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Doubt grows over prewar intelligence | csmonitor.com
Upcoming Kay report is already stoking skepticism of prewar claims, which are under fire in Congress.
By Peter Grier | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON Some seven months after the US invaded Iraq, criticism of the intelligence used to justify that attack is only intensifying.
House Intelligence Committee members recently wrote to the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, complaining of "inadequate information" to back administration claims of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, former UN weapons inspector David Kay has revisited Iraq in search of WMD, this time working for the CIA. He's expected to deliver an interim report this week saying he hasn't found much.
"It is clearer now than ever ... that the administration was exaggerating the extent of the [Iraqi] threat and using discredited and disputed information," says Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association.
Administration officials, for their part, have stressed the interim nature of Mr. Kay's upcoming report and said that he is still gathering information from the field.
"This will be the first progress report ... and we expect it will reach no firm conclusions," said CIA spokesman Bill Harlow last week.
Renewed debate about the nature of the threat the regime of Saddam Hussein posed to the world comes at an awkward time for the Bush administration.
Its request for $87 billion to help pay the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq has daunted many in Congress. Its plea at the UN for aid and troops from other nations has fallen on mostly deaf ears. Continued violence in Iraq itself shows no signs of abating. Indeed, many top US military commanders now seem resigned to the prospect of a long stay in a nation made dangerous by an organized insurgency.
As the postwar period turns ugly, splits in the administration itself have seemed more apparent than ever. According to press reports, the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations that the White House leaked to journalists the name of an undercover CIA operative.
The operative in question is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who has been a vocal critic of what he believes is the Bush team's mishandling of intelligence about Iraq.
Mr. Wilson has publicly accused presidential adviser Karl Rove of revealing his wife's identify. The motive, according to Wilson, was revenge for his own role in exposing as probably wrong the White House claim that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.
In a broadcast interview on Sunday National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said she knew of no such covert White House effort, and that "it certainly would not be the way that the president would expect the White House to operate."
In regards to evidence of Iraqi WMD, the House Intelligence Committee sent Mr. Tenet a letter following its own staff inquiry into what the US knew, and when it knew it.
The end of the UN's most concerted period of inspection activity in Iraq in 1998 was a crucial dividing line, according to the letter. Prior to that the UN and the rest of the world had a good idea of the Hussein regime's intentions and capabilities. After 1998, the intelligence available "was fragmentary and sporadic," according to the letter. One of the letter's signees, committee chairman Rep. Porter Goss (R) of Florida, is himself a former CIA employee and a respected voice on intelligence matters on Capitol Hill.
The intelligence problem was one of extrapolation, administration officials said over the weekend. Prior to 1998 it was clear that Saddam Hussein wanted to acquire WMD, and was even capable of using them - as he did against Kurdish rebels in 1988.
After the UN left in 1998, information may have become more difficult to acquire, but it was logical to assume that Hussein's quest continued, said Secretary of State Colin Powell in a broadcast interview on ABC.
"Now, if you want to believe that he suddenly gave up ... and had no further interest in those sorts of weapons, whether it be chemical, biological, or nuclear, then I think ... it's a bit naive to believe that," said Secretary Powell.
Critics retort that no serious person is arguing that Saddam Hussein decided on his own to give up such dangerous weapons after inspectors left.
It's still entirely possible that some leftover stocks of Iraqi chemical shells or other category of WMD will turn up after a concerted search through the country.
But the administration simply overlooked or underplayed how successful years of UN inspections were in degrading Iraq's WMD capability. The inspectors may have engaged in a shell game with Iraqi officials, who moved evidence away from their prying eyes, but it was a shell game that was exhausting and ultimately debilitating for Iraq itself.
Recent evidence "makes it all the clearer that the weapons inspections that the administration discarded were effective in denying Iraq militarily significant WMD," says Mr. Kimball of the Arms Control Association.
Yet prior to major combat operations in Iraq, US officials seemed sure that Baghdad had tons of weaponized chemicals, biological agents, proscribed Scud missiles, and a serious nuclear program.
In regards to weapons of mass destruction, "we know where they are," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in a March 30 broadcast interview.
Such statements simply created unrealistic expectations about WMD, say critics.
September 29, 2003 at 11:18 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Intelligence: September 2003 Archives
David Leppard
September 07, 2003
THE governments handling of vital intelligence about Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction was muddled and confused, a committee of senior parliamentarians is preparing to tell Tony Blair.
In a report to the prime minister on how intelligence was gathered in the run-up to the Iraq war, the intelligence and security committee (ISC) has concluded that Whitehall officials made what sources describe as a muddled series of judgments when including the infamous 45-minute claim.
The findings, expected to be published this week, are likely to be seen as a criticism of John Scarlett, Britains most senior spymaster. As chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), Scarlett had overall responsibility for drawing up the Iraq dossier.
In secret hearings over the past three months, MI6 and defence officials have given the committee conflicting evidence about what they thought the 45-minute warning referred to.
Some believed it meant a local artillery commander would take 45 minutes to fire chemical or biological shells once he had received orders. Others told the committee they believed it referred to the time it would take from Saddam giving the command to fire the shells. Some in the media presented it as the time it would take Saddam to strike Britain.
The committee is understood to have concluded that muddled thinking as opposed to a deliberate attempt by Downing Street to mislead led to this confusion. It is believed to say that the 45-minute warning should have been fully explained, a move which would have avoided the subsequent claims that No 10 was deliberately trying to overstate the dangers posed by Saddam.
Scarlett has been a key figure in the inquiry by Lord Hutton into the apparent suicide of Dr David Kelly, the government weapons expert, which is preparing to enter its second phase.
When Scarlett appeared before the inquiry, he broke with protocol to comment on the raw intelligence that the 45-minute claim was based on. It was made clear for the first time that the claim narrowly focused on battlefield munitions rather than long-range missiles.
Such weapons could be sent from forward deployed storage sites to military units and prepared for firing in 45 minutes. The average was 20 minutes, the raw intelligence said.
New witnesses to be called when the inquiry reopens a week tomorrow could include Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, Greg Dyke, director-general of the BBC, and even Richard Dearlove, head of MI6.
Mai Pederson, a mysterious US military linguist who introduced Kelly to the Bahai faith and is said to have been an influential figure in his life, could also be called.
Pederson, 43, became friendly with the scientist when they were working with a United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq.
Her second husband, Jim Pederson, claimed his Kuwaiti-born former wife worked for US military intelligence and would have targeted Kelly as a potential source.
Part of her military training was to cultivate anyone who might be able to help her in her intelligence work, he said. It may well have been why she zeroed in on Dr Kelly.
Kellys widow Janice told the inquiry that Mai Pederson had been quite influential with her husbands faith and had become a family friend.
In addition Hutton will recall for further examination several of the 67 witnesses who have already given evidence. Andrew Gilligan, the BBC journalist whose report on the 45-minute claim sparked the row which led to Kellys death, and Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, are likely to face the toughest grilling.
In a newspaper interview yesterday, Hoon complained about the building pressure, including the presence of photographers outside his home. He appeared to accept that his fate lay in Huttons hands, saying he would wait to see the inquirys findings before considering his position.
Last week was one of the worst for the government since Hutton opened his inquiry three weeks ago into the circumstances of Kellys death. In compelling testimony last Monday, Janice Kelly described how her husband felt totally let down and betrayed by his Ministry of Defence bosses.
The week ended with damning evidence from Richard Taylor, an adviser and spin doctor to Hoon. The minister had told Hutton that he played no part in the strategy that led to Kellys name as Gilligans source being made public.
Taylors evidence appeared to torpedo this claim. He testified that a meeting chaired by Hoon had explicitly talked through the strategy.
The issue at the heart of Huttons inquiry is relatively simple. Did Kellys treatment by the BBC and government contribute to his suicide and, if so, whose actions were to blame? The BBC and Gilligan have been badly tarnished by the evidence to date, as has the Downing Street spin machine headed by Alastair Campbell, the defence ministry and Hoon.
It now seems clear that Gilligans initial report was seriously flawed and the BBC should have have issued a retraction. Evidence has been produced to show that Campbell did not demand the insertion of the 45-minute warning in the dossier against the wishes of the intelligence services.
However, the government may still be found wanting on the broader charge that it spun the dossier to strengthen the case for war. Hutton has heard how the presentation as opposed to the substance of the dossier was hardened by a blizzard of recommendations from Campbell and his team.
Gilligans flawed reporting (as one BBC e-mail described it) has also ensnared Gavyn Davies, the corporations chairman. Davies was embarrassed by the disclosure of an e-mail written by Gilligan to the foreign affairs select committee which appeared to name Kelly as the source when the BBC was publicly saying it would not disclose his identity.
This weeks ISC report will fuel the controversy. Its conclusions on the 45-minute warning are unlikely to please the government as it suggests the entire row and perhaps even Kellys death could have been avoided had clearer language been used.
The ISC report is understood to clear Campbell of any wrongdoing and will therefore highlight the flaws in the BBCs reporting. The committees findings will also refocus debate on the role of Scarlett, the JIC chairman, who told Hutton that he had insisted on having ownership of the document.
Scarlett told the inquiry last month that Kelly, who was sceptical of the 45-minute claim, probably thought it referred to missiles with ranges of hundreds of miles. In fact it related to short-range munitions (and) mortar shells. Scarlett also said he had not been aware of any dissenting voices in the intelligence community.
Last week, however, Brian Jones, a recently retired senior weapons expert with the defence intelligence staff, said he and fellow officials had had concerns about the intelligence and the way it was presented.
The information, Jones said, had been passed to MI6 from an informant who got it from an unidentified Iraqi army officer. It didnt really give us any real feel that the primary source knew very much about the subject, said Jones. There was a lack of detail.
In its report, the ISC has concluded that the 45-minute tip came to MI6 from someone who had proved reliable in the past. But when it came to be presented in the dossier nobody actually knew what they were saying, a source said.
The committees conclusions will be cold comfort for Scarlett. He told the inquiry the JIC had approved the dossier but Jones challenged whether intelligence officials did actually sign off on it. If Hutton rules that standard procedures for producing such reports were by-passed, it will prove damaging for Scarlett and the government.
As the potential witnesses such as Hoon, Scarlett, Campbell, Gilligan and Davies wait to hear who Hutton is going to recall, none will be having a comfortable weekend.
September 29, 2003 at 09:48 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - U.S. Troops Battle Fighters Near Baghdad: "By TAREK AL-ISSAWI, Associated Press Writer
KHALDIYAH, Iraq - U.S. troops backed by tanks and helicopters battled Iraqi resistance fighters Monday near this Sunni Muslim town west of Baghdad, and the U.S. military announced the arrest of 92 people in a series of raids aimed at those responsible for attacks against Americans north of the capital. "
Sporadic, heavy gunfire rattled farming communities north of this town, where resistance to the American presence is strong. Residents said the fighting began at midmorning and continued in the early afternoon, with U.S. M1A2 tanks firing 120-millimeter cannons as helicopters strafed farm houses with 50-millimeter machine gun fire.
Villagers said the clash began after Iraqi resistance fighters fired rocket-propelled grenades at an American convoy. U.S. military spokesmen in Baghdad said they had no information about the fighting. Hours after the battle began, four U.S. armored personnel carriers arrived as reinforcements. A jet fighter could be heard in the area. Eight Humvees carrying U.S. troops also could be seen heading toward the battle.
To the north, soldiers of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division launched two dozen raids in Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s hometown Tikrit and other areas, arresting 92 people and seizing weapons and ammunition in operations that ended Monday morning.
One of the raids included the largest-ever joint operation by U.S. troops from the 720th Military Police Battalion and about 200 American-trained Iraqi police.
"The people we went after are the trigger-pullers attacking the coalition," said Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commands the 720th, based in Fort Hood, Texas. "We want to send the message that if you pull the trigger on the coalition, we will get you."
He said the operations were designed to "break the back of the Fedayeen" in the Tikrit area.
Raids in the 4th Division sector have intensified after Iraqi resistance fighters shot and killed three Americans in an ambush two weeks ago just outside Tikrit. In a coordinated series of attacks and ambushes against U.S. forces last week, nine Iraqi fighters were also killed.
"We think all these people and weapons found in the past are linked," Poirier said. "We think they are linked to the organized attacks and are also responsible for the assassination attempts against the Iraqi police as well."
The ongoing violence has complicated efforts to rebuild this country following the collapse of Saddam's regime in April. Since President Bush (news - web sites) declared an end to major combat on May 1, more than 80 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire. That has led to questions about the U.S.-led coalition's stewardship of this country since American and allied forces launched military operations March 20.
In Baghdad, suspected Saddam supporters Monday blew up early a video shop that sold videotapes depicting atrocities committed by the ousted regime. No one was injured in the pre-dawn blast which also damaged four other shops on al-Rasheed street. Shopkeeper Abbas Fadhil, 27, said he had received leaflets warning him to stop selling such tapes "but I paid no attention to them."
On Sunday, the Polish military reported that one Iraqi was killed and a second was detained after a gunbattle with a Polish patrol near the city of Hilla. It was the first fatality suffered in a clash involving the Poles, who took over control of a sector in south-central Iraq (news - web sites) on Sept. 3.
Poland commands some 9,500 peacekeepers from 21 nations and contributed about 2,400 of its own troops to the force.
Meanwhile, a 17-member, bipartisan Congressional delegation is visiting Iraq to get a firsthand look at conditions here as Congress considers President Bush's request for an additional $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites). The figure includes $20.3 billion to rebuild Iraq's government and economy after the war.
Democrats have criticized the $20.3 billion portion, noting it comes as the United States struggles with record federal deficits. The plan has been submitted as polls show a steady drop in Bush's popularity and in the public's confidence in his Iraq policies.
"I think most of the ones who were here will be supporting this legislation ... and I hope their voices will have a very big impact upon the Democrats in the House, as well as the Republicans," Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., told reporters Sunday in Mosul.
During their visit to Baghdad, Lewis and other delegation members toured the al-Yarmouk hospital, peering into baby incubators and greeting expectant mothers at the maternity ward.
Infant mortality in Iraq is estimated at 103 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births in the United States.
"We have been shocked by the conditions of the infrastructure in general, and this hospital is a reflection of just how bad the situation is," Lewis said after walking through the grounds.
Lewis described the $20.3 billion as "only the beginning" of what will be required to repair the country's infrastructure.
September 29, 2003 at 07:02 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The U.S. was sure Saddam had WMD, but Iraqi scientists tell TIME the weapons were destroyed long before the war
NANCY GIBBS and MICHAEL WARE
Time Magazine
BAGHDAD -- The trader was actually sitting at home in Baghdad, waiting. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Americans came. It was just after curfew on the night of June 22, ten weeks after Saddam Hussein's fall, when he heard a helicopter overhead, the humvees in the street outside, the knock at the door. U.S. soldiers came rushing into the house, broke his bed, searched everywhere, then put a blindfold on him and drove him away.
He knew they would come because he knew what they were looking for. He had worked for the import section of Iraq's powerful Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), essentially the state's weapons-making organ, which owned hundreds of factories, research centers-everything you needed if you wanted to build an arsenal of chemical or biological weapons. He spent much of his time in the 1980s buying tons of growth medium, which scientists use to cultivate germs. "We were like traders." he says. "The scientists would tell us what they wanted, and we got it." After Gulf War I, he entertained a steady stream of U.N. weapons inspectors wanting to know what had happened to all that growth medium, how had it been used, what was left.
But there wasn't much he could tell them, not that he could prove, at least. Just before the war, he recalls, the chiefs at the mic had told people like him involved in the weapons program to hand over some of their documents and burn the rest. "They didn't realize at that time the Americans would insist on every single document," he says. "They thought the (U.S.) attacks would come and that would be it." When in the years after the war U.N. inspectors kept demanding a paper trail, the superiors got nervous. They "started asking us for the documents they had told us to destroy. They were desperate. They even offered to buy any documents we may have hidden."
Ten years and another war later, a new set of interrogators is wondering what happened to Iraq's bioweapons program. On the night of his arrest, the Americans took him to a detention center at the airport, where he was kept in a cell alone, given plenty of water and military rations. Two pairs of Western interrogators took turns asking questions, sometimes through a translator, sometimes directly in English or Arabic. "They asked me about the importation of things like chemicals and about people sent abroad for special missions. The essence of it was, Are there any wmd?" They particularly focused on the period after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left Iraq. "Could any trade have happened without my knowledge within the mic, not just my section?" The buyer says he had nothing of interest to tell the interrogators; his group, he insists, had long ago quit the weapons-of-mass-destruction business. As they pressed him about what he purchased and for whom, it seemed to him that "it was just like the blind man clutching for someone's hand to hold." After three days he was blindfolded, taken back into the city and released.
The trader's story offers a glimpse into the challenges faced by David Kay, a co-head of the Iraq Survey Group, charged by the cia with finding the wmd the Bush Administration insists Iraq has. Kay is expected to release a status report on his findings soon, possibly this week. While stressing that the account will not be the Survey Group's final word, cia spokesman Bill Harlow allows that it "won't rule anything in or out." That remark seems a tacit acknowledgment that the U.S., after nearly six months of searching, has yet to find definitive evidence that Saddam truly posed the kind of threat the White House described in selling the war.
Bush Administration officials never anticipated this predicament. They expected that wmd arsenals would be uncovered quickly once the U.S. occupied Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been scoured, and nearly every top weapons scientist has been captured or interviewed. That the investigators have found no hidden stockpiles of VX gas or anthrax or intact gas centrifuges suggests that it may be time to at least entertain the possibility that Iraqi officials all along were telling the truth when they said they no longer had a wmd program.
Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that officials destroyed or never kept the documents that would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems-missiles, air defenses, radar-not biological or chemical programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have. It would be an irony almost too much to bear to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place.
These tales are tempting to dismiss as scripts recited by practiced liars who had been deceiving the world community for years. These sources may still be too frightened of the possibility of Saddam's return to power to tell his secrets. Or it could be that Saddam reconstituted an illicit weapons program with such secrecy that those who knew of past efforts were left out of the loop. But the unanimity of these sources' accounts can't be easily dismissed and at the very least underscores the difficulty the U.S. has in proving its case that Saddam was hoarding unconventional arms.
Iraqi engineering professor Nabil al-Rawi remembers being at a conference in Beirut on Feb. 5 and watching on TV as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a presentation to the U.N. laying out the U.S. case that Iraq was pressing ahead with its weapons programs. Conference participants from other Arab countries grilled al-Rawi whether Powell's charges were true. An exasperated al-Rawi tried to reassure his counterparts that he and his teams had abandoned their illegal programs years earlier. Did they believe him? "I don't think so," he says.
Al-Rawi contends that he had been around long enough to know what was what. He had worked on the Iraqi nuclear program before the 1991 war and until the fall of the regime was a senior member of the mic. He and a nuclear engineer whom TIME interviewed claim that the nuclear-weapons program was not resumed after the plants were destroyed by the U.S. in Gulf War I. In his more recent work at the mic, al-Rawi had a perspective on the biological and chemical programs as well. Those too, he insists, were shut down in the early 1990s; the scientists transferred to conventional military projects or civilian work. Last November, al-Rawi says, he was asked by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, to give a seminar-essentially career counseling-to mic scientists "on ways to attract funding for and shape new research projects because there was no weapons work for them."
Sa'ad Abd al-Kahar al-Rawi, a relation of Nabil's, also thinks he would have known had Baghdad revived its wmd efforts. A professor of economics, he was a top financial adviser to the regime and knew the government books well. He says he would have known if money was disappearing into a black hole created by a special weapons project. Similarly, Iraqi scientists note that their community is small and tightly knit; most of them studied together and worked together. If a new, secret wmd program had started up, they argue, certain core players who held the necessary expertise would have had to be involved. Several scientists told TIME that all their cohort is accounted for; no one went underground. Iraq's premier scientists, according to Nabil al-Rawi, moved on to other things-teaching, water and power projects, producing generic Viagra.
Many did continue developing military technology. After 1991 Nabil al-Rawi worked on electrical controls for unmanned drones and, most recently, Stealth bomber-detection radar. Such projects were meant to be hidden from U.N. inspectors, who, the Iraqis have long asserted, were riddled with American spies. The Furat facility just south of Baghdad was a known nuclear site before the first Gulf War. Last fall the White House released satellite photos showing a new building at the site and suggested it was designed for covert nuclear research. But al-Rawi claims it was rebuilt to produce radar and antiaircraft systems. When TIME visited the plant this summer, there were signs of heavy bombing, but the new building was intact-and carpeted inside with documents in French, Russian, Arabic and English, all having to do with radar equipment, frequencies and trajectories.
In his U.N. presentation, powell asserted that the Tariq State Establishment in Fallujah was designed to develop chemical weapons. When TIME visited the site, it was empty. U.N. inspectors visited the facility six times from December 2002 to January 2003 and reported that the chlorine plant that so concerned the Americans "is currently inoperative." Nabil al-Rawi says the hundreds of scientists who worked there are now "doing other things." Another site mentioned by the allies in the walk-up to the war was the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, which both British intelligence and the cia suspected was part of a biological-warfare program.
TIME visited the site in July to see the two recently built warehouses that had raised those concerns. One had been bombed, its door cascading with a mountain of debris made up of burned and broken empty vials. The intact other building was packed to the rafters with boxes full of glassware and beakers. Pigeons roost in the ceiling, their droppings and feathers-some of it inches thick-caking the cardboard towers. Nothing appears to have been moved in a long time. U.S. intelligence officials declined to tell TIME about Washington's postwar assessment of the site.
So, why all the hide and seek if suspect facilities did not contain incriminating evidence? The former Minister of Industry and Minerals, Muyassar Raja Shalah, cites national security: "The U.N.'s accusations about hiding things were true," he says, recalling charges that Iraqis hustled evidence out the back door even as U.N. inspectors entered through the front. "This was Iraq's right, because the U.N. was searching for wmd in a lot of military facilities, and of course we held a lot of military secrets relating to the national security of Iraq in these places. It was impossible to let a foreigner have a look at these secrets."
Some analysts suspect that Saddam's game was a sly form of deterrence: keep the U.S. and his neighbors guessing about the extent of his arsenal to prevent a pre-emptive attack. A bluff like that had worked for him before: in 1991, during an uprising among Iraqi Kurds in Kirkuk, soldiers inside helicopters dropped a harmless white powder onto the rebels below, terrifying them into thinking it was a chemical attack. The Kurds retreated, and the uprising collapsed. Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspection team that entered Iraq last November and left just before the war, told Australian national radio two weeks ago that "you can put up a sign on your door, beware of the dog, without having a dog."
Pentagon officials were so certain before Gulf War II that the Iraqis had outfitted their forces with chemical weapons that U.S. soldiers storming toward Baghdad wore their hot, heavy chemical weapons gear, just in case. But a captain in Iraq's Special Security Organization, the agency that was responsible for, among other things, the security of weapons sites, says no such arms were available. "Trust me," he says, his eyes narrowed, as he sits in a back-alley teahouse in Tikrit, "if we had them, we would have used them, especially in the battle for the airport. We wanted them but didn't have any."
Colonel Ali Jaffar Hussan al-Duri, a Republican Guard armored-corps commander who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and in both Gulf Wars, remembers the time when Iraq's Chemical Corps was fear inspiring. "We were much better at it than the Iranians," he says, who are thought to have suffered as many as 80,000 casualties in chemical attacks. But after Gulf War I, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who headed the mic, took the most talented Chemical Corps officers with him, according to Hussan. After that, he claims, the unit became a joke. "It should have been a sensitive unit-it once was-but in the end that's where we dumped our worst soldiers." Comments a Republican Guard major of the Corps: "It had nothing."
If that's true, what happened to the banned weapons Iraq once possessed? In the inspections regime that lasted from 1991 to 1998, the U.N. oversaw the destruction of large stores of illicit arms. Some documented inventories, however, were never satisfactorily accounted for; these included tons of chemical agents as well as stores of anthrax and VX poison. The Iraqis eventually owned up to producing these supplies but insisted that they had disposed of much of them in 1991 when no one was looking and had kept no records of the destruction. That made Blix wonder. In an interview with TIME in February, he described Iraq as "one of the best-organized regimes in the Arab world" and noted "when they have had need of something to show, then they have been able to do so."
A former mic official insists that this view is mistaken. "In Iraq we don't write everything," he says. The claim that Saddam would destroy his most dangerous weapons of his own accord and not retain the means to prove it seems a stretch. But a captain in the Mukhabarat, the main Iraqi intelligence service, says he was a witness to just such an exercise. In July 1991, he says, he traveled into the Nibai desert in a caravan of trucks carrying 25 missiles loaded with biological agents. First the bulldozers took a week to bury them. It took three more weeks to evacuate the area. Then the missiles were exploded. No one kept any kind of documentation, the captain says. "We just did it." This meant that when weapons inspectors came demanding verification, the Iraqis could not prove what or how much had been destroyed.
Sa'ad al-rawi contends that the men who carried out such missions were junior level, sergeants and first sergeants. "They are not educated men," he says. "You order them to do something, they do it. When we had to try to account for this, we tried to recall them in 1997, but many had of course left the army and were hard to find. And the ones we did find certainly couldn't remember exactly how many missiles were buried, nor what was in each of them."
That still leaves unanswered why the Iraqis would have unilaterally destroyed their most potent arms. One theory, advanced by the U.N., is that the regime used these exercises as a cover for retaining a fraction of their stores. The idea is that they would destroy quantities of weapons (creating a disposal site and eyewitnesses, if not written records) and claim to have got rid of everything yet actually hold on to some of it. The Mukhabarat captain concedes that scientists kept small amounts of VX and mustard gas for future experiments. "I saw it myself, several times," he says.
Samir, a chemicals expert who worked for a branch of the mic called the National Monitoring Directorate, says he knows of a case in which 14 artillery shells filled with mustard gas were preserved out of a batch of 250 slated for destruction. The main purpose of keeping them, he says, was to test their deterioration over time. The Iraqis handed over the shells to the U.N. in 1997, claiming that they had been mis-stored and recently discovered, an explanation Samir says was a ruse. When four of the shells were unsealed, tests found their contents to be 97% pure. "The gas was perfect," says Samir.
Even if the Iraqis did destroy most of their illegal weaponry in 1991, that does not mean they didn't build up new stores. The notion that the bioweapons program wound down in the 1990s is flatly rejected by Richard Spertzel, who led the U.N. hunt for biological weapons inside Iraq from 1994 to 1998. "We were developing pretty good evidence of a continuing program in '97 and '98," he says. Some U.N. inspectors, disagree, saying they believe that there was no further production after 1991. Spertzel says an Iraqi scientist phoned him just this past April and told him an "edict" went out from Saddam shortly before the war ordering his biological-weapons teams to destroy any remaining germ stockpiles.
That Saddam would have continued feverishly pursuing weapons of every kind seems more in keeping with his character than the idea that he gave up on them. The Iraqi dictator was crazy for weapons, fascinated by every new invention-and as a result was easily conned by salesmen and officials offering the latest device. Saddam apparently had high hopes for a bogus product called red mercury, touted as an ingredient for a handheld nuclear device. Large quantities of the gelatinous red liquid were looted from Iraqi stores after the war and are now being offered on the black market.
Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the mic to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent several years in the 1990s as an air-defense inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer would say he needed $10 million to build a special weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there was never anything behind them."
If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western intelligence services were picking up so many clues about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer one logical argument that the Administration has been making ever since the weapons failed to appear after the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide, did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps because even he was mistaken about what was really at stake in this fight.
Whether the Iraqis had actual stores of unconventional weapons, Spertzel argues, is beside the point. He finds it credible that Iraq converted many of its weapons factories to civilian uses. Baghdad's official policy from 1995, he notes, was that facilities that were not building weapons had to be self-supporting. But, he adds, "they would be available when called upon" to return to armsmaking. Spertzel thinks the focus on finding a 55-gal. drum of poison is misplaced. "The concern that many of us always had was not that they were producing great quantities of stuff but that the program was continuing-they were refining techniques and making a better product. That's all part of an offensive program." Absent a smoking gun, the Administration may have to fall back on means and motive. That's always, however, a tougher case to prove.
-With reporting by Mark Thompson and Timothy J. Burger/Washington
September 29, 2003 at 06:59 AM in | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
BBC NEWS | UK | Profile: Sir Richard Dearlove
Sir Richard Dearlove became the second MI6 chief to be named publicly, when he was appointed head of the secret intelligence service in 1999.
Described as an intelligence "all rounder", his appointment was seen as a reflection of the agency's new post-Cold War priorities - fighting organised crime rather than spying on the Soviets.
Chosen by then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, in consultation with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, Sir Richard took the classic route into the espionage business.
Born in Cornwall on 23 January 1945, he was educated at the independent fee-paying Monkton Combe School near Bath.
After a year at Kent School in the United States, he went to Queen's College, Cambridge, a favourite recruiting ground for the intelligence agencies, where he was almost certainly "talent spotted".
He began his MI6 career in 1966 and two years later received his first overseas posting to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.
Rocket attack
After postings in Prague, Paris and Geneva, Sir Richard became head of MI6's Washington station in 1991.
He returned to the UK in 1993 as director of personnel and administration and became director of operations the following year.
In 1999 Sir Richard was appointed chief and, like all his predecessors since the agency's founder Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, became known in Whitehall simply as "C".
A year later he had to endure the indignity of a terrorist rocket attack - blamed on dissident Irish republicans - on MI6's headquarters on the south bank of the River Thames, although the damage was slight.
Secret intelligence
In 2001 it was the agency's reputation that came under fire after the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
MI6 was accused by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee of failing to respond with sufficient urgency to warnings that al-Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack.
The agency has come in for more scrutiny since the government's decision to publish an Iraqi weapons dossier based on secret intelligence - a move said to have made many in the intelligence community deeply uncomfortable.
Sir Richard is married with three grown-up children.
He received a knighthood in June 2001.
September 28, 2003 at 07:57 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | UK recalls MI6 link to Palestinian militants
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem
Wednesday September 24, 2003
The Guardian
Britain has ordered the MI6 agent at the heart of its Middle East strategy to leave Jerusalem, claiming that it fears for his safety.
Alistair Crooke provided Britain with its only direct contact with Hamas and other organisations officially shunned by the UK. But his associates say he is being forced out by the Foreign Office, which they claim is increasingly reluctant to challenge Israel's pledge to "obliterate terrorist groups".
Officially, Mr Crooke, 54, was assigned as a security adviser to the EU's special envoy to the Middle East six years ago because of his experience during the peace talks in Northern Ireland.
But the intelligence officer was at the forefront of the British attempts to draw Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups into the political process.
Mr Crooke, who was reported in the Israeli press as the spy who rejected the CIA's armoured vehicles in favour of Palestinian taxis, played a central role in putting together a ceasefire by Hamas a year ago which he believed would put an end to suicide bombings.
The deal was wrecked when the Israeli air force killed Hamas's military commander and 14 civilians, including nine children, by dropping a bomb on a house.
He was also involved in negotiations to end the Israeli army's sieges of Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem last year. He engineered several local truces between the Israelis and Palestinians during some of the worst fighting of the past three years.
Two years ago the outgoing British ambassador, Francis Cornish, described him to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz as "a person who worked with the security apparatuses of both sides. He went into action after they stopped trusting each other and developed a special skill to persuade them of the logic of things and to bridge the lack of confidence between them."
Yesterday, a British embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv said Mr Crooke would leave Jerusalem within days for "personal security reasons".
"The deterioration in the security situation in the occupied territories made it impossible for him to do his job safely," the spokesman said.
"We do think he's done a really difficult job in difficult conditions and has been outstanding at doing it."
The embassy acknowledged that Mr Crooke was leaving against his will but declined to discuss what his associates say were his growing differences with the Foreign Office over how best to bring an end to violence by Hamas and other militant groups.
Sources said that even after the latest suicide bombings and collapse of a seven-week ceasefire, amid what the Palestinians claim was deliberate Israeli provocation, Mr Crooke continued to argue that Hamas was ready to enter the political process and urged Israeli restraint.
But British diplomats in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and London, who were described as increasingly hostile to Mr Crooke's role, were said to have lost faith in that option after Hamas killed 23 people in the worst bus suicide bombing of the intifada last month.
"Alistair firmly believes in the value of continued discussion, that a deal could be worked out," said one source. "If that's what you want, one of the things Alistair has was contacts with Hamas. But in this environment, it's less decisive."
Mr Crooke also provided a rare link between the Israeli military and intelligence services and the groups that they were fighting.
He sought to persuade Ephraim Halevy, the former chairman of Israel's national security council, among others, that a deal could be done with Hamas in Israel's favour.
After quitting as Ariel Sharon's chief security adviser last month, Mr Halevy said he believed that Israel should negotiate with the political wing of Hamas.
But Mr Crooke was criticised by other Israeli officials who distrusted him, as did some Palestinians. The most notable of them was Mohammed Dahlan, the Palestinian Authority's security minister, who complained that he gave too much prominence to Hamas.
Yesterday, the MI6 officer declined to talk about the reasons for his departure from Israel.
September 28, 2003 at 07:55 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - White House Says It Had Iraq WMD Intelligence: "Sun Sep 28,12:56 PM
By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) insisted on Sunday there was new U.S. intelligence obtained before the Iraq (news - web sites) war about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs, despite an assertion by key congressional leaders that the information was dated or fragmentary.
Rice, a top aide to President Bush (news - web sites), dismissed the finding by leaders of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee that much of the information relied upon long-standing judgments dating back to before U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998 that were not routinely challenged by intelligence agencies.
"There was enrichment of the intelligence from 1998 over the period leading up to the war," Rice said on the "Fox News Sunday" program. "And nothing pointed to a reversal of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s very active efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction."
"... It was very clear that this continued and it was a gathering danger," she said. "Yes, I think I would call it new information and it was certainly enriching the case in the same direction."
She was responding to concerns of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, and Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), a California Democrat, in a letter to CIA (news - web sites) Director George Tenet dated on Thursday and obtained by Reuters this weekend.
'CONSTANT AND STATIC'
"The assessment that Iraq continued to pursue chemical and biological weapons remained constant and static over the past 10 years," the letter said.
There was "insufficient specific information" about the former Iraqi president's plans and intentions, the status of Iraq's WMD programs and capabilities, and Iraq's links to al Qaeda, the lawmakers said.
The letter, which did not reflect the full committee's opinion, cited weakness in intelligence from spies on the ground and said the government needed to develop better sources.
The lawmakers concluded: "There were significant deficiencies with respect to the IC's (intelligence community's) intelligence collection activities concerning Iraq's WMD programs and ties to al-Qa'ida (al Qaeda) prior to the commencement of hostilities there."
The United States justified going to war largely because of a threat from Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs, but no such weapons have been found.
Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said he had "no second thoughts" about the decision to go to war.
"There was every reason to believe -- and I still believe -- that there were weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs to develop weapons of mass destruction," Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
"I don't think we have anything to be regretful about," he added.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said, "The notion that our community does not challenge standing judgments is absurd."
"Iraq was an intractable and difficult subject. The tradecraft of intelligence rarely has the luxury of having black and white facts," he added.
CIA adviser David Kay, who has been coordinating the hunt for Iraq's banned weapons, is scheduled to present lawmakers with an interim report in the coming week, but was not expected to reveal that any weapons had been found.
Kay's report was "only going to be a progress report and is likely not going to draw any major conclusions," Rice said. "He's got a very long way still to go," she told Fox.
An October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate report on Iraq said it had continued its WMD programs, had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programs.
September 28, 2003 at 07:48 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
CNN.com - Justice Dept. seeks source who leaked CIA agent's name - Sep. 28, 2003
Sunday, September 28, 2003 Posted: 1:52 PM EDT (1752 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Justice Department is trying to pinpoint the source of a news leak that identified the wife of former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a CIA officer, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.
Administration officials told CNN last week that the CIA had asked the department for a legal opinion as to whether there should be an official investigation into the naming of an undercover CIA employee, allegedly by someone working in the Bush administration.
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was described as a CIA employee in a July column by Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times. CNN has been unable to reach Plame.
Wilson has publicly chided the Bush administration for including in his 2003 State of the Union speech a British intelligence report that -- before the Iraq war -- Iraq was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
Wilson said he visited Niger in early 2002 on behalf of the CIA to investigate a British intelligence report alleging that Iraq tried to buy uranium there. Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat in the African nation, reported finding no evidence to support the claim.
Eventually, Bush acknowledged that the uranium statement was not accurate, and CIA director George Tenet said the error was his responsibility.
Wilson has suggested the leak about his wife was directly connected to his public criticism of the administration for including the uranium report in the speech after he had already discredited it.
"The idea, it seemed to me, in going after me and then later making these allegations about my wife, was clearly designed to keep others from stepping forward," Wilson, rormerly the acting U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, told CNN last month.
"I don't know if that's true or not, but you can be sure that a GS-14 or 15 with a couple of kids in college, when he sees the allegations that came from senior administration officials about my family ... in the public domain, you can be sure that he's going to be worried about what might happen if he were to come forward."
GS-14 or GS-15 refers to the federal General Schedule pay scale. GS-15 is the highest level, with annual salaries generally ranging from $95,000 to $125,000.
Rice, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said she "knew nothing of any such White House effort to reveal any of this."
"Certainly it would not be the way the president expected his White House to operate," she said.
The Justice Department "gets these things as a matter of routine," she said.
Novak's column connected the leak to the Bush administration and reported that Plame "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
"Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate," wrote Novak, who is also a host of CNN's "Crossfire." "The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him."
Though Novak has declined to reveal his sources, Wilson and others have suggested that the information was fed to Novak by the White House.
Asked whether the president will try to determine whether the White House leaked the information about Plame, Rice told NBC's "Meet the Press," "I think it's best, since it's in the hands of the Justice Department, to let it remain there."
September 28, 2003 at 04:46 PM in CIA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
TIME.com: So, What Went Wrong? -- Oct. 06, 2003
Ever since America's decisive military victory, Iraq has been nothing but trouble. TIME reports on the errors and bad guesses, before and after the war, that got the Bush Administration into this spot
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT
On May 1, off the coast of California, president George W. Bush landed in flying gear on the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincolnâwhich sported a banner reading mission accomplishedâand said, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
The war, said Bush, had been carried out "with a combination of precision and speed and boldness the enemy did not expect, and the world had not seen before."
But the mission wasn't accomplished then, and it still is not. The reconstruction of Iraq has proved far more difficult than any official assumed it would be. Since May 1, 170 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, as sporadic guerrilla attacks have continued. Two potential leaders of the new IraqâAyatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and Akila al-Hashimi, a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council in Iraqâhave been assassinated. Also dead is Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. chief representative in Iraq, who was killed when a bomb exploded at U.N. headquarters last month. After a second bombing last week near the building, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered a reduction in the size of the organization's missionâalready much smaller than it had once beenâfor reasons of safety.
Over the long, hot Iraqi summer, frequent power cuts made life unbearable for millions, while the flow of oil, which the Administration had hoped would fund Iraq's reconstruction, was, on some days, less than half what it had been before the war. And despite five months of searching, the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), whose possession by Saddam Hussein had been the principal reason advanced by Bush for the war, are still nowhere to be found. "There are challenges greater than we anticipated," said a White House official last week, while insisting "In time, the benefits of our actions will be quite obvious."
The number of Americans to whom those benefits are obvious right now is in decline. In the latest Gallup poll, Bush's approval ratings dropped to 50%, the lowest since right before Sept. 11, 2001. Some critics of the Administration's hard-liners pull no punches. "It reminds me of Vietnam," says retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who headed the U.S. Central Command from 1997 to 2000. "Here we have some strategic thinkers who have long wanted to invade Iraq. They saw an opportunity, and they used the imminence of the threat and the association with terrorism and the 9/11 emotions as a catalyst and justification. It's another Gulf of Tonkin."
On Capitol Hill, Bush's eye-popping supplementary budget request of $87 billion in the current fiscal year for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistanâwhich includes $20 billion in grants to rebuild Iraqâhas left even Republicans gasping. As it becomes clear that there will not be a sudden influx of non-American troops into Iraq, the Pentagon is having to extend tours of duty there of regular soldiers and reservists. Bush's travails have invigorated the Democratic Party; all the Democrats running for the White House make criticism of Bush's record in Iraq a part of their pitch. And although few are brave enough to say it, other world leadersâmost of whom opposed the warâcan hardly hide their sense that the Bush Administration is getting what it deserves. When Bush spoke before the U.N. General Assembly last Tuesday, he faced an audience he has often described as having the enthusiasm of a "wax museum." The applause that greeted his speech was tepid, while that reserved for war opponent Jacques Chirac, the French President, was, at least by the U.N.'s decorous standards, positively thunderous.
In the speech, Bush said the U.S.-led coalition is "helping to improve the daily lives of the Iraqi people," rebuilding schools and reopening hospitals. The claim is well made. For most Iraqis, everyday life is steadily improving, helped by the onset of cooler weather. But the missteps and violence of the summer, and the realization that the U.S. and its allies will be paying for Iraq in blood and treasure for years, have altered America's politics and foreign policy, making it likely that the 2004 election will be competitive and practically ensuring that if the U.S. wants to embark on another adventure like the pre-emptive war in Iraq, it will do so virtually alone.
Those consequences flow from a series of flawed assumptions and decisions made before the war startedâsome based on resolute optimism, some based on naivete, and some that carried unfortunate unintended consequences. The Administration's leading members, said Democratic Senator Joseph Biden last week, "believed we would find an oil-rich, functioning country, that we'd be met by cheering crowds, that all we had to do was sweep out the top Baathist layers, implant our favorite exiles and watch democracy take root as the bulk of the troops returned home by Christmas." Allowing for Bidenesque hyperbole, that is not far off the mark. Bureaucratic infighting, wishful thinking andâat least according to his many rivalsâan undue influence in Washington exerted by Ahmed Chalabi, the exile leader who is the darling of the neoconservative faction in Washington, contributed to a process by which the Bush Administration got Iraq wrong. Here's how:
WHAT WEAPONS?
Of all the miscalculations on Iraq, few have been as surprising as the inability to find real evidence of Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon officials say the 1,200-strong team led by cia weapons expert David Kay, whose interim report is expected soon, has not found any stockpiles of deadly chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. So far, says an Administration official, "they have come across only parts and pieces and thingsâand that's about the best they are going to come up with." Members of Bush's senior national security team, says this official, "are as surprised as anyoneâthey really thought that it would be a lot easier to find, identify and show the world everything that was there." Iraqi sources involved in Saddam's WMD programs, meanwhile, insist that there was nothing to find; all weapons, they say, were destroyed long ago (see following story). For Bush, the failure to find WMD has been a source of political embarrassment. For his principal ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it has been a disaster, as allegations that his government exaggerated a nonexistent threat have sapped confidence in his leadership.
Critics insist that Bush and Blair stretched the available intelligence on WMD until it fit their predetermined decision to go to war. But that can't be the whole story. There is no doubt many British and U.S. officials really believed that Saddam had at least chemical and biological weaponsâthe British government, certainly, would never have taken the risk of waging an unpopular war if it had genuinely thought there was nothing deadly to be found in Iraq. And in their conviction that Saddam was hiding something, Bush and Blair were not alone. Top members of Bill Clinton's Administration were also convinced that Saddam had WMD programs, and in an interview with Time in February, even Chirac said it was "probable" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. U.N. weapons inspectors had long said that Iraq had not accounted for all the WMD discovered in the 1990s.
Why were so many people so sure that Saddam had WMD? In part, of course, because he did once have themâand until challenged by U.N. inspectors after the first Gulf War had tried to conceal them. There may, however, have been another reason: Saddam himself apparently thought he had them. Sources tell Time that Western intelligence intercepted communications from Saddam that indicated he was taking a keen interest in the progress of ongoing WMD programs. It may be that evidence of such programs will yet turn up. Or possibly Saddam may have been duped by his own scientists, who didn't tell him their work on WMD was not getting far. (It would have been a brave Iraqi who crossed Saddam on that point.) Alternatively, in the hall of mirrors that was Iraq, Saddam may have been trying to fool everyone into thinking that he had something he hadn't. But if the assumption that Saddam had deadly weapons looks, at least for now, to have been mistaken, it was to an extent understandable.
VICTORY WITHOUT PACIFICATION
The fruitless hunt for WMD has not cost American lives. The failure to understand that the war was not overâand in some ways, had barely begunâwhen Bush stood on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, has. The war that was fought in Iraqâwith a swift march from the south to Baghdadâwas not the war that Pentagon planners had anticipated.
Right up to a few weeks before the start of hostilities, plans had called for the 4th Infantry Division to advance from Turkey through northern Iraq. Administration officials, especially Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who led the negotiations with Ankara, had believed that Turkey would support the U.S. But the prospect of war in Iraq was deeply unpopular in Turkey, and on March 1, the Turkish parliament, dominated by the Islamist A.K. (Justice and Development) Party, turned the U.S. down.
Diplomats and observers in Ankara allocate responsibility for the fiasco in many ways: some blame inexperienced A.K. ministers who overplayed their hand with the U.S., while others point the finger at Wolfowitz, who, say his critics, never understood that with the election of the A.K., military and secular leaders with strong ties to the U.S. no longer monopolized power. Says Emin Sirin, an A.K. parliamentary deputy and Istanbul businessman: "The Americans thought that if you talk to two or three people, you have Turkey in your hands. The whole system has changed, and they didn't appreciate that."
Whoever is to blame, the Turkish mess made it harder to fight the war. With a substantial force coming down from Turkey, there was a chanceâthough no certaintyâof pacifying the "Sunni triangle" to the north and west of Baghdad, including Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. Instead, Iraqi fighters loyal to Saddam left Baghdad and went home, where, motivated by nationalism and tribal loyalties, they could regroup and plan attacks on American forces. It was not until Juneâin Operations Desert Scorpion and Peninsula Strikeâthat the fight was taken to them. One battle, for the town of Dululiyah, north of Baghdad, involved 4,000 U.S. soldiers.
The speed of the U.S. advance from the south, coupled with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's determination that the U.S. invading force should be as small as possible, had a further consequence. When the war was over, there were not enough U.S. troops to detain and disarm Iraqi fighters or maintain security in the cities. Governmental authority in Iraq collapsed, leaving the U.S. forces, already stretched thin, to do everything from guarding banks to hunting down guerrillas. "The Americans thought they would come and just slot in at the top," says Entifadh Qanbar, a spokesman in Baghdad for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.). "But the whole government basically melted away, and they weren't ready for that."
That failure was compounded by the disastrous decision by U.S. proconsul L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer in May to disband the Iraqi army, which put thousands of armed men on the streets with no pay and no reason to support the Americans. In December a blue-ribbon commission created by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University had argued the opposite case. The Iraqi army, the panel said, "could serve as a guarantor of peace and stability if it is retrained in part for constabulary duty and internal security mission"âsomething that has only just been started. Ron Adams is a retired Army lieutenant-general who acted as deputy to retired Army General Jay Garner, chief of the reconstruction effort in its first months. Says Adams: "There were some of us saying, right from the get-go, 'We think there's a troops-to-task mismatch hereâI'm not sure there are enough troops to maintain security.'" Ibrahim al-Janabi, of the Iraqi National Accord (i.n.a.), says that in early March, i.n.a. leader Ayad Alawi, who now sits on the Governing Council, met with top U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, to recommend that the U.S. keep the Iraqi army and police force intact to maintain security. Chalabi, for his part, had argued for a U.S.-trained, 15,000-strong military-police force to keep the peace after the collapse of Saddam's regime. "It would have made all the difference in the world," he says. But U.S. policymakers, claims Chalabi, "didn't listen to us at all."
TOO MANY COOKS
That Chalabi thinks he was not listened to by U.S. officials will produce a hollow laugh in both Washington and Iraq. For his opponents in Iraq, the chaos over the summer can be laid at Chalabi's door. "I think the Americans relied on information they got from Iraqis outside the country, especially Chalabi," says Rabiah Mohammed al-Habib, a prominent tribal prince in Iraq. "These people simply wanted military intervention." Sometimes unfairly, Chalabi is blamed for encouraging his friends in Washington to think that an invasion would be a breeze and reconstructing Iraq not much harder.
Chalabi's longstanding links to top officials in the Administration are legendary. He considers Wolfowitz a good friend and the night after the statue of Saddam fell in Baghdad spoke with 12 Senators from his base in Nasiriyah, Iraq. One I.N.C. official says that in the run-up to the war, Francis Brooke, Chalabi's point man in Washington, spoke once a week to Bill Luti, who ran the Pentagon's Iraq policy from the Special Plans Office. Brooke also had access to John Hannah, who runs the Middle East desk in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. "From Day One, we were having discussions with the Bush Administration," says Brooke. "Our views were well known."
And they were influential. A year ago, Tom Warrick, a career State Department official, assembled a Future of Iraq project that brought together more than 200 Iraqis in working groups with U.S. officials observing. The I.N.C. joined only one of the working groups. Chalabi's people dismiss the whole exercise as absurd. "We just thought it was a joke," says an I.N.C. official. Says another: "The idea that there was a well-organized project at the State Department that was producing sophisticated postwar planning is ridiculous. The scholarship was at the high school-essay level." Others believe I.N.C. and its allies in the Administration already knew what they wanted to do and undermined an effort to unite Iraqis of all persuasions around a common project. "What happened to all that work we put in?" says Laith Kubba, an Iraqi at Washington's National Endowment for Democracy. For whatever reason, the Future of Iraq project was pretty much ignored. "The White House barely knew about it," says a former official involved in postwar planning.
In fact, by September 2002, the White House had its own exercise under way. In August of that year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had held contentious hearings on Iraq, focusing on the apparent lack of any postconflict preparation. Just after Labor Day, Rice summoned her top staff to an evening meeting and set up four working groups to try to coordinate inter-agency squabbling. State, as usual, was trying to find a multilateral approach to Iraq and to boost the status of opponents to the regime inside Iraq. The Defense Department was happy to go it alone and rely on its favored Iraqi exiles. The cia, meanwhile, was trying to warn that governing Iraq after the war would not be as easy as some of the exiles had thought.
Rice's working groups failed on two counts. First, they never succeeded in getting State and the Pentagon on the same page. In January Bush assigned responsibility for postwar Iraq to the Pentagonâto which Garner reportedâwhich soon made it plain that everyone else would play a secondary role. But, just as important, the Rice group responsible for postwar planning, led by Elliott Abrams from the National Security Council and Robin Cleveland from the Office of Management and Budget, woefully underestimated the cost of reconstructing Iraq. It was the work of that group that in large part led omb director Mitch Daniels to estimate a year ago that the total price tag of the Iraq adventure would be just $50 million to $60 million, a range Bush surely now wishes were true. The failure to get the costs right turned on two false assumptions: that Iraq's infrastructure was in relatively decent shape and that Iraqi oil exports would pay for much of the country's reconstruction. But Iraq's electricity grid is barely functional, and its oil installations aren't much better. "The oil refineries can't be repaired, in my opinion," said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a visit to Iraq last month. "They have to be replaced."
How did the Administration get its cost estimates so wrong? The conventional explanationâoffered last week by Marine General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffâis that "until you get in on the ground, you don't have a thorough understanding of how degraded those systems became." But Iraq isn't on the dark side of the moon. "There were plenty of people in and out of Iraqâinspectors and many other potential sources of information about the state of Iraq's infrastructure," says Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer. "This was a whopping intelligence failure."
Peters has a point. A report on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council last year stated: "The deficit in electric power as a result of damage inflicted and nonavailability of spare parts and equipment for maintenance is a serious problem throughout the country. The network continues to deteriorate." The Council on Foreign Relations/Rice University study estimated that "rebuilding Iraq's electrical power infrastructure could cost $20 billion to restore its pre-1990 capacity." Many oil experts spent last winter publicly debunking the Administration's assumptions on oil, pointing out that 12 years of sanctions had left the industry in a terrible state. "There has been a great deal of wishful thinking about Iraqi oil," said the Council on Foreign Relations/Rice University report, noting that the oil sector was "being held together by 'Band-Aids'" and estimating that the Iraqi industry needed $30 billion to $40 billion to rehabilitate active wells and develop new fields. "Put simply," the report continued, "we do not anticipate a bonanza." According to Department of Energy figures, Iraq is pumping only about 1.65 million bbl. of oil a day now, compared with 2.8 million before the war and 3.5 million before 1990, which makes that revelation something of an understatement.
LIBERATORS VS. OCCUPIERS
Administration officials insist that U.S. forces were welcomed into Iraq as liberatorsâwhich, for a week or so, they wereâand that there is still gratitude for their presence nowâwhich is more debatable. In a society that has been as repressed as Iraq's for 50 years, true popular sentiment is hard to judge. Iraq is still getting used to freedom and its boundless possibilities. After the war was over, many stores in Baghdad did not take up their shutters, though it was safe for them to do so. "We're waiting for someone to tell us to open," said an elderly shopkeeper. But whatever horrors they have suffered, Iraq's proud citizens cannot be expected to be happy with the reality of foreign soldiers on their streets. "There is a real nationalistic feeling here," says a European diplomat who has worked in Baghdad for two years. "It is a real country, and it has a real national feeling that it is being occupied. And even if they don't know who will lead them tomorrow, they don't want to be occupied." Kasim al-Sahlani, a senior member of the Dawa Party, a moderate Islamic party that opposed Saddam from within, complains that Bremer said Iraqis were not yet ready to lead the country. "The Iraqis are civilized people," he says, "but Paul Bremer's words make us sound like children."
Joe Fillmore, a contract translator with the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit, agrees that resentment is deepening. Things may look better on the surface, he says, but there is a growing frustration with the occupation. "The town is divided into two parts," he says. "Those who hate us and those who don't mind us but want us to go." Even Chalabi, who is among the most pro-American people in Iraq, says, "When the U.S. said we are not liberators, we are an occupation force, the views of people changed."
Part of the difficulty is simply cultural. "If an Iraqi policeman stops someone on the street and asks them politely to do something," says al-Janabi of the I.N.A, "that person will be ready to be a ring on the policeman's finger. But if you shout at him like the Americans do and hurt his dignityâhe will hate you." In Baghdad a U.S. special-forces officer sadly agrees. "We should have been culturally sensitive," he says. In places like Fallujah, he argues, "we should never have gone into people's houses. Saddam's soldiers never went into housesâthey would negotiate and settle things with money. We don't understand how things work around here." That is an honest assessment, not an indictment. There is not the slightest reason in the world why 19-year-old boys from Kansas and Kentucky should know how to deal with Iraqi sensitivitiesâto get Iraq rightâand it is unfair to condemn them for failing to do so. But it is not unfair to judge those who got Iraq wrong and thought five months ago that the mission of those young men, now hunkering down for a longer tour of duty than they ever expected, was over. It is not.
âReported by Brian Bennett, Simon Robinson, Vivienne Walt and Michael Ware/Baghdad, J.F.O. McAllister/London, Andrew Purvis/Vienna and Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Viveca Novak, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington
September 28, 2003 at 04:32 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Peter Conradi
September 28, 2003
THE German president, Johannes Rau, has accused Britain of giving in to Adolf Hitler's territorial demands and likened the subsequent suffering of exiled Germans to the fate of the Jews.
Weighing into the debate on his country's role in the second world war, Rau also criticised the allies for seizing territory, forcing 12m Germans to flee their homes in eastern Europe.
Rau, 72, a veteran Social Democrat, likened the suffering of the expelled Germans â a powerful lobby known as the Vertriebenen â to the fate of victims of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s.
The president criticised foreign leaders, including Neville Chamberlain, who âextended their handâ to Hitler at a meeting in Munich in 1938. Their agreement handed Hitler part of Czechoslovakia.
Rau, who retires next year, also decried those âwho in central and eastern Europe, first, working together with the Germans, deprived the Jews of their rightsâ and afterwards deprived the Germans of their rights, too. He pointed in particular to the 1945 Yalta and Potsdam conferences at which the allies gave German land to Poland and others.
âHitlerâs criminal policies do not exonerate anyone who answered terrible wrongs with terrible wrongs,â Rau declared. âThe pan-European catastrophe can only really be understood in its entire context.â
The speech, delivered earlier this month to the annual meeting of the Bund der Vertriebenen (Expellees Association), has gone largely unreported in Germany.
It coincides with a heated argument about plans for a centre in Berlin to remember the Vertriebenen, which has caused alarm in eastern Europe.
His attempt to link the fate of the Vertriebenen with that of the Jews appears to mark a fresh stage in what Antony Beevor, the historian, has criticised as a Opferkultur, or victim culture, among Germans.
September 28, 2003 at 12:28 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Matthew Scott never thought heâd be taken hostage travelling. But the risks are greater than many suspect. Margarette Driscoll reports
With all the resilience of youth, Matthew Scott returned home to London last week looking as if he had taken a stroll through Hyde Park. In fact, he had spent 12 days wandering alone in the Colombian rainforest without food and with only rainwater to drink after escaping from kidnappers.
James and Kate Scott, his ecstatically relieved parents, could hardly contain themselves. They had been through the nightmare that haunts every family as headstrong teenagers take off in their gap years to the ends of the earth.
For nearly two weeks they had believed their 19-year-old son was one of a group of hostages in the hands of gunmen somewhere in the vastness of South America, out of contact and beyond any help they could hope to bring.
Colombia is notoriously dangerous. During the mid-20th century it endured decades of bloody political strife known simply as la violencia. It later became infamous for its billionaire drug traffickers; and the cocaine profits stoked a civil war between Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, which has fuelled an epidemic of kidnappings.
Matthewâs parents had not wanted him to go. James Scott, a retired orthopaedic surgeon, said last week: âYou could say he went without parental consent.â But, like tens of thousands of other youngsters on their gap years, Matthew thought foreign travel in remote areas was none too daunting.
His father was able to joke in the joy of reunion: âThere are places youâd like your children to go. Obviously, Iâd have preferred him to have gone to Croydon.â But what are parents to do? Indeed, should they do anything to rein in an adventurous spirit?
WHEN Matthew arrived in Colombia in May, he wanted to learn Spanish, polish his juggling and see a bit of the world. He went to the old city of Cali, where he studied Spanish and taught English.
At the end of his stint in Cali, Matthew was determined to see more of Colombia. Three weeks ago, he joined a group travelling to the Lost City, a spectacular 2,500-year-old ruin hidden in a forest in the Sierra Nevada â the âsnowy mountainsâ.
This is an isolated, risky area, and he was apparently warned against going. But he was âvery adventurous and impulsiveâ, said a friend in Colombia.
The warnings were vindicated in the most dramatic fashion. As Matthew and his 15-or-so companions slept in a cabin, a group of armed men burst in. They were from a small left-wing organisation that calls itself the National Liberation Army (ELN) The guerrillas lined the tourists up in the rain, stripped them of their valuables, then selected their hostages. Matthew was one of eight foreigners â two Britons, a German, a Spaniard and four Israelis â marched off into the trees.
In recent years, as kidnapping has become more urbanised in Colombia, the âquick-napâ has come into play. In this, the victim is grabbed for a few hours and released when either the family stumps up a few hundred dollars or the kidnappers have exhausted the victimâs debit cards.
Matthewâs kidnappers, however, followed the âtraditionalâ tactic of taking their captives on a route march into the mountains and forests to evade capture. As they slogged through the sierra on the second day, Matthew saw a chance to escape. This time his impulsiveness helped him. âIt was raining in the mountains, the visibility wasnât good. The sides were very steep,â he said. âI jumped off a cliff very quickly. I was lucky not to have broken my arms and legs.â
For nearly two weeks he stumbled through the rainforest until he was found, skinny and dehydrated, by a group of Kogui Indians who gave him some soup, beans and oranges. A passing army patrol took him to hospital.
Remarkable though Matthewâs escape was, Mark Henderson, the other Briton, and six others were still held by the ELN. Matthew had struck up a friendship with Henderson, a 31-year-old television producer from North Yorkshire, in a Bogota backpacker hostel. They had intended to travel around Colombia together.
The Colombian government is offering a reward of more than ÂŁ11,000 for information leading to the rescue of Henderson and other hostages, and the Colombian army has some 1,500 soldiers, two spy planes and nine helicopters scouring the zone. Advisers from the Metropolitan police and the Israeli security services have joined the search, but it is difficult work: the area encompasses mountain peaks, deep jungles and deserts.
SHOULD the hostages have made a rational assessment of the risks they ran and avoided the trip? Perhaps it is asking too much.
Although the world is portrayed in the media as increasingly dangerous, recent research for the Foreign Office showed that fewer than one in 10 people could name a single risk on trips abroad.
âThe more we travel, the further we go, the more blasĂ© we seem to become,â said Rachel Briggs, author of a study on travel risk for the Foreign Policy Centre. âPost-September 11 we are all aware of terrorism, but the more we concentrate on that the more the risks of crime like kidnapping are obscured. But in certain parts of the world it is a real danger. There are more than 3,000 kidnaps a year in Colombia alone.â Other hotspots include the Philippines, former Soviet republics and South Africa.
A generation ago, the youngest backpackers facing these dangers were mainly in their twenties, travelling post- university. Now they are barely out of school and perhaps travelling for the first time on their own. What can be done to prepare them?
Objective, a personal security company (www.objectivegapyear.com), runs gap-year travel courses for youngsters booked in by anxious parents. The courses, taught by former SAS men at ÂŁ150 a time, cover how to cope with a rip-tide or a snake bite â but they concentrate on how to stay out of trouble.
âItâs all about avoidance and planning,â said Louise Bowman-Shaw, the organiser. Her advice in the worst-case scenario â being taken hostage â is to underreact:
âComply with anything you are told to do. Donât try to be a hero. Try to strike up some rapport with your captor; itâs much harder to kill someone you like. It might be the first time theyâve ever kidnapped someone and theyâll be jumpy. Donât panic them into killing you because youâre being a pain.â
DAVID HUTCHINSON, a 60-year-old retired banker, knows how to survive. He lived in Bogota for many years before he was kidnapped last March. As he arrived at his apartment block he was grabbed, tied up and drugged by members of Farc, the largest Marxist guerilla group. It was the last time he saw home for 10 months.
He was kept with a group of fellow captives high in the mountains outside Bogota. It rained every day and they feared catching pneumonia. Hutchinson contracted leishmaniasis, a fly-borne parasite similar to leprosy that ate away at one of his legs. âIf youâre going to survive you need to be patient and fatalistic,â he said. âYou have to eat a bit every day, wash, donât let yourself get into a depressive state. You have to learn to live with fear.â
He was afraid of being rescued; several captives were executed recently when the army tried to raid a guerrilla camp. He sat it out while the kidnappers negotiated a ransom with his family. âItâs a long, drawn-out process,â he said. âYou need a tough negotiator on your side. In our case it was a priest. Thereâs no way my wife could have coped. They ask for $2m. You say they can have 17/6d and two green stamps. They say, âWe wonât even bury him for thatâ. And so it goes on . . .â
Hutchinson will not say what ransom was finally paid, but it wiped him out financially. âThese are not romantic peasants, they are very nasty people,â he says. âI worked all my life, and everything I saved has gone.â
The aftermath was almost as traumatic as the original ordeal. Hutchinson did not feel safe again for months after his release. âYou go to cross a road and you canât do it,â he says. âYou stand on the pavement with the cars going by and turn to jelly and burst into tears. But slowly it passes. Every day you get a little better.â
Tom Hart Dyke, a botanist captured as he recorded rare species of orchid on the Colombia-Panama border in March 2000, says what kept him going was the companionship of his fellow captive, Paul Winder, with whom he later wrote The Cloud Garden, a book about their ordeal.
âWeâd only known each other three weeks but we bonded,â he said. âWe had a couple of chances to escape but we both had to agree to do it. In our situation if one had escaped, the other would have had a bad time. Itâs very difficult and we are thinking of poor Mark Hendersonâs parents. Iâm sure it will be all right in the end, but it will take time. They have to be strong.â
Sometimes, it is not all right in the end. Nev Popeâs 25-year-old son Jason, a geologist, was taken hostage five years ago in Angola. He has not been heard of again.
She has set up Mamma (murdered, abandoned, missing, maimed, abducted) which aims to provide practical and spiritual support to people whose loved ones have been injured or killed abroad.
âA lot of people feel they are going mad,â she said. âWhere do you turn for help? If you go for bereavement counselling you're admitting they're dead. If you don't, are you keeping a false hope alive? How do you cope with weeks or months with no news?
With luck, Matthew Scott, being so briefly a captive, should escape the worst of the psychological traumas.
Returning to his familyâs ivy-clad home in Clapham, south London, on Friday night, he said: âI still feel as though I'm walking on air. I have a hammock in my bedroom and right now all I want to do is lie in it and listen to music and perhaps invite some of my friends around. I think perhaps they (his family) all worry too much about me at times.â
Additional reporting: Rachel Dobson
September 28, 2003 at 11:58 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Steven Shukor
AN RAF engineer who died 50 years ago was unlawfully killed by the government in secret chemical weapon trials, an inquest will be told this week.
Ronald Maddison, 20, from County Durham, volunteered to participate in experiments at the Porton Down military testing centre near Salisbury in May 1953 believing they were to help find a cure for the common cold. He collapsed and died an hour after 200mg of liquid sarin â a deadly nerve agent â was dripped onto his uniform in a gas chamber.
An inquest into Maddisonâs death was held in secret in 1953 and recorded a verdict of misadventure. However, last year the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, approved a new hearing, saying the circumstances were of âreal public concernâ.
The outcome of the inquest is considered crucial by hundreds of Porton Down veterans, who want a public inquiry into a secret testing programme held there between 1948 and 1983.
They have obtained legal aid to challenge a decision this summer by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute those behind the programme, following a four-year police investigation. The veterans claim they were duped into volunteering for the tests which involved a series of chemical agents including mustard gas and hallucinogens such as LSD.
The servicemen were not told what chemicals were being tested on them and many say they were told they were helping to find a cure for the cold.
Official government notices calling for volunteers for the Porton Down experiments in February 1953 stated:
âThe physical discomfort resulting from the tests is usually very slight. Tests are carefully planned to avoid the slightest chance of danger.â
The reality, it appears, was different. John Longden, a volunteer, had liquid CS gas dripped into his eye in 1969 after being told it would feel like âsoap in the eyeâ and that there was an antidote. In the event, he was strapped into a chair and held down for an agonising eight minutes. The antidote turned out to be a bucket of cold water thrown in his face.
In another case, Gerald Beech, who took part in a sarin gas test in 1950, said: âWe couldnât see in the daylight for a good 48 hours. Virtually blinded we were and that was just the beginning of my troubles.â
Many of the volunteers, like Beech, complain of long term ill-health, including severe respiratory problems, as a result of the experiments.
In Maddisonâs case the tests resulted in his death. There is evidence the scientists knew the risks. A report written on the eve of the test by Dr Harry Cullumbine, head of the physiology section at Porton Down, said: âThe object of these experiments has been to discover the dosage of (sarin) which when applied to the clothed or bare skin of men would cause incapacitation or death.â Dr Cullumbine went ahead with the tests although five men had been hospitalised in the previous weeks.
It is understood lawyers acting for the Maddison family will argue that scientists, who are all dead, acted recklessly and unlawfully.
Ken Earl, 69, chairman of the Porton Down Veterans Support Group, said: âItâs imperative that we get a good result here. It may bring on a public inquiry.â
A preliminary hearing takes place on Wednesday.
September 28, 2003 at 10:31 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Jack Grimston
September 28, 2003
THE prime minister was yesterday formally asked to explain any role Downing Street played in initiating a police raid on the offices of The Sunday Times in Northern Ireland.
The move came in the wake of ruling by a Belfast court that the surprise raid â conducted by armed police officers earlier this year â was unlawful.
Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, admitted to the court on Friday that the search warrant had not been properly authorised.
A valid search of journalistic material requires the authorisation of a county court judge but instead the warrant was signed by a justice of the peace.
Orde was ordered to pay the newspaperâs costs in bringing a judicial review which forced his admission of wrongdoing.
Now Kevin McNamara, a former Labour party front-bench spokesman on Northern Ireland, has written to the prime minister to ask if he â or anyone else in office â was responsible for initiating the unlawful raid. He is backed by the Conservatives who have pledged to raise the matter in the Commons unless McNamara receives a satisfactory reply from Tony Blair.
âThe sequence of events that led to the police raids would seem to any fair-minded person, including me, to be very suspicious,â said Peter Bottomley, a former Conservative Northern Ireland minister. âIf he (McNamara) doesnât get a satisfactory response I am prepared to raise it in parliament.â
The Sunday Times office was raided and papers seized shortly after Liam Clarke, the paperâs Northern Ireland editor, and his wife Kathryn Johnston published an updated version of their book From Guns to Government in April.
The book contained transcripts of tape recordings, taken from a joint police/MI5 surveillance operation known as âNarcotic 1â, which detailed bugged telephone conversations.
One was between Jonathan Powell, the prime ministerâs chief of staff, and Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein MP and former IRA commander. It caught them laughing and joking about participants in the peace process, with McGuinness at one point referring to unionist MPs as âassesâ.
A second transcript, taken from a tap on McGuinnessâs home phone, records a conversation between Mo Mowlam, the former Northern Ireland secretary, and McGuinness in which the minister addresses the former IRA man as âbabeâ.
The book appeared in shops in Northern Ireland on April 28, more than three weeks before the official publication date. The transcripts were then picked up by The Times, which contacted Downing Street on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 29, to ask for comments.
Shortly after the first editions of the paper appeared in London, a police raid was launched on the home of a retired Special Branch officer who was arrested and accused of leaking the transcripts.
The next evening the Sunday Times office in Belfast was raided. The doors were battered down and files removed, although Clarke had offered officers a key.
The home of Clarke and Johnston was also searched for five hours before the pair were arrested and sacks of documents and several computers removed. Their nine-year-old daughter Alice had to be left in the care of neighbours while they were held and questioned for 24 hours.
Orde has admitted the raid on the Sunday Times office in Belfast was unlawful but he has not said who ordered that it be carried out. His only comment on the genesis of the operation has been to say that it resulted from an âallegationâ being received.
Now MPs want to know who the order came from. They are interested because the leaked transcripts contained in the book posed no threat to national security.
The only threat they appeared to pose was to Downing Street itself. On one level they proved embarrassing because they revealed how cosy Powell had become with Sinn Fein. On another they suggest that the government might have breached Commons rules as, under parliamentary guidelines known as the Wilson Principles, the Commons should be told if an MPâs phone is being tapped.
The heavy-handed tactics have sparked outrage across the political spectrum in Northern Ireland and among civil liberties groups. Nationalist and unionist members of the Northern Ireland Police Board have demanded that Orde answer a series of questions about the raids and have taken legal advice on his refusal to do so.
The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, a statutory body, has also condemned the police tactics. Professor Brice Dickson, its chief commissioner, said he was ârelieved that the unlawfulness of those operations has been establishedâ.
British Irish Rights Watch, a human rights watchdog, has reported the matter to the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression and also demanded an explanation from Orde.
Paul Tweed, a solicitor acting for The Sunday Times, said: âMy clients are still awaiting a full explanation of the improper and unlawful police action, and in particular for the totally unnecessary force employed by the police at the time.â He added that Clarke and Johnston would now be taking civil action for damages against the chief constable. Both they and the newspaper are seeking the return of all documents seized.
Last night Clarke said: âThe majority of papers seized have been returned and none was regarded as of evidential value by the police.â However, they have kept a number of documents used in the defence of a libel action brought against the newspaper by Thomas âSlabâ Murphy, IRA chief of staff.
Bottomley said: âSince the police admit that the action against the newspaper office was wrong they should concede that the same thing applies to the raid on the journalistsâ home. The chief constable should volunteer that without waiting to have it wrung out of him in court.â
September 28, 2003 at 10:29 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Simon Jenkins
The Hutton inquiry ended its hearings yesterday. It has proved the biggest self-inflicted wound in modern politics. The nation has been engrossed. Witnesses and lawyers have wallowed in a giant vat of hindsight. But the fact is that Tony Blair the politician has been mortified by Tony Blair the lawyer. Asked for truth, Lord Hutton has given the Prime Minister what he cannot have expected, the truth.
An inquest into the suicide of the scientist David Kelly has laid bare the tangled web that politicians weave when first they practise to deceive. It has been conducted in public. The public is the jury. We have been given the evidence. We are entitled to deliver a verdict.
My verdict is simple. Dr Kelly was a shy, sensitive man who vented his professional frustration to the media. He played with fire, was burnt and proved unable to handle the consequences. As the Prime Minister knew well, his death was suicide.
What can Lord Hutton add? He has become a political Jerry Springer. He has set members of the British Establishment tearing at each otherâs faces in public. We have watched boggle-eyed as his lordship has shown us into the most private rooms of state, into its bedrooms, beneath its sheets, into its most obscene diaries. No e-mail, phone-call or snatched office remark has escaped his prurient lens. Inquiry âin cameraâ has become inquiry on camera.
To Mr Blair, Lord Huttonâs job was to pin Dr Kellyâs death on a journalist, the BBCâs Andrew Gilligan, to appease the rage of his over-mighty press aide, Alastair Campbell. This was always a squalid manoeuvre. Mr Campbell pleaded that his boss was seeking to restrain him. Mr Blairâs failure to do so shows him as putty in his assistantâs hands.
I do not see how any reasonable person can find Mr Gilligan guilty. While he admitted errors in his original story, as did the BBC in handling him, they in no way damaged the storyâs essence or the validity of broadcasting it. Every item of evidence presented to Lord Hutton has vindicated the claim that the September dossier was originally unhelpful to Mr Blair and had to be altered, or desperately âover-eggedâ, to prove Iraqâs aggressive intent.
Objections to this process from within the intelligence community were suppressed.
The more the inquiry burrowed into the storyâs foundations, the more secure they came to seem, despite being called â100 per cent wrongâ by Mr Campbell. They were confirmed in evidence from the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and from Brian Jones, of defence intelligence. The story was clearly more or less as Dr Kelly intended and clearly in the public interest. It may have impugned Downing Streetâs integrity â something Mr Campbell used to do with abandon when he was a journalist. So do most stories critical of government. But it was Mr Campbellâs paranoid response that drove everyone to the barricades.
Who should now resign? Who should be eviscerated in Old Palace Yard for the delectation of the Westminster village? The answer is nobody. This inquiry has been ludicrously disproportionate. An open-and-shut inquest has been conducted like an Agatha Christie whodunnit with a dozen suspects in the courtroom. A personal tragedy has become a weapon in a public brawl between ministers and the BBC. We should have had an inquest into the reasons for the Iraq invasion. Instead we had to use a private inquest as proxy.
From the moment sometime in 2002 that Mr Blair knew he was going to join George Bush in a reckless military adventure in the Middle East, some crisis like this was inevitable. He was a lawyer and he needed legal justification for what he suspected was illegal. This, he felt, had to come from intelligence of an âimminent threatâ. Colleagues and officials struggled to give him support, legal, political and military. Critics rightly subjected that support to scrutiny. There was a clash of government and media, few holds barred.
The Hutton inquiry has revealed nothing beyond the normal, often flawed, responses of people who work under intense pressure. They do not enjoy the luxury of legal hindsight. We learnt as much from the other-worldly Scott Report into arms for Iraq in 1996. No human institution, no company, Whitehall department or newspaper office can behave as lawyers believe they should. Their internal relations could not for a moment withstand Lord Huttonâs forensic scrutiny.
We talk, argue and e-mail each other without expecting lawyers to wave transcripts before the world and shout: âOoh, look, what theyâve said!â If that were the case, the business of Britain which, even in government, depends on a measure of privacy, would become less not more open. Without confidentiality there is no proper debate. We all cut occasional corners and swap gallows humour. We try to predict outcomes.
None of those involved with Dr Kelly knew he might commit suicide. Jeremy Gompertz, QC, in his passionate tribute, appeared to think that they should. The reality is that hundreds of citizens every day are treated by the Government and the media in as cavalier, and possibly cruel, a fashion as was Dr Kelly. They do not commit suicide. We cannot deal with them as if they might. Lawyers may present the world as being on the brink of breakdown, accident or a juicy suit for negligence. It is not.
I would rather apply a ruthless test of reasonableness to the Hutton saga. The Prime Minister had decided to go to war. It was not unreasonable for his staff to do everything to help him. It was not unreasonable for them to put together a public dossier on Saddam Husseinâs âaggressive intentâ. It was not unreasonable, when the first draft failed to do this, to ask the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to try again, with extra spice. Their boss was fighting for his political life.
Nor was it unreasonable for some in the wider intelligence community to get upset when their material was âover-eggedâ. It was not unreasonable, though perhaps unwise, for the JIC to disregard these doubts. It was not unreasonable to expect some doubters to use their contacts with the press to hint at their disquiet. It was not unreasonable for Dr Kellyâs bosses to take a dim view of this.
Nor was it unreasonable for Andrew Gilligan, and other journalists, to search out the doubters and put them under pressure. It was not unreasonable for the Today programme to take some pride in a scoop. It was not unreasonable, though as it turned out unwise, for Mr Gilligan to make hay with it while the sun shone. Nor was it unreasonable, though also unwise, for Mr Campbell to protest as strongly as he did.
The formal status of the BBC governors as both the corporationâs regulator and its defender may be out of date and absurd, but everyone knows that they are little more than cheer-leaders. It was therefore not unreasonable for them to leap to the defence of the BBC managers when under blatant political pressure. They had been told the story was sound and were not a broadcasting complaints authority.
It was not unreasonable, indeed it was essential, for the BBC to protect its source. But I cannot see it as unreasonable for the Government to try to discover and reveal the source. When he duly revealed himself, it was neither illegal nor unreasonable for ministers to try to publicise the fact, as Jonathan Sumption, QC, said yesterday. Geoff Hoon may have dissembled on this to the inquiry â to be accused by Mr Gompertz of bare-faced hypocrisy. But most witnesses dissembled in some respect. Not a day passes at the Dispatch Box or in a Commons committee but Old Mother Truth is not tortured horribly. Had Dr Kelly not died and Mr Campbell not wanted to âopen a flankâ against the BBC, this would have blown over.
Lawyers use cold facts to defend their clients and attack their foes. The law is institutionally disproportionate. I believe that the Kelly/Gilligan affair was never suitable for such handling. It was a political sideshow, one of feints, nuances, dodges and glancing blows, on the fringe of something far more important, an issue of peace and war. The affair began with Mr Blairâs controversial decision to invade Iraq and was compounded by Mr Campbellâs paranoia.
Iraq has now been invaded. Mr Campbell has now resigned. A man has died by his own hand. No one was to blame. Surely the matter is closed.
September 28, 2003 at 10:28 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The Insight team
THE cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Gravesend, a Thames-side town in north Kent, is lined with spacious bungalows. The elderly owner of number 27, Evelyn Le Chene, was not at home on Friday. The man who answered her door described her as âa woman of secretsâ.
Secrets, indeed: despite her age, Le Chene has been named as the mastermind of a vast private intelligence-gathering network that collated the identities and confidential details of nearly 150,000 left-wing activists and offered them at a price to British industrial companies.
Among her clients was the defence giant British Aerospace, now known as BAE Systems, according to a source intimate with the companyâs security operations.
BAE, which has close links to Whitehall, paid Le Chene for at least four years to spy on opponents of the arms trade, according to the source.
Insight has seen computer files and thousands of pages of reports from the widespread spying operation carried out for BAE. Bank accounts were accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on.
When samples were shown last week to members of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), a key target, one of them collapsed with shock at the extent of the personal detail they contained.
BAE said yesterday it was unable to comment on the specific allegations but would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal.
Le Chene did not respond to requests for an interview about her activities. So who is she, and how did an elegant 67-year-old living in Kent get into such business? She is certainly no Melita Norwood, the elderly widow in nearby Bexleyheath, unmasked in 1999 as a former Soviet spy. On the contrary, Le Chene is a member of the exclusive Special Forces Club and has campaigned as a dedicated anti-communist. She was previously the director of an organisation called the West European Defence Association, which warned of Soviet infiltration during the cold war.
She is now on the board of Threat Response International, a company that advises corporations on security threats. Also on the board is Barrie Gane, who has been identified in the media as a former deputy head of MI6.
As a young woman, she married Pierre Le Chene, a former British agent in Nazi-occupied France who survived the Mauthausen concentration camp and was awarded the Legion dâHonneur and MBE. She wrote books about his life.
In the past she has not avoided publicity. In 1987, eight years after her husbandâs death, she attracted news headlines by confronting his former torturer, Klaus Barbie, the âButcher of Lyonsâ, who was on trial.
Nine years ago she wrote an acclaimed book about animal âheroesâ of warfare, including a cat called Simon and a pigeon called Winkie. But it was at about this time that she was also developing her hidden life as a âwoman of secretsâ.
She was first approached by the security office at BAE to carry out surveillance work in the mid-1990s, according to a source. At the time, she had been running a company innocuously named R&CA Publications from an office in an industrial estate in Rochester, Kent. Both the company and the office have since closed. Le Chene was chosen by BAE because she specialised in âhumanâ intelligence. âShe wasnât very good at tapping phones or doing dustbins, but she was very good at running agents,â one source close to BAE said last week.
At the time CAAT, a respected Quaker and Christian-based pacifist group which believes in non-violent protest, was stepping up a campaign against the ÂŁ500m sale of BAE jets to Indonesia. The campaigners protested that the aircraft would be used to crush resistance in East Timor, which was seeking independence.
Le Chene recruited at least half a dozen agents to infiltrate CAATâs headquarters at Finsbury Park, north London, and a number of regional offices.
She was to become an expert on the burgeoning pressure group sector. Documents seen by The Sunday Times indicate that she ran an agent in the World Development Movement, an anti-poverty charity which campaigns against the arms trade to third world countries, and targeted more hardline groups such as Earth First and Reclaim the Streets.
The close connections and mixed membership of such groups meant she acquired information on Friends of the Earth, the Greens, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and animal rights charities.
By late 1996, when John Majorâs Conservative government was deciding whether to grant licences for the Hawk contract, the intelligence reports on CAATâs activities started flowing into BAEâs offices at Farnborough, Hampshire, almost every day.
Calling herself âSource Pâ, Le Chene initially sent over her briefings on an encrypted fax to the BAE security offices on the ground floor of Lancaster House at the airfield.
Later BAE set up software on her office computer so that the company could access the reports directly from her database, according to a source, who said the firm paid her ÂŁ120,000 a year.
Thousands of pages of reports were made by Le Chene to BAE. They poked fun at the protesters: one had ârevolting habitsâ, another was âseriously into saving the tortoiseâ. But they enabled BAE to build a large file of activistsâ names, addresses and telephone numbers as well as always keeping fully briefed on their meetings, demonstrations and political contacts.
Le Chene herself boasted a database of 148,000 âknown namesâ of CND, trades unions, activists and environmentalists which she would sell for ÂŁ2.25 each. She offered full biographies including national insurance numbers and criminal records where possible.
âPutting together profiles is not an overnight job,â she notes in one report. âIt takes time to get to know people, their nick-names, habits etc.â
Even links with celebrities were passed on. References are made in reports to the actresses Helen Mirren and Prunella Scales and their opposition to certain arms companies and the âtorture tradeâ. One agent had obtained a letter addressed to Anita Roddick, owner of the Body Shop, from the Clean Investment Campaign, which promoted ethical investments.
The report notes: âThis is a very important document. The request is for the Body Shop to have declarations in their shop windows against the arms trade. If this is granted by the shops, then the Clean Investment Campaignâs first success will be notched up.â
Often the reports detailed forthcoming plans for demonstrations by activists outside BAEâs 60 UK sites. The information was used to ambush trespassers and then serve injunctions preventing them from returning.
Some of the information was gleaned simply by attending CAAT meetings. However, one agent downloaded the entire contents of a CAAT headquarters computer including a membership list, personal folders and details of private donations. Bank account details were also passed on, according to a source, and Agent Pâs reports to BAE discuss sending computer discs and tapes obtained from CAAT.
Names and addresses of activists were routinely run through the BAE computers to check if any were shareholders. The BAE switchboard was configured to flag up any calls from telephone numbers associated with the activists.
Desks were rifled, diaries were read and address books photocopied so that the information could then be transferred to BAE. CAAT members were often followed.
One such target was Jenneth Parker, described in one report as a âgood-lookingâ 25-year-old, who was a key activist and networker for CAAT and student groups.
A tape recording of a phone conversation between Le Chene and a senior officer in BAE group security reveals that they discussed having Parker followed. Reports on Parker give details of her addresses, housemates, hairstyles, the contents of her diary and her alleged habit of smoking marijuana in the corridor.
During the intense surveillance the pressure groups began to suspect that they had been infiltrated. One report relays fears amongst CAAT activists that a meeting would be âfull of BAE spiesâ.
They were not far off the mark. According to a source, Le Chene infiltrated an agent known as âBroughâ into a Humberside offshoot of CAAT called Hull Against Hawks.
The group was important within CAAT as it is on the doorstep of BAEâs Brough plant where the Hawk bodies are manufactured.
BAEâs security had a photograph of âBroughâ and added to his credibility within CAAT by ensuring that he was manhandled during protests at BAEâs annual meeting at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1997.
Le Chene invoiced BAE for the ÂŁ280 a month rent for Broughâs flat in Hull, and there is evidence that he was the secretary of the Hull group and used the name Alan Fossey.
He had become secretary of the Hull group shortly after moving to the town. He proved very useful, driving his fellow campaigners â a mixture of students and pacifists â to marches in his van and holding the groupâs meetings in his small flat in a new development by the marina.
His sound counsel was valued by other members of the group. When, at one meeting, a campaigner had suggested leaping over a fence to âoccupyâ an arms fair, Fossey had cut the subject dead by claiming he had heard the event was being guarded by paratroopers.
Quite how he knew, nobody asked. But then nobody knew the truth about who really paid the rent on his fully furnished flat, where they met, or who was really picking up the bill for the phone he used to arrange all the groupâs business.
Le Cheneâs agents were instructed to take particular interest in connections between anti-arms trade pressure groups and the House of Commons. Meetings and correspondence with MPs of all three parties was closely monitored and advance warning of any parliamentary events was always reported.
According to a source, the agents collected a series of letters, many private, which were sent through to BAE to read. They included correspondence to or from a number of leading Labour politicians such as David Clark, then shadow defence secretary, Ann Clywd, the MP, and Jack Straw, then home secretary.
When CAAT and two other pressure groups hired solicitors Bindman and Partners to seek a judicial review against the granting of export licences for arms companies, BAE was alerted to the contents of a letter sent by the firm to the then trade minister, Ian Lang.
A letter sent to CAAT in October 1996 by Jeremy Hanley, the Foreign Office minister, discussing British policy on the sale of arms to Indonesia, also found its way to BAE.
BAEâs security department filtered the information and passed it on to their in-house government relations teams so that they could be one step ahead of the campaigners when lobbying in parliament.
Dick Evans, BAEâs then chief executive, would also receive regular verbal briefings on the contents of Le Cheneâs reports from Mike McGinty, an ex-RAF officer who headed security.
The operation went on for at last four years until the end of the 1990s.
A BAE spokesman said last night: âThe company cannot comment on anything that may relate to the physical security of our plant sites in the UK. The security of our people and places is paramount.â
Asked about the alleged theft of computer files from CAAT, the spokesman added: âWe would never encourage anyone to do anything illegal.â
September 28, 2003 at 10:27 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Syria denies US spy ring: "Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday September 25, 2003
The Guardian
American officials suggested yesterday that the arrest of two servicemen on suspicion of espionage at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp could be part of one of the most damaging spy rings uncovered in the US military since the cold war.
Captain James Yousef Yee, an army chaplain, and senior airman Ahmad al-Halabi, an air force translator, were both allegedly caught in possession of classified information about the camp's detainees, infrastructure and operations.
Capt Yee was born a Chinese Christian but converted to Islam in 1991 and studied in Syria before rejoining the army. Mr al-Halabi is Syrian-born, and allegedly had contact with Syrian officials.
However, the Syrian information minister, Ahmad al-Hassan, called the reports of a Damascus-backed spy ring 'baseless and illogical', saying that personnel at Guantanamo would have been carefully screened.
US officials said at least three other military personnel were being questioned. "
September 28, 2003 at 10:23 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Macmillan backed Syria assassination plot
Documents show White House and No 10 conspired over oil-fuelled invasion plan
Ben Fenton
Saturday September 27, 2003
The Guardian
Nearly 50 years before the war in Iraq, Britain and America sought a secretive "regime change" in another