decision was in fact made at the Bush-Blair summit at the president’s range at Crawford, Texas, in early April 2002. Not only did this confirm it, but it did so in terms that were highly damaging to the prime minister.

Despite having been warned by his officials that “regime change per se is illegal” he had agreed to back military action to achieve it. There were three conditions attached to his agreement. But the most crucial of these, that “options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted” would never be achieved.

The third leaked document was Foreign Office legal advice, which was appended to the briefing paper. This is a useful background document on the British view of international law the text of which is now also published on this website.

The recent circulation on the internet of the text of five other similar memos, which were leaked to me last September, has raised some interesting issues, largely because I destroyed the original copies I was given to protect my source. A number of supporters of President Bush have even suggested that this somehow “proved” that the documents were not genuine.

Firstly, all of the documents have been authenticated not just by me, but by the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press. Secondly, the various documents included quotes from a dozen senior officials, including Blair, Straw and Hoon, none of whom have come forward to dismiss them as fakes. Thirdly it is a matter of record that a police Special Branch leak investigation took place into how I came to get hold of the documents, something that would not have occurred were they forgeries.

The leak investigation should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Downing Street Memo, which carries the stern warning, “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.” The irony is of course that the attention given to the document by the internet bloggers once it appeared on this website has almost certainly made it the most widely read secret British document in history.

Additional links: Hansard on bombs dropped March to October 2002

Hansard on bombs dropped October 2002 to January 2003

Online discussion with Washington Post

July 30, 2005 at 08:53 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home