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By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
VASILI MITROKHIN, the former KGB archivist who handed MI6 thousands of top-secret documents that were smuggled out of Moscow when he defected in 1992, has died at the age of 82.
He was responsible for one of the most remarkable intelligence coups for decades. His material, copies of KGB foreign intelligence documents that he had scribbled down over 12 years, exposed extensive Cold War Soviet subversive operations around the world during seven decades.
Intelligence experts said that the material provided an unprecedented insight into how the KGB and the Soviet Communist Party had worked.
When he decided to defect, MI6 intelligence officers removed him, his family and six large cases of secret material to a safe house in Britain.
Mr Mitrokhin first tried to defect to the Americans. In 1991, with the break-up of the Soviet Union, he took samples of his notes and boarded an overnight train for Latvia, which had become independent. He went to the US Embassy in Riga, the capital but there were so many Russians requesting visas that he left and tried the British Embassy. There he showed a young woman diplomat his copied documents and promised to return a month later with more. At his next visit he brought 2,000 typed documents to show to MI6 intelligence officers. He had hidden the papers under his dacha after retiring in 1984.
He visited London in September 1992 and agreed to defect. He left Moscow for the last time on November 7, travelling by train to Riga, from where MI6 officers escorted him to Britain. The details of his journey remain classified.
The defection was kept secret for seven years. In 1995, MI6 invited the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew to its headquarters, where he met Mr Mitrokhin and agreed to collaborate with him in writing a history of the KGB based on the secret material. But it was not until 1999 that the extraordinary story of the KGB archivist was made public when the 996-page book he had written with Professor Andrew, The Mitrokhin Archive, was published.
Mr Mitrokhin's wife, Nina, died in 1999. They had a son, who survives. A private funeral will be held.
January 31, 2004 at 01:18 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
By Michael Evans, Peter Riddell and Philip Webster
Did MI6 get it wrong over Saddam's arsenal, ask MPs?
An emotional Greg Dyke announces his resignation as BBC Director-General on the steps of Broadcasting House yesterday. Photo: David Bebber/Reuters
TONY BLAIR is facing an inquiry into the intelligence that led Britain into war with Iraq, dashing his hopes of drawing a line under an affair that has dogged his Government for months.
The head of the intelligence service, MI6, is to be summoned before a new parliamentary inquiry, which will examine the accuracy of the information about Saddam Hussein's weapons and will report in June, The Times learnt last night.
The disclosure came on the day that Greg Dyke resigned as the BBC Director-General over the David Kelly tragedy, and the corporation apologised to the Government, prompting Downing Street to declare that its war with the BBC was at an end.
In an exclusive interview with The Times yesterday, Mr Dyke said that he expected to be asked to stay on when he offered his resignation to the BBC governors.
Mr Dyke, describing how he had lost the support of his board, added: "If in the end you screw up, you have to go."
Later, addressing BBC staff who staged demonstrations protesting against his departure, the outgoing Director-General was in tears. Mr Blair's keenness to close the damaging battle was explained by the findings of a Times/Populus poll today showing that, despite the Hutton report's exoneration of him, his ministers and officials, the public believes that he has been damaged almost as much as the BBC by the affair.
In better news for the Prime Minister, the survey also found that two thirds of voters now believed that the war with Iraq was justified because of the removal of Saddam.
Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, will appear before the Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ann Taylor, the former Labour Cabinet minister, to give further evidence on why he believed that the intelligence on Saddam's weapons was reliable and accurate.
It was MI6 that provided the bulk of the intelligence for the Downing Street dossier that underpinned Mr Blair's decision to go to war.
Although the hearings will be in private, the committee's report will be published.
Unless the Prime Minister agrees to Opposition demands to hold a public inquiry into why Britain went to war in Iraq, the parliamentary committee will be the only body in a position to ask more questions of the key players in the intelligence community. It will also be able to take on board the findings of the Hutton inquiry, and remarks by David Kay, who resigned as the leader of the Iraq Survey Group after stating that he believed no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) existed in Iraq.
The committee has already given its verdict on the Government's dossier on Iraqs weapons, in a report published on November 11. Like Lord Hutton, it cleared the Government of the allegation of "sexing up" the intelligence, but acknowledged that MI6 had found it challenging to glean secret material from inside Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's comprehensive security apparatus.
Whitehall officials said that MI6 remained confident that its key contributions were based on reliable and authoritative sources. The other agencies, such as GCHQ, the signals intelligence centre, also contributed to the dossier, but most of the new secret material came from human, not electronic, sources, according to the officials. They said this included the assertion in the dossier that Saddam had restarted small-scale production of chemical weapons. This, they said, was fresh intelligence. Sir Richard and other officials from the intelligence community will have to explain to the parliamentary committee why they remain confident that their assessment of the state of Iraqs WMD programme at the time of the dossier, published in September 2002, was correct.
Ms Taylor's committee is likely to ask Sir Richard whether he is still happy with the sourcing of the now-notorious 45-minute claim relating to the time that it would take for the Iraqis to deploy chemical and biological weapons. Lord Hutton was facing a backlash yesterday from critics who have dismissed his report into the David Kelly affair as a "whitewash".
The refusal of some Tory MPs and sections of the media to accept the report's conclusions is alarming Downing Street, which fears that "politically motivated attacks" will undermine efforts to draw a line under the controversy. Sir Christopher Bland, a former BBC chairman, questioned the even-handedness of a verdict which exonerated the Government but "tarred and feathered" the BBC. Lord Rees-Mogg, a former vice-chairman of the BBC and former Editor of The Times, said: "I don't have any confidence in Hutton. I have not fully read his report but I have already come to the conclusion ...that it is a bad bit of work."
Mr Dyke's departure, 24 hours after the resignation of Gavyn Davies as Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, made the long-demanded apo-logy to the Government possible. Richard Ryder, the acting Chairman, said: "On behalf of the BBC, I have no hesitation in apologising unreservedly for our errors."
Mr Blair immediately welcomed his words. "This for me has always been a very simple matter of an accusation that was a very serious one that was made. It has now been withdrawn. That is all I ever wanted."
He added: "I want to make it absolutely clear I fully respect the independence of the BBC. I have no doubt that the BBC will continue, as it should do, to probe and question the Government in every proper way. What this does now is allow us to draw a line and move on."
Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's former communications director and leading pursuer of the BBC, was equally happy to declare the matter closed. "All we have ever wanted was for these allegations to be withdrawn. I'm glad that has now happened and I want to thank Richard Ryder."
He said he had "no interest" now in what happened to other BBC personnel involved in the affair such as Mr Gilligan, adding he wanted to build a new life outside No 10.
Mr Blair's spokesman said: "The Prime Minister believes that two decent and honourable men have done the decent and honourable thing and it is time, as he said, to move on."
Mr Dyke said he, too, wanted to draw a line under the episode.
"Throughout this affair my sole aim as director general of the BBC has been to defend our editorial independence and to act in the public interest," he said.
A new BBC chairman will be appointed by Mr Blair by Easter. Then the governors will appoint a new director general. In the meantime Mark Byford has been named as the acting operational chief.
The Populus poll for The Times found that barely a third of people think Lord Hutton's inquiry will make a "positive difference" to the tone in which public life is conducted and to the way that the Blair Government behaves.
Nearly two-thirds think the inquiry will positively affect how "the BBC reports news stories in the future," while more than half believe it will change the way that "politicians make their case for military conflict in the future".
January 31, 2004 at 01:17 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
KGB archivist who escaped to Britain and presented to the world an unprecedented insight into the workings of the Soviet system
One of the most spectacular defectors from Russia in terms of the “product” he brought with him when he came over in 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin first erupted into the public’s consciousness in September 1999 with the publication of his book The Mitrokhin Archive, written with Professor Christopher Andrew. Based on the unprecedented access he had had to KGB files through his work as the security organisation’s chief archivist from 1972 to 1984, this made a host of revelations about Soviet espionage and counter-espionage operations from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 onwards.
Among the most fascinating of these was the revelation that an octogenarian grandmother, Melita Norwood, had been betraying British nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union for a period of 40 years from 1937. Such a disclosure led to a public furore which ended only with the Attorney-General of the day advising the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, that at such a distance a prosecution would be inappropriate.
Then there was the so-called Romeo agent, John Symonds, a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, who, according to the archive, had fled the country when faced with corruption charges and had been recruited by the KGB in Morocco. After KGB charm training, his job thereafter was to seduce the employees of foreign embassies, with a view to obtaining secret information.
Among other revelations by Mitrokhin were plans to disrupt the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales, making it look like an MI5 plot to discredit Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party; a plot to injure and disfigure the defected Russian ballet dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Natalya Makarova, thus wrecking their careers; and details of hidden Soviet arms caches scattered throughout Western Europe and the US, to be used by agents and their pro-Soviet accomplices in the event of a war.
The Mitrokhin Archive also paraded a host of big American names, ranging from Henry Kissinger, whose phone calls to President Nixon the KGB claimed to have tapped, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carters national security adviser, whom the KGB allegedly tried to recruit. At the other end of the scale were more spies, traitors and suspects: Robert Lipka, a clerk at the National Security Agency who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1960s and was jailed for 18 years; and Felix Bloch, the highest ranking State Department official ever to be investigated for espionage (he was sacked and stripped of his pension but the FBI never had enough evidence to charge him); as well as more detail about the familiar Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
It seemed an unprecedented treasure trove, as well as being a tremendous coup for British Intelligence. Mitrokhin had offered himself first to the CIA when leaving Russia via the Baltic States in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the US agency was so overrun with defectors, each of whom had exotic claims to make about his or her fundamental importance to Western intelligence, that it turned him down. He therefore approached a British embassy, was welcomed with open arms and passed on to the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) which brought him to London.
Sceptics nevertheless urged caution about the value of The Mitrokhin Archive. It was inevitably a heavily edited selection of Mitrokhins six aluminium trunkfuls of notes (some of which had been located by MI6 men after his departure from Moscow), worked on over a period of seven years. Some critics argued the intelligence game being what it is that the effect of the revelations was tendentious, that direct quotation was sparse, and that reference to specific documents was often absent.
Above all, the question was asked: what had led Mitrokhin to select and transcribe the particular documents he did and what was he trying to prove? He had apparently become disillusioned with Communism in the early 1960s, when the changes promised by Khrushchev at the 20th party congress in 1956 had failed to materialise. Yet his defection, and the exposure of the evils of the Communist system, which he claimed as his goal, had had to wait for another 30 years, by which time that system had effectively ceased to exist and had certainly ceased to be a threat to Western civilisation.
Nevertheless, The Mitrokhin Archive undoubtedly contained many vivid insights into the workings of the Soviet system, particularly at times when it came under pressures to which its ossified philosophy was not equal. Party reaction to the uncontrollable rumblings of the Solidarity period in Poland, for example, were vividly documented by the series of panic-stricken phone calls between the leadership and its servants in Warsaw.
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin was born in 1922 in Yurasovo in Ryazan oblast (province), the second of five children. His childhood was spent partly in Yurasovo and partly in Moscow, depending on where his father, a decorator, could find work and his large family could obtain food. This tended to mean that Mitrokhin spent most winters in Yurasovo, which imbued in him a deep love of the countryside.
After his secondary education, Mitrokhin entered an artillery school. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he moved to Kazakhstan, where he studied for a degree, graduating in law after first reading history. Towards the end of the war, Mitrokhin took his first job, in the military procurators office in Kharkov, Ukraine.
He then secured entry to the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow, a three-year course, which ended with his recruitment in 1948 into the KI (Committee of Information), the name by which the Soviet external service was then known. In 1954 it was absorbed into the newly formed KGB (Committee of State Security).
Mitrokhin was shortly afterwards posted to the Middle East, an undercover assignment, which required extensive training and which lasted about three years until 1953. Back in the Moscow headquarters of the KGB, he was entrusted with operational work which involved occasional visits abroad under cover. In this capacity, he accompanied the Soviet team to the 1956 Olympic Games in Australia.
In the late 1950s, Mitrokhin was transferred from operational activities to the department responsible for the services archives. In this capacity he had a second foreign posting in East Berlin in the second half of the 1960s.
On his return to Moscow in 1972, he launched the project which was eventually to make available for public consumption the most comprehensive treasure trove of information from the KGBs most secret files, stretching back to the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and covering most major aspects of the KGBs work.
An idealistic Communist in his youth, Mitrokhin later claimed disillusionment at the failure of the Khrushchev reforms to take any meaningful shape. He maintained until the end of his life that he remained a communist at heart, but that this political philosophy had been corrupted by the Soviet leadership. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which he witnessed at fairly close quarters from East Berlin, also made a deep impact.
His extensive reading of KGB files brought home even more starkly to him the criminality of the regime for which he was working. He decided therefore to make his own record of the files under his control in the hope that one day this could be brought to the notice of the Russian public.
He began taking detailed notes of the files which passed across his desk daily, initially hiding these in his shoes to evade security checks. At weekends he would regularly go to his dacha outside Moscow, where he secreted his notes in metal containers in cavities under the ground floor.
His access to top secret information was significantly increased when it was decided to move the external intelligence service the First Chief Directorate of the KGB to new premises on the outskirts of Moscow in 1974. This meant that there was a thorough review of all files transferred to the new premises, overseen by Mitrokhin himself. These included the most secret of all the KGBs files, in which details of Directorate S illegals operations were held.
After his retirement from the KGB in 1984, he set about sorting out his notes into coherent form. He had never really expected that his archive would see the light of day, but as the momentous political developments in the Soviet Union began to undermine the unity of the country and the power of both the Communist Party and the KGB, his hopes grew.
He made an exploratory trip to Sakhalin in the Far East to see whether it might be possible to make his way with his archive to Japan. He travelled to Karelia to examine whether he could slip over the border into Finland. Then with the formal break-up of the Soviet Union in late 1991 and the re-establishment of the three independent Baltic states, he made his way there in March 1992, and after offering himself unsuccessfully to the CIA, established contact with the Secret Intelligence Service. He was finally brought out with his family by SIS in November 1992.
Lengthy initial debriefings in London were followed by a decision to publish The Mitrokhin Archive, a collaboration with Professor Andrew, of Cambridge University, one of the foremost academic authorities on intelligence and security matters. The book, covering KGB activities in the West and in Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union itself, became an immediate international success on its publication in 1999. The FBI has described the archive as the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.
Other publications followed. In 2002, the Cold War International Historical Project in Washington published on the internet Mitrokhins work on Afghanistan. In January 2002 a KGB Lexicon was published by Frank Cass. At the time of his death, Mitrokhin had completed several other works about which he was negotiating with publishers.
Mitrokhin was a shy man, intensely private, who shunned publicity. Dedicated to his family, he was devastated when his wife, Nina, a doctor, died of motor neuron disease in 1999. To close friends he was charming, kind and generous. At heart he remained a man of simple tastes, never happier than when he was eating his own home-prepared vegetable soup.
Mitrokhins health had been in decline in recent months, but typically he insisted on continuing to work until he contracted pneumonia, from which he died.
He is survived by a son.
Vasili Mitrokhin, former KGB archivist, was born on March 3, 1922. He died on January 23, 2004, aged 81.
January 31, 2004 at 01:15 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Richard Lloyd Parry
One million recluses are threatening the foundations of society — from their bedrooms
ON PAPER, at least, the phenomenon known as hikikomori does not look like a threat to the foundations of Japanese society. The word means simply social withdrawal and, in its early stages at least, the condition is as banal as a teenage sulk.
The typical hikikomori is a young man living at home who abandons his work or education, refuses to see his friends and retreats into his bedroom. He spends all his time alone, playing computer games, browsing the internet and emerging only for late-night shopping expeditions to refresh his supply of comics.
For periods of a few days at a time, such episodes are familiar to parents all over the world. But in Japan they have taken on the proportions of an epidemic.
More than a million Japanese, four in five of them young men, are believed to be suffering from long-term hikikomori. A third of them are over 30; a quarter of them have been living alone in their bedrooms for more than ten years.
Since identifying the condition five years ago, psychiatrists have come to recognise the misery which it causes to individual sufferers and their families. But it also represents a demographic time bomb, with devastating implications for Japans already troubled economy and overburdened welfare system.
With ever-increasing life expectancy and a shrinking birth rate, Japan is already in danger of running out of young people to man its industries, pay its taxes and support its growing retired population. If it is not tackled, hikikomori threatens to remove a million or more productive workers from this already dwindling pool.
Economically this is a great burden, said Shinako Tsuchiya, an MP who heads a parliamentary group investigating the problem. Hundreds of thousands of adults are not working. When their parents grow too old to look after them, they will become a burden on the welfare system. We have to take measures to help people return to society, and prevent young people falling into a hikikomori state.
Beginning this year, the Government is to multiply eightfold the amount of money that it spends on social services for parents in an effort to tackle the problem. But even this increase, from 300 million yen (1.7 million) to 2.3 billion yen (12.8 million), is regarded by those affected by hikikomori as wholly inadequate The most you can say is that its better than nothing, said Masahisa Okuyama, who runs an organisation of parents of hikikomori children. Hikikomori are incapable of earning their own living, but they and their families are not entitled to any help from the Government.
Mr Okuyamas son has been a hikikomori for ten years and he knows as well as anyone the devastation which the condition can cause across entire families. The problem typically begins with bullying at school or betrayal or abandonment by a close friend.
The kind of boys who become hikikomori are the sensitive, intelligent ones, with parents who are liberal and overprotective, he said. The kind of parents who read the Asahi newspaper (Japans equivalent of The Guardian).
Refusal to go to school or to work is followed by increasing withdrawal and moodiness, and often aggression against parents. In the West, family violence suggests the violence of a husband to his wife or children, said Tamaki Saito, the psychiatrist who coined the term hikikomori. In Japan, it is the violence of children against their parents.
The causes of the condition are only vaguely understood, but it is clear that it is a peculiarly Japanese phenomenon. The intense pressure to achieve academically and conform to norms in school, at work and in society are cited as explanations. Hikikomori are those who snap under the pressure and, rather than competing, choose to withdraw from society altogether.
Affluence is a precondition, because without parents to feed them and provide them with a roof above their heads, most hikikomori would starve. But the collapse of Japans bubble economy has created a world in which, for the first time since the war, a lifetime of employment is no longer guaranteed.
Unlike Britain, it is normal for Japanese children to live at home until they marry. People sometimes say that this is just a problem of self-indulgence and that is a very big misunderstanding, Dr Saito said. But the cultural background is very important. You dont get this problem in developing countries, because people there have to work to live. This is a Japanese problem, uniquely so, because in Japan people expect to be supported by their families after they grow up.
True social withdrawal is not just a passing phase. The most extreme case known to Mr Okuyama is a man of 53 who has been living in his room for 30 years. Hikikomori can be talked out of their rooms, but it requires persistent and dedicated work by counsellors and social workers. At present this work is done by networks of volunteers, many of them hikikomori parents, hopelessly ill-matched to the scale of the problem.
Hikikomori are not mad or stupid, Dr Saito said. They are shy, gentle, clever people and this is a problem for all of us. A society that abandons the weak, and only values the strong thats no society at all.
TACKLING THE PROBLEM
The Japanese Youth Development Association estimates that there are 600,000 to 1.6 million hikikomori.
A survey completed in July last year by the Japanese Health Ministry found that more than a third of hikikomori were over the age of 30. An earlier survey conducted by a group representing parents of hikikomori found that more than 70 per cent of sufferers were over 20. Symptoms normally appear around the age of 15.
Online counselling is the latest approach being adopted to help sufferers. Despite the belief that Japans increasing dependence on artificial forms of communication is one of the root causes of social withdrawal, counsellors report that hikikomori have tended to be far more forthcoming when communicating by e-mail.
January 31, 2004 at 01:12 AM in Japan | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
From Roland Watson in Washington
As pressure mounts for an inquiry, our correspondent sifts through the flawed surveillance that sent the US-led coalition into war
EXACTLY a year ago, President Bush used his State of the Union address to spell out the charges against Saddam Hussein. “The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving,” he proclaimed to the world.
Twelve months on, after the deaths of more than 500 coalition troops and countless thousands of Iraqis, Mr Bushs two sentences were so nearly right, yet so wildly wrong. Saddam was not disarming, but that was because he had nothing to disarm. Rather than deceiving the world, it was he who was being deceived by his own scientists who had failed to build the weapons he craved.
For much of the intervening year both the Bush Administration and Tony Blair have counselled patience, insisting the WMD would turn up eventually, but this was the week that the White House finally admitted what had long ago become apparent that the weapons it used to justify war do not exist. Mr Bush signalled the start of the retreat ten days ago when, in this years State of the Union speech, he offered only a vague reference to dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related activities.
That was closely followed by Dick Cheney, the hawkish Vice-President, stating as he flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, that the jury is still out on Iraqi WMD.
Then came the bombshell from David Kay. The head of the hunt for Iraqs arsenal for the past nine months resigned, saying he did not believe the WMD stockpiles existed.
In subsequent interviews Dr Kay said he believed Saddam had destroyed most of the weaponry after the 1991 Gulf War. It turns out we were all wrong, he declared in testimony on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Condoleezza Rice, President Bushs National Security Adviser, completed the Administrations retreat, albeit in the most tortuous language.
I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground, she said. There was no doubt that we are going to need to go back and compare what we thought we would find with what we found.
It was not a graceful climbdown. In its efforts to escape blame, the White House achieved stunning levels of chutzpah. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, denied that the Administration had ever identified Saddam as an imminent threat.
He insisted it was the media, not the White House, that was responsible for any such impression. I think some in the media have chosen to use the word imminent. Those were not words we used. We used, grave and gathering threat, he said.
Saddam had grown increasingly divorced from reality, he said. Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, told Dr Kay how Saddam would send him manuscripts of novels he was writing even as US forces were massing in the Gulf.
The charge that Mr Bush and Mr Blair led their countries into war on false pretences could not be more serious. But even as their justification for war crumbled, both were handed unexpected lifelines.
Dr Kay placed the blame squarely on intelligence failures. He said that had he been in Mr Bushs shoes he would have acted in the same way, and that there was no indication the Administration had brought undue political pressure to bear.
Indeed Mr Bush moved yesterday to portray himself as the injured party. I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts, he said. I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq.
In Britain Lord Hutton, in his report on the death of David Kelly, likewise cleared Mr Blair of tampering with intelligence to improve the case for war, thereby suggesting that the intelligence was at fault.
The flawed intelligence was not just that of the CIA under Mr Bush, or of the intelligence agencies of countries such as Britain and Israel that supported the war. French and German intelligence also believed Saddam had WMD, as did President Clinton. Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector, said last January that Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance of the disarmament which was demanded of it .
So the question now becomes how could so many have been so wrong? Dr Kay provided his own considered answer. He told how, in his judgment, Iraq had all but abandoned its quest for large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, an increasingly delusional Saddam had been duped by corrupt scientists who were both eager to please and to line their pockets. The regime was no longer in control. It was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programmes, he said.
He has also floated the theory that Saddam may himself have been behind the deception in order to maintain his status as the strongman of the Gulf region. In other words, he certainly was deceiving the rest of the world, but the deception was the precise opposite of what Washington and London thought it to be.
Both conclusions explain the absence of WMD, but not the extraordinary failure of the apparently credulous CIA and MI6.
Western intelligence apparently had too few people on the ground, and was relying to a dangerous degree on Iraqi defectors and exiles with their own reasons for encouraging a US invasion.
The intelligence operation was also hobbled by its reliance on satellite images. When Colin Powell made a forceful case to the UN Security Council last year, he presented pictures of lorries parked against buildings which he said were involved in WMD projects. It seems now that they were simply lorries parked against buildings.
The White House is for the moment resisting mounting pressure to hold an independent inquiry into the intelligence failure, despite Mr Bushs demand for the facts. John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, broke ranks yesterday and demanded that an independent commission take a sweeping look at recent intelligence failures.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has already drafted a report strongly critical of the CIA. There is also a report in the works on Capitol Hill about intelligence failures in the run-up to September 11. The last thing Mr Bush wants in an election year is for another such inquiry to spin out of his control.
Relations between the White House and the CIA are frayed. Last years squabble about who was to blame for the false claims in Mr Bushs State of the Union speech that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger have left a sour taste. The CIA is also smarting over the claims that White House officials leaked the name of an agency spy to get back at her husband for criticising the war.
To make the CIA squirm under a public spotlight, and risk it leaking against Mr Bush in the run-up to Novembers presidential election, would be a huge risk. But there are also dangers for Mr Bush from inaction. A failure to order an investigation could be exploited by Democrats in the election campaign.
It was Mr Bush who described the threat from Saddam as urgent, Mr Cheney who called it mortal and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, who said it was immediate.
For the moment Mr Bush has public opinion on his side. A Gallup poll this month showed that 56 per cent of Americans, when asked if the war had been a mistake, said No. In October, 55 per cent said that finding banned weapons was not necessary to judge the war a success.
US intelligence stands charged of relying on old and circumstantial material to build the case against Saddam.
After the September 11 attacks, American intelligence agencies may have been hyper-sensitive to potential dangers from Iraq. The Administration certainly was.
Intelligence committees on Capitol Hill believe that the CIA failed to consider at all the possibility that Saddam no longer had WMD. Indeed, a rushed intelligence update on Iraq in 2002 claimed that Saddam posed more of a threat than previous estimates.
Dr Kays conclusions raise critical questions about the credibility of intelligence services around the world, but particularly in the US. And they challenge the coherence and realism of Mr Bushs signature doctrine of pre-emption, which relies on intelligence. The answers to both could affect the Presidents re-election chances.
January 31, 2004 at 01:07 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda
SLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 30 — At the start of the month, Pakistan massed several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an ultimatum.
If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses, withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members.
Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender.
The most wanted fugitives, including foreign Qaeda members, remain at large, although as an added incentive, Pakistani officials have promised not to hand over any fugitive Pakistanis to the United States.
American officials declined to comment on the policy, but Pakistani officials hope the British method, combined with the American-financed building of roads and schools, will show results.
"There is this age-old system of collective responsibility," said Lt. Gen. Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, the governor of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and a key supporter of the new approach. "Tribes are supposed to help the government."
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the tribal areas that span both sides of the border have proved to be a redoubt for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the area's inaccessible crags. Insurgents have used the border area, home to smugglers and guerrillas for centuries, as a base to carry out cross-border attacks that have killed or wounded dozens of American soldiers.
Responding to American pressure, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, deployed soldiers in the tribal areas for the first time in the country's history in the spring of 2002. That provoked bitter protests from hard-line Islamic political parties that won sweeping support in and around the tribal areas in elections that October.
All told, Pakistani soldiers and police officers have captured more than 500 suspected Qaeda members, most of them low-level fighters caught fleeing Afghanistan in 2002.
More than 70,000 Pakistani soldiers are now deployed in the tribal areas, but over the last year capturing fighters has proved more difficult. Suspected Taliban fighters have killed six Pakistani soldiers carrying out raids in the tribal areas since August. Two Pakistanis were killed by American fire on the border. A senior Pakistani intelligence official said Pakistan has had no reports since 2002 that Mr. bin Laden has been in South Waziristan, the tribal agency whose main town is Wana.
Pakistani officials said they would never allow American forces into Pakistan, but conceded that they had been under intense American pressure to act in the tribal areas. They said they hoped the new approach would prove fruitful. There is little expectation that the tribes would abruptly hand over Mr. bin Laden. Instead,the hope is to gradually make the area less hospitable for the Qaeda leader and his backers.
Mr. bin Laden is believed to have strong popular support in the tribal areas, the most religiously conservative and isolated part of Pakistan. The virulent fundamentalism in the tribal areas, which are governed directly by Pakistan's federal government, is the product of decades of government neglect and the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980's, according to Pakistani analysis.
The United States indirectly helped pay for hundreds of hard-line religious schools that produced anti-Soviet fighters. Today, the same schools appear to produce anti-American fighters.
Malik Ajmal Wazir, 35, a leader of the Zalikhel tribe, said in a telephone interview from the tribal areas on Friday that the tribes were addressing the problem and that American forces would face resistance. "Our tribes will rise against them," he said. "We don't like the Americans, and there will be a fight."
The religious schools and clerics are one of the main sources of information for the 3.1 million residents of the area, where the literacy rate is 25 percent for men and 3 percent for women and public schools are few. Seventy percent of the tribal areas are not easily accessible by road.
Pakistan bars foreign journalists from entering the tribal areas without a military escort. Military officials said no journalists would be taken to Wana until the current operation concluded.
Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to Pakistan, said the British empire sent 11 expeditions into Waziristan in the early 1900's in an effort to subdue them. Criminals had repeatedly kidnapped British colonialists, fled to the impenetrable border areas and demanded ransom. In one famous case, the saga of a schoolgirl kidnapped and taken into the tribal areas played out across London's front pages, embarrassing colonial administrators.
But all 11 expeditions failed to subdue the areas, he said. The British decided instead to take advantage of an existing tribal custom that held an entire tribe responsible for the actions of one of its members. Tribes were ordered to find kidnappers themselves, or face collective punishment. "It's kind of striking to see how Pakistan today is using tactics that the British used 100 years ago," Mr. Lyall Grant said.
Tribal elders said they would rather sort out matters themselves than have outsiders search their communities and homes. In an interview in Islamabad, Maulana Abdul Malik, 43, a leader of the Jalikhel tribe and a member of Pakistan's Parliament from Wana, said he had urged other tribal leaders to hand over the men.
But he insisted that Mr. bin Laden and his supporters were not on the Pakistani side of the border. He also displayed the perceptions of the United States that exist in much of the tribal areas. He said that "only God knows" who carried out the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and that "hundreds of thousands of people" died in the subsequent American bombing of Afghanistan. "Americans should spread a message of love," he said, "and stop slaughtering humanity."
The senior Pakistani intelligence official said that at least 70 low-level Qaeda members were hiding in South Waziristan, but that he did not believe Mr. bin Laden and his senior aides were on the Pakistani side of the border.
Other Pakistani officials said their raids were handicapped by a severe shortage of helicopters. They asked the United States to send military equipment to Pakistan, not troops. Local tribesmen spot ground convoys from miles away, they said, and warn the wanted men, who flee.
The governor said he hoped new aid flowing into the area would reduce sympathies for Taliban and Al Qaeda. He said the government had increased the development budget for the tribal areas by 400 percent, to $67 million. If significant increases are made for several years, he said, the tribal areas will finally receive government financing on a par with other parts of the country.
There is also international help. Norway is building 350 schools, he said. Japan and the United States are spending $2 million on refurbishing existing primary schools. And the United States is paying $10 million for new roads.
Pakistani officials said they would wait to see how many of the wanted men were handed over, particularly foreigners. Depending on the results, they will shower the area with money, or soldiers.
David Rohde reported for this article from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar
January 31, 2004 at 12:05 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
THE resignation statement issued by Andrew Gilligan, whose BBC report led to the Hutton inquiry:
“I am today resigning from the BBC. I and everyone else involved here have for five months admitted the mistakes we made. We deserved criticism. Some of my story was wrong, as I admitted at the inquiry, and I again apologise for it. My departure is at my own initiative. But the BBC collectively has been the victim of a grave injustice.
If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right. The Government did sex up the dossier, transforming possibilities and probabilities into certainties, removing vital caveats; the 45-minute claim was the classic example of this; and many in the intelligence services, including the leading expert in weapons of mass destruction, were unhappy about it.
Thanks to what David Kelly told me and other BBC journalists, in very similar terms, we know now what we did not know before. I pay tribute to David Kelly.
This report casts a chill over all journalism, not just the BBCs. It seeks to hold reporters, with all the difficulties they face, to a standard that it does not appear to demand of, for instance, government dossiers. I am comforted by the fact that public opinion appears to disagree with Lord Hutton and I hope this will strengthen the resolve of the BBC.
The report has imposed on the BBC a punishment far out of proportion to its or my mistakes, which were honest ones. It is hard to believe now that this all stems from two flawed sentences in one unscripted early-morning interview, never repeated, when I said that the Government probably knew that the 45-minute figure was wrong. I attributed this to David Kelly; it was in fact an inference of mine. It has been claimed that this was the charge which went round the world, but a cuttings check shows that it did not even get as far as a single Fleet Street newspaper. Nor did the Government mention it in its first three letters of complaint. In my view, this helps to explain why neither I nor the BBC focused on this phrase as we should have.
I explicitly made clear, in my broadcasts, that the 45-minute point was based on real intelligence. I repeatedly said also that I did not accuse the Government of fabrication, but of exaggeration. I stand by that charge, and it will not go away.
In Greg Dyke the BBC has lost its finest Director-General for a generation. He should not have resigned, and I am extremely sorry to see him go.
I would like to thank the BBC for its support throughout the extraordinary and terrible ordeal that has been the last seven months. It has defended the right to investigate and report accurately on matters about which the public has a right to know. Save for the admissions I and the BBC have made, my reporting on the dossiers compilation fulfilled this purpose.
I love the BBC and I am resigning because I want to protect it. I accept my part in the crisis which has befallen the organisation. But a greater part has been played by the unbalanced judgments of Lord Hutton.
January 30, 2004 at 10:44 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Telegraph | News | Public scepticism over Hutton
Lord Hutton has not, after all, drawn a line under the Government's conduct of the events leading up to Dr David Kelly's death, according to YouGov's survey for The Daily Telegraph.
Tony Blair and other ministers may imagine they are now in the clear but a substantial majority of the public takes a different view.
Fully 56 per cent of YouGov's respondents interviewed yesterday believe the findings of Lord Hutton's inquiry amount to a whitewash. Only 34 per cent believe that the law lord made an impartial and thorough attempt to discover the truth.
Moreover, the BBC as an institution emerges in far better shape from the survey than it did from Lord Hutton's report.
A considerable majority of YouGov's respondents accepts that the BBC can take little credit from its handling of Andrew Gilligan's initial report on the Today programme but far more trust BBC journalists than trust members of the Government.
A majority also believes that the BBC's board of governors should not resign en masse and that the governors, rather than the new Office of Communications, should continue to act as the BBC's regulator as well as overseeing the corporation's management.
A large majority fears that as a result of Lord Hutton's criticisms the BBC is in danger of becoming overly cautious in its handling of new stories and of becoming subject to covert Government pressure.
Taken as a whole, the YouGov survey demonstrates yet again that, however much most people claim to distrust journalists in general, they trust BBC journalists far more than politicians.
Despite Lord Hutton, the long-standing rule that politicians attack the BBC at their peril still seems to apply.
As the figures in the chart show, more than half of YouGov's respondents reckon that Lord Hutton is a member of the "Establishment" who was "too ready to sympathise with the Government", "in the end producing something like a whitewash".
Only a third believe his report "represents a thorough and impartial attempt to discover the truth behind the events leading up to Dr Kelly's death". Much of the response to the Hutton report is highly partisan, with Conservative supporters overwhelmingly convinced that Lord Hutton - consciously or sub-consciously - was involved in some kind of stitch-up. Even so, one Labour voter in five clearly harbours suspicions about the report's validity.
Asked about the BBC's future, YouGov's respondents incline to support the status quo. There is no majority for radical change and large numbers are evidently keen to defend the corporation's independence.
Roughly half of those interviewed, 52 per cent, reckon that, despite recent failures, the BBC's existing corporate structures are adequate, though a substantial minority, 38 per cent, take the view, supported by Michael Howard and the Conservative front bench, that power to regulate the corporation should be given to an independent body.
More than half those interviewed, 56 per cent, also believe that the BBC's handling of the Gilligan story has not caused it to forfeit its entitlement to the annual licence fee.
Far more widespread is concern about the corporation's ability to keep itself at arm's length from the Government of the day. A huge 70 per cent fear either "a lot" (31 per cent) or "a little" (39 per cent) that as a result of Lord Hutton's criticisms "the BBC will become too cautious in its coverage of new and current affairs and too subject to behind-the-scenes Government pressure".
The section of the chart headed "the issue of trust" tells its own story.
Trust in BBC news journalists to tell the truth has fallen markedly since YouGov last asked the same question in the spring of last year.
Nevertheless, far more people still trust the Corporation's journalists to tell the truth than trust ministers in the Blair Government, leading Conservative politicians or, for that matter, those who run the intelligence services.
According to YouGov, no one comes well out of the events that occurred prior to Dr Kelly's death.
Nearly three quarters, 72 per cent, disapprove of the role played by Gilligan, and two thirds, 66 per cent, believe that Dr Kelly's MoD managers on the whole behaved "improperly".
Almost as many, 62 per cent, take the same dim view of the behaviour of the BBC's governors and management.
However, members of the Government, although not so widely condemned, by no means emerge with clean hands. As the figures indicate, clear majorities view with disfavour the conduct of Alastair Campbell, the Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and, to a lesser extent, the Prime Minister himself.
YouGov elicited the views of 2,312 adults across Great Britain online yesterday. Only the views of the 1,932 respondents who claimed to know something about Lord Hutton's findings are reported here. The sample has been weighted to conform to the demographic profile of British adults as a whole.
Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University
January 30, 2004 at 12:40 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
From Michele C. posted at "The Command Post"
The Command Post - Iraq - Transcript of Kay's Opening Statements
The following is the statement former U.S. Weapons Inspector David Kay made to the Senate committee before questioning:
KAY: As you know and we discussed, I do not have a written statement. This hearing came about very quickly. I do have a few preliminary comments, but I suspect you’re more interested in asking questions, and I’ll be happy to respond to those questions to the best of my ability.
I would like to open by saying that the talent, dedication and bravery of the staff of the [Iraq Survey Group] that was my privilege to direct is unparalleled and the country owes a great debt of gratitude to the men and women who have served over there and continue to serve doing that.
A great deal has been accomplished by the team, and I do think … it important that it goes on and it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and totally focused on WMD; that that is important to do it
A great deal has been accomplished by the team, and I do think it important that it goes on and it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and totally focused on WMD; that that is important to do it.
But I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.
Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.
Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraqs possession of WMD.
The Germans certainly the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.
It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.
Were also in a period in which weve had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didnt discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location.
The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to that.
Theres a long record here of being wrong. Theres a good reason for it. There are probably multiple reasons. Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and dont have free and open societies.
In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.
Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities one last chance to come clean about what it had.
We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.
I think the aim and certainly the aim of what Ive tried to do since leaving is not political and certainly not a witch hunt at individuals. Its to try to direct our attention at what I believe is a fundamental fault analysis that we must now examine.
And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.
As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. Its typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.
In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.
And never not in a single case was the explanation, I was pressured to do this. The explanation was very often, The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that theres another explanation for it.
And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that Im convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, inappropriate command influence that led them to take that position.
It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.
And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that.
We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.
The fact that it wasnt tells me that weve got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and weve got to figure out what was there. And thats what I call fundamental fault analysis.
And like I say, I think weve got other cases other than Iraq. I do not think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away, and thats why I think it is an urgent issue.
And let me really wrap up here with just a brief summary of what I think we are now facing in Iraq. I regret to say that I think at the end of the work of the [Iraq Survey Group] theres still going to be an unresolvable ambiguity about what happened.
A lot of that traces to the failure on April 9 to establish immediately physical security in Iraq the unparalleled looting and destruction, a lot of which was directly intentional, designed by the security services to cover the tracks of the Iraq WMD program and their other programs as well, a lot of which was what we simply called Ali Baba looting. It had been the regimes. The regime is gone. Im going to go take the gold toilet fixtures and everything else imaginable.
Ive seen looting around the world and thought I knew the best looters in the world. The Iraqis excel at that.
The result is document destruction were really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that were going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.
But I do think the survey group and I think Charlie Duelfer is a great leader. I have the utmost confidence in Charles. I think you will get as full an answer as you can possibly get.
And let me just conclude by my own personal tribute, both to the president and to [CIA Director] George Tenet, for having the courage to select me to do this, and my successor, Charlie Duelfer, as well.
Both of us are known for probably at times regrettable streak of independence. I came not from within the administration, and it was clear and clear in our discussions and no one asked otherwise that I would lead this the way I thought best and I would speak the truth as we found it. I have had absolutely no pressure prior, during the course of the work at the [Iraq Survey Group], or after I left to do anything otherwise.
I think that shows a level of maturity and understanding that I think bodes well for getting to the bottom of this. But it is really up to you and your staff, on behalf of the American people, to take on that challenge. Its not something that anyone from the outside can do. So I look forward to these hearings and other hearings at how you will get to the conclusions.
I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates. But you have more public service certainly many of you than I have ever had, and you recognize that this is not unusual.
I told Sen. [John] Warner [chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee] earlier that Ive been drawn back as a result of recent film of reminding me of something. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the combined estimate was unanimity in the intelligence service that there were no Soviet warheads in Cuba at the time of the missile crisis.
Fortunately, President Kennedy and [then-Attorney General] Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.
But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.
So that by the end of the Johnson administration, the intelligence community had a capability to do what it had not been able to do at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.
I think you face a similar responsibility in ensuring that the community is able to do a better job in the future than it has done in the past.
Posted By Michele C. at January 28, 2004 03:07 PM | TrackBack
January 28, 2004 at 09:31 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Muslim Web Sites in Spotlight as Qaeda Scares Spread
By Firouz Sedarat
DUBAI (Reuters) - Islamist Web sites are drawing a wide audience as possible harbingers of al Qaeda attacks but experts say they are erratic and unreliable sources of warnings that could save lives.
Analysts say the sites, used by al Qaeda backers to spread their message, are unlikely sources of exact information on where or how Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s network might strike next -- though an experienced eye may spot the more probable comments.
Mainly, the Arabic-language sites, usually bulletin boards where anyone can post anonymous messages, provide a forum for users with nicknames like erhabi (terrorist) and abuosama (Osama's father) to vent anger at the West and United States.
"There's no official al Qaeda site, only sites run by Qaeda supporters but even these lack credibility as anyone can post there," London-based Islamic activist Yasser el-Serri said.
The sites praise as heroes the hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities, and often carry threats of even bloodier acts.
Last week, an Internet statement by a group claiming to be the Yemeni wing of al Qaeda vowed to strike a "devastating and crushing blow" against the United States to avenge the 2002 killing of its leader by a CIA (news - web sites) drone aircraft.
"We are capable now, of destroying an entire American city -- repeat: an entire city -- while your government remains arrogant," one recent post said.
"No one knows if a post is from a boasting young man or from an intelligence agency," Serri told Reuters. "But with experience, one can tell which may be genuine, by eliminating fakes based on their bad knowledge of Islam."
London-based analyst Paul Eedle who closely follows pro-Qaeda sites, agreed that a trained eye was needed.
"The way to assess the authenticity of statements is to see what other Islamists on the Net think of them," he said. "In this and other spheres, the Internet is a self-authenticating community."
EFFECTIVE PROPAGANDA TOOLS
"Since September 11, al Qaeda has used the Internet as a media machine, managing the public perception of it. That's almost as important to it as setting off bombs," Eedle said.
"Al Qaeda has a clear program to maintain a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam, and to terrify opponents and win over supporters."
Gary Bunt, a University of Wales lecturer who runs a site on Islam, virtuallyislamic.com, said Islamists had proven much more tech-savvy than their governments.
"A number of these site are exciting to take a look at. They've been designed very intelligently, a great deal of thought goes into how to put the message across," he told Reuters by telephone. "That has had an impact."
Mainstream media have been reluctant to report many of the threats posted on the sites. But Jeremy Reynalds, a U.S.-based analyst who frequently reports on Islamist sites, said the decision was a difficult one.
"I have debated with myself as to whether I am helping fuel a panic or whether I am doing the public a service.
"Do you withhold the information until you can verify it or do you publish it and say: this is not necessarily reliable but we have decided to let you know, in case."
January 28, 2004 at 08:45 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
From Elaine Monaghan in Washington
DAVID KAY, former chief weapons hunter for President Bush, said yesterday that “we were all wrong” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and called for a review of US intelligence.
“It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment. And that is most disturbing,” Dr Kay told the US Senate Armed Services Committee.
Dr Kay resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group last week with the parting words that he did not believe the stockpiles actually existed. His remarks prompted Mr Bush and his entourage to retreat from their insistence that the weapons on which they had built their case for war would eventually be found.
Dr Kays latest remarks touched a nerve with Republicans who are trying to resist Democrat demands for an inquiry that also studies how Mr Bush and his cabinet used the intelligence to make claims about Saddam's weapons that turned out to be false.
Dr Kay said that he, too, would have drawn the same conclusions as the Bush Administration had he been presented with the same body of intelligence on Saddam's weapons and that those responsible for the false reports must be held accountable.
US intelligence had become too dependent on technology to spy on its enemies and needed to get back to the business of human intelligence.
January 28, 2004 at 08:28 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
THE Ministry of Defence was criticised by Lord Hutton in his report yesterday for failing to warn David Kelly of the agreed Whitehall procedure under which his name might become public.
However, Lord Hutton did not accuse either Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, or Sir Kevin Tebbit, the Permanent Secretary, or any other MoD officials of failing in their duty of care towards Dr Kelly.
He said that there were mitigating circumstances and he also absolved Mr Hoon of telling untruths during evidence that he gave to the inquiry into Dr Kellys death.
In two appearances at the inquiry Mr Hoon was questioned closely about how much he knew in advance of the procedure adopted by the MoD press office in dealing with the media after it was announced that an official had admitted to briefing Andrew Gilligan, the BBCs Today reporter, about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction.
In his first appearance Mr Hoon gave the impression that he had not seen the Question and Answer briefing notes drawn up by the most senior press officers, which provided extra details about Dr Kelly without actually naming him.
However, Lord Hutton confirmed for the first time that in his written, unpublished, evidence to the inquiry, Mr Hoon admitted that he had been told of the approach the MoD press office would use.
Therefore, I consider that Mr Hoon was not untruthful . . . (and) I do not consider that he was seeking in his evidence to conceal his knowledge of this approach, Lord Hutton said.
However, Lord Hutton focused on the fact that Dr Kelly was never told that the MoD would confirm his name to journalists if they came up with his identity.
Lord Hutton concluded that the MoD and Downing Street were telling the truth when they denied having a devious strategy to put Dr Kellys name into the public domain. There was no dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous strategy by the Government covertly to leak Dr Kellys name to the media, Lord Hutton said.
However, he added that there were a number of defects in the way that the MoD had dealt with the weapons scientist.
The sudden information from Dr (Bryan) Wells (Dr Kellys line manager at the MoD) that his name had been confirmed to the press by the MoDs press office without any explanation as to why this had been done must have been very upsetting for him and must have given rise to a feeling that he had been badly let down by his employer, Lord Hutton said in his report.
The MoD should have set up a procedure to let Dr Kelly know immediately that his name had been confirmed to the press. Yet the MoD allowed a period of 90 minutes to elapse before Dr Wells rang Dr Kelly to tell him what had happened.
Lord Hutton acknowledged fully that Dr Kelly had been told on a number of occasions, notably by Richard Hatfield, the MoD personnel director, that it was likely that his name would become known, and that the weapons scientist had appreciated this fact.
The law lord also concluded that there were a number of mitigating circumstances: the exposure that Dr Kelly subsequently faced from press attention, whilst obviously very stressful, was only one of the factors placing him under great stress; MoD individuals did try to support Dr Kelly with offers of help in dealing with the media; and that, because of his intensely private nature, Dr Kelly was not an easy man to help or to whom to give advice.
Lord Hutton said: It is also right to emphasise that no one, including the officials in the MoD, could have contemplated that Dr Kelly might take his own life.
However, Dr Kelly must have felt great shock to be told in a brief, and often crackly, mobile telephone call from Dr Wells on the evening of July 9 the day before he was identified in three newspapers including The Times that the press office of his own department had confirmed his name.
January 28, 2004 at 08:26 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Bronwen Maddox
LORD HUTTON said Tony Blair acted entirely in good faith in presenting his dossier of intelligence on Iraq’s weapons in September 2002.
He cleared Downing Street emphatically of Andrew Gilligan’s central charge: that it included information in its case for war which it knew to be wrong, or had reason to think was unreliable. But given that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found, what should we now make of the quality of that intelligence?
Yesterday, as Lord Hutton was concluding his presentation, David Kay, head of the United States Iraq Survey Group until he resigned on Friday, was preparing to testify to Congress that he did not believe such weapons had existed. In the past two days, President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have backed away from their earlier assertions that weapons would be found, while Democratic presidential contenders have seized on the issue as a promising line of attack on the President.
Lord Hutton, let us be clear, does not set out to answer this question. He acknowledges the controversy as legitimate but concluded that a question of such wide import, which would involve the consideration of a wide range of evidence, is not one which falls within my terms of reference.
He does consider how the dossier was put together. But he also exonerates almost intelligence chiefs such as John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, from the charge of inappropriately strengthening the presentation of intelligence.
In criticism whose mildness would be hard to surpass, he says: I consider that the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which, whilst consistent with the available intelligence, was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Husseins weapons of mass destruction, may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment.
However, he adds that although this possibility cannot be completely ruled out, he is satisfied that all the intelligence staff involved made sure that the dossier was consistent with JIC intelligence.
Lord Hutton also notes, without judgment, that part of the Defence Intelligence Staff thought the assertion that weapons were ready to launch in 45 minutes should have been preceded by the words intelligence suggests, rather than the more emphatic we judge.
So in his view, the intelligence chiefs did not sex up the dossier any more than did the politicians. But that simply moves the question on to the agents in the field. Did they get it wrong, and if so, how?
Lord Hutton does not address this, but David Kay does. It is hard to consider the Hutton report and the Blair dossier without reference to Mr Kays remarks in the past week. Although he is not well known in Britain, his assessment is front-page news across America. The question of the accuracy of the British-American case for war is now rising rapidly up the US political agenda as Congress prepares to scrutinise it with at least the thoroughness that Lord Hutton applied to Mr Gilligan.
We had found no actual large weapons stockpiles and no indication of a production process that would have produced such stockpiles," Mr Kay said when he resigned.
No one has questioned that Saddam remained malevolent towards the West and Israel, and that Iraq, which continued to run sophisticated oil refineries and to develop its missiles, was capable of producing such weapons. A case for war based on potential threat remains entirely intact.
But a case based on an actual threat, as the Blair dossier claimed, now looks shaky. Mr Kay, using the evidence of physical searches in Iraq and interviews with captured members of the regime, concludes that there was no sustained effort to produce WMD after the end of the 1991 war, although there were intermittent flickers of interest.
Burgeoning corruption and Saddams loss of control was the main reason for the programmes dissolution, he believes. Senior Iraqis have told him that money which Saddam thought he was authorising for the programme was siphoned off by individuals.
But the CIA failed to detect this. While UN inspectors were allowed into the country, the CIA became spoiled, he says. Agents looked at satellite pictures, and asked the team on the ground to investigate. But when the UN was kicked out in 1998, the CIA failed to plug the gap or to acknowledge that there was one.
Mr Kays conclusion is entirely relevant to the Hutton report. Intelligence is often unreliable, usually incomplete, and rarely decisive, he argues. Agents should certainly reflect that but their bosses, and in turn their political masters, should not escape the responsibility of asking whether those weaknesses exist.
January 28, 2004 at 08:25 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Dominic Kennedy
THE BBC has a defective editorial system, management was faulty and unreasonable, and the governors incorrectly believed that their independence required them to reject the Government’s complaints.
Lord Hutton’s report condemns the BBC from top to bottom. There are Andrew Gilligan’s inadequate, lost and conflicting notes. Then there are the managers who failed to check his story before rushing to defend him from Alastair Campbell’s attacks and who failed to notice the holes in his notekeeping when they did look at them.
Suspicions about Mr Gilligans allegedly flawed reporting were hidden from senior managers and, in turn, by managers from the governors.
Finally, the board failed to check the story, which might have led them to withdraw their insistence that it had been in the public interest and admit it was wrong.
Nobody in the BBC chain of command escapes Lord Huttons censure. First, he acknowledges the high points of principle involved, striking a balance between the publics right to know and the medias resposibility to get its facts right when attacking individuals.
The communication by the media of information obtained by investigative reporters on matters of public interest is a vital part of a democratic society, Lord Hutton said. The right to communicate is, however, subject to the qualification that the media should not make false allegations impugning the integrity of others, including politicians.
The BBCs editorial system was defective by allowing Mr Gilligan to broadcast his report at 6.07am without editors seeing and approving a script.
BBC management was at fault for failing to investigate properly the Governments complaints. Before Richard Sambrook, the director of news, wrote to Alastair Campbell in defence of Mr Gilligan, management failed to examine the reporters notes to see if they supported his allegations. When management did look at the notes, it failed to appreciate that they did not support the most serious allegations and so failed to draw this to the attention of the governors.
Owing to what Lord Hutton condemned as defective management, the contents of an e-mail from Kevin Marsh, the Today programme Editor, criticising Mr Gilligans reporting, sent to Stephen Mitchell, head of radio news, were not made known to Mr Sambrook or the governors.
The governors were placed in a difficult position when they met on July 6, because the management was telling them that it was satisfied about the reliability and credibility of Mr Gilligans anonymous source. The governors were right that it was their duty to protect the BBCs independence against attacks by the Government, Lord Hutton accepted.
He blamed Mr Campbell for raising the temperature of the dispute in evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, in which the Governments director of communications and strategy, as he was then, accused the BBC of having an anti-war agenda. There was, however, more to what Mr Campbell said to the MPs: the Governments concern about Mr Gilligans broadcasts was a separate issue about which specific complaints had been made.
The governors should have recognised more fully that their duty to protect the BBCs independence was not incompatible with considering these complaints properly, which they failed to do.
Gavyn Davies, the Chairman, had explained in evidence to the inquiry the understandable view that the governors had to rely on management to investigate Mr Gilligans source. But that was not the correct view to take because the Government, with the authority of the Prime Minister and John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, had denied the truth of the report. Rather than relying on managements assurances, the governors should have made more detailed investigations into Mr Gilligans notes.
THE BBC REACTS
The statement made by Greg Dyke, the BBC Director-General:
We note Lord Huttons criticisms of the BBC. Many of these relate to mistakes which the BBC has already acknowledged and for which we have already expressed regret.
The BBC does accept that certain key allegations reported by Andrew Gilligan on the Today programme on May 29 last year were wrong and we apologise for them.
However, we would point out again that at no stage in the last eight months have we accused the Prime Minister of lying. The dossier raised issues of great public interest. Dr Kelly was a credible source. Provided his allegations were reported accurately, the public in a modern democracy had a right to be made aware of them. We have already taken steps to improve our procedures.
January 28, 2004 at 08:24 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Dominic Kennedy
ANDREW GILLIGAN, the Today programme reporter, made unfounded, grave allegations attacking the integrity of the Government and the Joint Intelligence Committee, Lord Hutton concluded.
In the light of the uncertainties in Mr Gilligan’s evidence and the existence of two versions of his notes, it was not possible to conclude definitely what David Kelly had said to the reporter.
But Dr Kelly did not say that the Government probably knew or suspected that the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes was wrong before it had been inserted in the dossier, Lord Hutton said.
Nor did he say to Mr Gilligan that the claim was excluded from the original draft because it came only from one source and the intelligence agencies did not believe that it was necessarily true.
In his evidence, Mr Gilligan had accepted that he was wrong to broadcast these allegations on the programme. The reporter now acknowledged that the 45-minutes claim had been excluded from the original version of the dossier because it had come to the intelligence services late.
Mr Gilligan had wrongly inferred that the Government knew the claim was wrong and had wrongly attributed this opinion to his source. The allegation I intended to make was one of spin, but . . . I do regard those words as imperfect and I should not have made them, he told the inquiry.
It had been my mistake, the reporter said, to attribute to Dr Kelly his own interpretation that, a week before publication, Downing Street had ordered the dossier to be sexed up, made more exciting and more facts to be discovered. I regret, Mr Gilligan told the inquiry, that . . . I did not report entirely carefully and accurately what he had said. Mr Gilligan was definite that it was Dr Kelly and not he who introduced the name (Alastair) Campbell into their discussion at the Charing Cross Hotel in Central London on May 22, 2003.
There are two significant differences between the two versions of Mr Gilligans note on his personal organiser, Lord Hutton observed. The earlier version is dated May 21, 2003, and does not contain the name Campbell. The later version is dated May 22 and includes the word Campbell.
Mr Gilligan had also lost the manuscript note that he made the day after he met Dr Kelly, Lord Hutton said. The reporters memory of the discussion was not entirely clear, leaving considerable doubt about what his source had said to him.
However, Susan Watts, the Newsnight reporter, regarded by Lord Hutton as an accurate and reliable witness, did say that Dr Kelly had mentioned Mr Campbell to her and so, the law lord concluded, he may have done the same with Mr Gilligan.
Mr Gilligan claimed that he had given adequate notice to the Government the night before he broadcast his allegations, but the Government disputed this.
Mr Gilligan had acknowleged in his evidence that it had been quite wrong for him to send an e-mail to MPs suggesting that Dr Kelly was the source for a report by Ms Watts on Newsnight.
WORD FOR WORD
JOHN HUMPHRYS: The Government is facing more questions this morning over its claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq . . . is Tony Blair saying theyd be ready to go within 45 minutes?
ANDREW GILLIGAN: Thats right, that was the central claim in his dossier, which he published in September, the main, erm, case if you like against, er, against Iraq and the main statement of the British Governments belief of what it thought Iraq was up to and what weve been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that, actually the Government probably, erm, knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in. What this person says, is that a week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather, erm, a bland production. It didnt, the, the draft prepared for Mr Blair by the intelligence agencies actually didnt say very much more than was public knowledge already and, erm, Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up, to be made more exciting and ordered more facts to be, er, to be discovered.
January 28, 2004 at 08:23 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
AM satisfied that Dr Kelly took his own life and that the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body.
It is probable that the ingestion of an excess amount of Coproxamol tablets coupled with apparently clinically silent coronary artery disease would have played a part in bringing about death more certainly and more rapidly than it would have otherwise been the case.
I am further satisfied that no other person was involved in the death of Dr Kelly and that Dr Kelly was not suffering from any significant mental illness at the time he took his own life.
ON THE issues relating to the preparation of the Governments dossier of 24 September 2002 entitled Iraqs Weapons of Mass Destruction, my conclusions are as follows:
The dossier was prepared and drafted by a small team of the assessment staff of the JIC. Mr John Scarlett, the Chairman of the JIC, had the overall responsibility for the drafting of the dossier. The dossier, which included the 45 minutes claim, was issued by the Government on 24 September 2002 with the full approval of the JIC.
The 45 minutes claim was based on a report which was received by the SIS from a source which that Service regarded as reliable. Therefore, whether or not at some time in the future the report on which the 45 minutes claim was based is shown to be unreliable, the allegation reported by Mr Gilligan on 29 May 2003 that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before the Government decided to put it in the dossier, was an allegation which was unfounded.
The allegation was also unfounded that the reason why the 45 minutes claim was not in the original draft of the dossier was because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true. The reason why the 45 minutes claim did not appear in draft assessments or draft dossiers until 5 September 2002 was because the intelligence report on which it was based was not received by the SIS until 29 August 2002 and the JIC assessment staff did not have time to insert it in a draft until the draft of the assessment of 5 September 2002.
The true position in relation to the attitude of "the Intelligence Services" to the 45 minutes claim being inserted in the dossier was that the concerns expressed by Dr Jones were considered by higher echelons in the Intelligence Services and were not acted upon, and the JIC, the most senior body in the Intelligence Services charged with the assessment of intelligence, approved the wording in the dossier.
Moreover, the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons section of the Defence Intelligence Staff, headed by Dr Brian Jones, did not argue that the intelligence relating to the 45 minutes claim should not have been included in the dossier but they did suggest that the wording in which the claim was stated in the dossier was too strong and that instead of the dossier stating we judge that Iraq has: military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them, the wording should state intelligence suggests.
Mr Alastair Campbell made it clear to Mr Scarlett on behalf of the Prime Minister that 10 Downing Street wanted the dossier to be worded to make as strong a case as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Husseins WMD, and 10 Downing Street made written suggestions to Mr Scarlett as to changes in the wording of the draft dossier which would strengthen it. But Mr Campbell recognised, and told Mr Scarlett that 10 Downing Street recognised, that nothing should be stated in the dossier with which the intelligence community were not entirely happy.
Mr Scarlett accepted some of the drafting suggestions made to him by 10 Downing Street but he only accepted those suggestions which were consistent with the intelligence known to the JIC and he rejected those suggestions which were not consistent with such intelligence and the dossier issued by the Government was approved by the JIC.
As the dossier was one to be presented to, and read by, Parliament and the public, and was not an intelligence assessment to be considered only by the Government, I do not consider that it was improper for Mr Scarlett and the JIC to take into account suggestions as to drafting made by 10 Downing Street and to adopt those suggestions if they were consistent with the intelligence available to the JIC.
However I consider that the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which, whilst consistent with the available intelligence, was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Husseins WMD, may have subconsciously influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment.
Although this possibility cannot be completely ruled out, I am satisfied that Mr Scarlett, the other members of the JIC, and the members of the assessment staff engaged in the drafting of the dossier were concerned to ensure that the contents of the dossier were consistent with the intelligence available to the JIC.
The term "sexed-up" is a slang expression, the meaning of which lacks clarity in the context of the discussion of the dossier. It is capable of two different meanings. It could mean that the dossier was embellished with items of intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable to make the case against Saddam Hussein stronger, or it could mean that whilst the intelligence contained in the dossier was believed to be reliable, the dossier was drafted in such a way as to make the case against Saddam Hussein as strong as the intelligence contained in it permitted. If the term is used in this latter sense, then because of the drafting suggestions made by 10 Downing Street for the purpose of making a strong case against Saddam Hussein, it could be said that the Government sexed-up the dossier. However in the context of the broadcasts in which the sexing-up allegation was reported and having regard to the other allegations reported in those broadcasts, I consider that the allegation was unfounded as it would have been understood by those who heard the broadcasts to mean that the dossier had been embellished with intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable, which was not the case.
ON THE issues relating to Dr Kellys meeting with Mr Andrew Gilligan in the Charing Cross Hotel on 22 May 2003 my conclusions are as follows:
In the light of the uncertainties arising from Mr Gilligan's evidence and the existence of two versions of his notes made on his personal organiser of his discussion with Dr Kelly on 22 May it is not possible to reach a definite conclusion as to what Dr Kelly said to Mr Gilligan. It may be that Dr Kelly said to Mr Gilligan that Mr Campbell was responsible for transforming the dossier, and it may be that when Mr Gilligan suggested to Dr Kelly that the dossier was transformed to make it sexier, Dr Kelly agreed with this suggestion.
However, I am satisfied that Dr Kelly did not say to Mr Gilligan that the Government probably knew or suspected that the 45 minutes claim was wrong before that claim was inserted in the dossier. I am further satisfied that Dr Kelly did not say to Mr Gilligan that the reason why the 45 minutes claim was not included in the original draft of the dossier was because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true.
In the course of his evidence .. . Mr Gilligan accepted that he had made errors in his broadcasts in the Today programme on 29 May 2003. The reality was that the 45 minutes claim was based on an intelligence report which the SIS believed to be reliable and the 45 minutes claim was inserted in the dossier with the approval of the JIC, the most senior body in the United Kingdom responsible for the assessment of intelligence.
In addition the reason why the 45 minutes claim was not inserted in the first draft of the dossier was because the intelligence on which it was based was not received by the SIS in London until 29 August 2002. Therefore the allegations reported by Mr Gilligan that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong or questionable and that it was not inserted in the first draft of the dossier because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true, were unfounded.
Dr Kellys meeting with Mr Gilligan was unauthorised and in meeting Mr Gilligan and discussing intelligence matters with him, Dr Kelly was acting in breach of the Civil Service code of procedure which applied to him.
It may be that when he met Mr Gilligan, Dr Kelly said more to him than he had intended to say and that at the time of the meeting he did not realise the gravity of the situation which he was helping to create by discussing intelligence matters with Mr Gilligan. But whatever Dr Kelly thought at the time of his meeting with Mr Gilligan, it is clear that after Mr Gilligan's broadcasts on 29 May Dr Kelly must have come to realise the gravity of the situation for which he was partly responsible by commenting on intelligence matters to him and he accepted that the meeting was unauthorised, as he acknowledged in a telephone conversation with his friend and colleague Ms Olivia Bosch after his meeting with Mr Gilligan.
ON THE issues relating to the BBC arising from Mr Gilligans broadcasts on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003 my conclusions are as follows:
The allegations reported by Mr Gilligan on the BBC Today programme on 29 May 2003 that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong or questionable before the dossier was published and that it was not inserted in the first draft of the dossier because it only came from one source and the intelligence agencies did not really believe it was necessarily true, were unfounded.
The communication by the media of information (including information obtained by investigative reporters) on matters of public interest and importance is a vital part of life in a democratic society. However the right to communicate such information is subject to the qualification (which itself exists for the benefit of a democratic society) that false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made by the media.
Where a reporter is intending to broadcast or publish information impugning the integrity of others the management of his broadcasting company or newspaper should ensure that a system is in place whereby his editor or editors give careful consideration to the wording of the report and to whether it is right in all the circumstances to broadcast or publish it.
The allegations that Mr Gilligan was intending to broadcast in respect of the Government and the preparation of the dossier were very grave allegations in relation to a subject of great importance and I consider that the editorial system which the BBC permitted was defective in that Mr Gilligan was allowed to broadcast his report at 6.07am without editors having seen a script of what he was going to say and having considered whether it should be approved.
The BBC management was at fault in the following respects in failing to investigate properly the Governments complaints that the report in the 6.07am broadcast was false that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong even before it decided to put it in the dossier. The BBC management failed, before Mr Sambrook wrote his letter of 27 June 2003 to Mr Campbell, to make an examination of Mr Gilligans notes on his personal organiser of his meeting with Dr Kelly to see if they supported the allegations which he had made in his broadcast at 6.07am.
When the BBC management did look at Mr Gilligans notes after 27 June it failed to appreciate that the notes did not fully support the most serious of the allegations which he had reported in the 6.07am broadcast, and it therefore failed to draw the attention of the Governors to the lack of support in the notes for the most serious of the allegations.
The e-mail sent by Mr Kevin Marsh, the editor of the Today programme on 27 June 2003 to Mr Stephen Mitchell, the Head of Radio News, which was critical of Mr Gilligans method of reporting, and which referred to Mr Gilligans loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology and referred also to the loose and in some ways distant relationship hes been allowed to have with Today, was clearly relevant to the complaints which the Government was making about his broadcasts on 29 May, and the lack of knowledge on the part of Mr Sambrook, the Director of News, and the Governors of this critical e-mail shows a defect in the operation of the BBC's management system for the consideration of complaints in respect of broadcasts.
The Governors were right to take the view that it was their duty to protect the independence of the BBC against attacks by the Government and Mr Campbells complaints were being expressed in exceptionally strong terms which raised very considerably the temperature of the dispute between the Government and the BBC. However, Mr Campbells allegation that the BBC had an anti-war agenda in his evidence to the FAC was only one part of his evidence. The Government s concern about Mr Gilligan's broadcasts on 29 May was a separate issue about which specific complaints had been made by the Government. Therefore the Governors should have recognised more fully than they did that their duty to protect the independence of the BBC was not incompatible with giving proper consideration to whether there was validity in the Governments complaints, no matter how strongly worded by Mr Campbell, that the allegations against its integrity reported in Mr Gilligan's broadcasts were unfounded and the Governors failed to give this issue proper consideration.
The view taken by the Governors, as explained in evidence by Mr Gavyn Davies, the Chairman of the Board of Governors, that they had to rely on the BBC management to investigate and assess whether Mr Gilligan's source was reliable and credible and that it was not for them as Governors to investigate whether the allegations reported were themselves accurate, is a view which is understandable.
However, this was not the correct view for the Governors to take because the Government had stated to the BBC in clear terms, as had Mr Campbell to the FAC, that the report that the Government probably knew that the 45 minutes claim was wrong was untruthful, and this denial was made with the authority of the Prime Minister and the Chairman of the JIC.
In those circumstances, rather than relying on the assurances of BBC management, I consider that the Governors themselves should have made more detailed investigations into the extent to which Mr Gilligan's notes supported his report. If they had done this they would probably have discovered that the notes did not support the allegation that the Government knew that the 45 minutes claim was probably wrong, and the Governors should then have questioned whether it was right for the BBC to maintain that it was in the public interest to broadcast that allegation in Mr Gilligan's report and to rely on Mr Gilligans assurances that his report was accurate.
Therefore in the very unusual and specific circumstances relating to Mr Gilligan's broadcasts, the Governors are to be criticised for themselves failing to make more detailed investigations into whether this allegation reported by Mr Gilligan was properly supported by his notes and for failing to give proper and adequate consideration to whether the BBC should publicly acknowledge that this very grave allegation should not have been broadcast.
ON THE issue whether the Government behaved in a way which was dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous in revealing Dr Kellys name to the media my conclusions are as follows:
There was no dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous strategy by the Government covertly to leak Dr Kellys name to the media. If the bare details of the MoD statement dated 8 July 2003, the changing drafts of the Q and A material prepared in the MoD, and the lobby briefings by the Prime Ministers official spokesman on 9 July are looked at in isolation from the surrounding circumstances it would be possible to infer, as some commentators have done, that there was an underhand strategy by the Government to leak Dr Kellys name in a covert way.
However, having heard a large volume of evidence on this issue I have concluded that there was no such strategy on the part of the Government. I consider that in the midst of a major controversy relating to Mr Gilligan's broadcasts which had contained very grave allegations against the integrity of the Government and fearing that Dr Kellys name as the source for those broadcasts would be disclosed by the media at any time, the Governments main concern was that it would be charged with a serious cover up if it did not reveal that a civil servant had come forward.
I consider that the evidence of Mr Donald Anderson MP and Mr Andrew Mackinlay MP, the Chairman and a member respectively of the FAC, together with the questions put by Sir John Stanley MP to Dr Kelly when he appeared before the FAC, clearly show that the Governments concern was well founded. Therefore I consider that the Government did not behave in a dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous way in issuing on 8 July 2003, after it had been read over to Dr Kelly and he had said that he was content with it, a statement which said that a civil servant, who was not named, had come forward to volunteer that he had met Mr Gilligan on 22 May.
The decision by the MoD to confirm Dr Kellys name if, after the statement had been issued, the correct name were put to the MoD by a reporter, was not part of a covert strategy to leak his name, but was based on the view that in a matter of such intense public and media interest it would not be sensible to try to conceal the name when the MoD thought that the press were bound to discover the correct name, and a further consideration in the mind of the MoD was that it did not think it right that media speculation should focus, wrongly, on other civil servants.
It was reasonable for the Government to take the view that, even if it sought to keep confidential the fact that Dr Kelly had come forward, the controversy surrounding Mr Gilligans broadcasts was so great and the level of media interest was so intense that Dr Kellys name as Mr Gilligans source was bound to become known to the public and that it was not a practical possibility to keep his name secret.
ON THE issue whether the Government failed to take proper steps to help and protect Dr Kelly in the difficult position in which he found himself my conclusion is as follows:
Once the decision had been taken on 8 July to issue the statement, the MoD was at fault and is to be criticised for not informing Dr Kelly that its press office would confirm his name if a journalist suggested it. Although I am satisfied that Dr Kelly realised, once the MoD statement had been issued on Tuesday 8 July, that his name would come out, it must have been a great shock and very upsetting for him to have been told in a brief telephone call from his line manager, Dr Wells, on the evening of 9 July that the press office of his own department had confirmed his name to the press and must have given rise to a feeling that he had been badly let down by his employer.
I further consider that the MoD was at fault in not having set up a procedure whereby Dr Kelly would be informed immediately his name had been confirmed to the press and in permitting a period of one and a half hours to elapse between the confirmation of his name to the press and information being given to Dr Kelly that his name had been confirmed to the press.
However, these criticisms are subject to the mitigating circumstances that (1) Dr Kellys exposure to press attention and intrusion ... was only one of the factors placing him under great stress; (2) individual officials in the MoD did try to help and support him in the ways which I have described ... and (3) because of his intensely private nature, Dr Kelly was not an easy man to help or to whom to give advice.
ON THE issue of the factors which may have led Dr Kelly to take his own life I adopt as my own conclusion the opinion which Professor Hawton, the Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University, expressed in the course of his evidence:
Q. Have you considered, now, with the benefit of hindsight that we all have, what factors did contribute to Dr Kellys death?
A. I think that as far as one can deduce, the major factor was the severe loss of self esteem, resulting from his feeling that people had lost trust in him and from his dismay at being exposed to the media.
Q. And why have you singled that out as a major factor?
A. Well, he talked a lot about it; and I think being such a private man, I think this was anathema to him to be exposed, you know, publicly in this way. In a sense, I think he would have seen it as being publicly disgraced.
Q. What other factors do you think were relevant?
A. Well, I think that carrying on that theme, I think that he must have begun - he is likely to have begun to think that, first of all, the prospects for continuing in his previous work role were diminishing very markedly and, indeed, my conjecture that he had begun to fear he would lose his job altogether.
Q. What effect is that likely to have had on him? A. Well, I think that would have filled him with a profound sense of hopelessness; and that, in a sense, his lifes work had been not wasted but that had been totally undermined.
Lord Hutton: Could you just elaborate a little on that, professor, again? As sometimes is the case in this inquiry, witnesses give answers and further explanation is obvious, but nonetheless I think it is helpful just to have matters fully spelt out. What do you think would have caused Dr Kelly to think that the prospects of continuing in his work were becoming uncertain?
A. Well, I think, my Lord, that first of all, there had been the letter from Mr Hatfield which had laid out the difficulties that Dr Kelly, you know, is alleged to have got into.
Lord Hutton: Yes.
A. And in that letter there was also talk that should further matters come to light then disciplinary proceedings would need to be instigated.
Lord Hutton: Yes.
A. And then of course there were the Parliamentary Questions which we have heard about, which suggested that questions were going to be asked about discipline in Parliament. Lord Hutton: Yes. Thank you.
Mr Dingemans: Were there any other relevant factors?
A. I think the fact that he could not share his problems and feelings with other people, and the fact that he, according to the accounts I have been given, actually increasingly withdrew into himself. So in a sense he was getting further and further from being able to share the problems with other people, that is extremely important.
Q. Were there any other factors which you considered relevant?
A. Those are the main factors that I consider relevant.
January 28, 2004 at 08:20 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
By Tom Baldwin and Greg Hurst
LORD HUTTON is expected to instigate a formal leak inquiry this week into how The Sun newspaper obtained details of his report before its publication yesterday.
Lord Hutton “deplored” the breach of elaborate security arrangements designed to prevent such disclosures, adding: “I am considering what investigative and legal action I should take against the newspaper and its source.”
The Conservatives immediately sought to pin the blame on the Government which, together with the BBC and other key players in the inquiry, had given binding undertakings against disclosing material from advance copies of the report distributed on Tuesday.
Liam Fox, the Tory chairman, said: The Governments fingerprints are all over the leaking of this document. It is a despicable act from a morally bankrupt government. Tony Blair demanded a retraction of the allegation.
Alastair Campbell, Downing Streets former communications director, who is no longer part of the Government but returned to No 10 on Tuesday to read an advance copy of Lord Huttons report, denied leaking it. The BBC and David Kellys family also said that they were not responsible.
There were persistent rumours yesterday that the newspaper may have obtained the document from a worker at the official Stationery Office printing plant in Bermondsey, southeast London, where the reports were produced.
Senior executives at the newspaper are said to have spent days planning an operation to obtain the report. It may also be significant that The Sun published an exclusive story on Tuesday morning about security arrangements at the printing plant where, it said, workers were searched when they left the building and had to wear special tags restricting their movements.
The Stationery Office said that there was no evidence to suggest that there had been any breach in the pre- approved security processes.
January 28, 2004 at 08:15 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Hutton Sketch by Magnus Linklater
WITH the gravity, logic and forensic analysis for which he is celebrated, Lord Hutton yesterday cleared the Government of bad behaviour in the David Kelly affair, and used the summary of his report to castigate the BBC in merciless detail.
Had Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's former director of communications, been present among the onlookers in the Royal Courts of Justice, he might well have leapt to his feet and punched the air in triumph. His campaign against the BBC had been vindicated - and in a distinctly more magisterial style than the way he conducted it.
It was left to the ill-concealed grin on the face of Tony Blair responding to the statement later in the House of Commons to say it all. As Michael Howard, the Tory leader, struggled to put the case against the Government that Lord Hutton had so conspicuously rejected, Mr Blair could afford to wrap himself in prime ministerial dignity.
"Let me repeat the words of Lord Hutton," he said. " 'False accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others ... should not be made.' Let those that made them now withdraw them." Behind him, loyal backbenchers exulted in the unusual experience of taunting Mr Howard with cries of "resign" and "apologise". Bathed in a combination of surprise and relief, they gave vent to behaviour so rowdy that the Speaker, Michael Martin, had to bring them to order. The real drama, however, had begun an hour and a half earlier, as Lord Hutton entered Court 76, gave his usual courteous bow, and began delivering his report summary in a rapid-fire monotone. It was clear in a few minutes which direction he was moving in. It was not, he said, within his brief to determine whether the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was sufficiently strong to justify the UKs military action; nor was it part of his remit to assess its reliability.
At a stroke, he had eliminated what was, perhaps, the most contentious issue at the heart of the whole affair. Instead, he took as his starting point the claims made by Andrew Gilligan, the BBC defence correspondent, that Downing Street had ordered its Iraq dossier to be "sexed up". The way he uttered the phrase, with barely concealed distaste, said it all.
"It was these allegations, attacking the integrity of the Government, which drew Dr Kelly into the controversy about the broadcasts and which I consider I should examine under my terms of reference," he said.
Gradually, in the absolute silence with which he was heard, it became clear that each and every charge against Downing Street or the Ministry of Defence could be explained and discounted, while those against the BBC had been proved. The BBC had failed to exercise proper editorial control over Mr Gilligan's broadcasts, it had omitted to check the accuracy of his reports, it had been at fault in the way it investigated the Government's complaints. From its Chairman, Gavyn Davies, to its Director-General, Greg Dyke, to the BBC's governors, its production staff, and the reporter himself, no one was spared Lord Hutton's displeasure. The only conclusion to draw, he said, was that "the BBC should publicly acknowledge that this very grave allegation should not have been broadcast".
When it came to the political and intelligence world, however, the tone changed. Lord Hutton cleared Downing Street of exerting undue pressure on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which had prepared the weapons dossier, accepting Mr Campbell's statement that "nothing should be stated in the dossier with which the intelligence community were not entirely happy".
He rejected allegations that John Scarlett, the committee's chairman, had bent to political pressure, and maintained he had only accepted suggestions "which were consistent with the intelligence known to the JIC". The most that might be said against him was that he had been "subconsciously influenced" by Mr Blair's desire to have a strong dossier to justify the invasion of Iraq. But even here he was satisfied that Mr Scarlett had behaved properly.
Finally, he cleared Downing Street of behaving in a way which was "dishonourable or underhand or duplicitous in revealing Dr Kelly's name to the media". Once Dr Kelly himself had come forward to confess that he had talked to Mr Gilligan, the Government was entitled to reveal that fact to the public, and to the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) which was investigating the matter.
The purpose of finding a way of ensuring that the name came out was, he said, "to protect the Government from a charge of cover-up and of withholding important relevant information from the FAC".
The exonerations came thick and fast: the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Defence, and Downing Street spin-doctors, had all behaved correctly in briefing the press. Even Geoff Hoon, whose evidence to the inquiry had seemed so muddled and self-contradictory, was "not untruthful", and could be absolved of any blame for failing to protect Dr Kelly or control his own department.
The infamous question-and-answer process by which Dr Kelly's name became known was justified because "it was better to be frank with the press and confirm the correct name if it was given". He said that several newspapers had guessed Dr Kelly's identity fairly rapidly, while "the name was also confirmed to The Times after it had put 20 names". The only criticism was that officials at the MoD should have warned Dr Kelly that his name was about to be published.
For those listening, there was an air of anti-climax. It may partly have been because The Sun had scooped him that morning by revealing chunks of his report - an act of betrayal which he condemned.
It may also have been because of something else that was lacking. We had grown used, in the course of the inquiry, to Lord Hutton's laser-like interventions, whenever a witness was confused, contradictory, or less than honest. There was little of that on show yesterday. True, he was critical of the BBC, but he failed to turn his acerbic eye on the goings-on in Downing Street - the blizzard of e-mails which marked its anti-BBC campaign, the four-letter words of Mr Campbell's diary, the absence of note-taking at Downing Street meetings, the ethics of disclosing the name of a distinguished scientist, the way in which intelligence was subverted to the requirements of political expediency, the extraordinary interference in the JIC's procedures by Mr Campbell and by Jonathan Powell.
All these we had expected to hear condemned by Lord Hutton. But in the end he stood aloof from that, and from anything that might have exceeded his brief. Instead, he remained true to the character which has always informed his career in Northern Ireland, where he has presided over a mine-strewn judicial system for more than 30 years.
He never put a foot wrong there. He was not about to start now.
January 28, 2004 at 08:11 PM in UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
GREG DYKE'S future as BBC Director-General was hanging in the balance las