MI6 chief told PM: Americans 'fixed' case for war

The Sunday Times - Britain

March 20, 2005

MI6 chief told PM: Americans ‘fixed’ case for war
Nick Fielding
THE HEAD of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed” by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.

Blair followed the US lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the programme claims.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America’s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was “inevitable”. Dearlove said “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by George W Bush’s administration.

The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.

The documentary — to be shown on BBC1’s Panorama tonight — reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.

The memo says: “There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the US. But even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years.”

The programme argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush’s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair’s true reason for going to war.

Cook says: “What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration that Britain was their closest ally. His problem is that George Bush’s motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was doing.

“His problem was that he could not be honest about that with either the British people or Labour MPs, hence the stress on disarmament.”

The intelligence services had little evidence to show that Iraq was a serious threat. At the meeting with Dearlove in July, Straw was still not entirely convinced. But, the programme claims, Blair had to keep talking up the threat posed by Iraq to justify his policy of supporting Bush. MI6 was then tasked to seek new information from its limited Iraqi network to make the case for war.

The little intelligence that could be gathered was seized upon by Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press secretary, and John Scarlett, the official leading a team drawing up the now notorious intelligence dossier.

The new material came mostly from two sources. The first, who was new and untried, reported that Iraq had restarted chemical agent production. The second, who had never previously provided details on WMD, was the source of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

When Dearlove briefed Blair on the first source, only days before he presented his dossier to parliament, the MI6 chief told him “the case is developmental and the source remains unproven”. Nonetheless, Blair told MPs two weeks later on September 24, 2002: “The intelligence picture they paint is one accumulated over the past four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative.”
The evidence was vital in reducing parliamentary opposition to the decision to go to war. Only much later, after the fall of Saddam and the dawning realisation that Iraq possessed no WMD, was it revealed that the intelligence from both agents had been withdrawn.

However, Blair’s immediate problem of justifying the war against Iraq had been solved. He went on a diplomatic offensive to swing the United Nations behind a vote for war.

Panorama interviewed Adolfo Zinser, former Mexican ambassador to the UN, who recalls a briefing with MI6 as Britain was trying to shore up support in the security council for the second resolution on Iraq.

Zinser says: “I asked them, ‘Do you have full proof of the existence of these weapons, at any one of these particular sites that you are referring to?’ The MI6 officers told me, ‘No, we don’t’.”

The programme says Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, was not convinced the invasion would be lawful without a second UN resolution. It was not until two days before the war that Goldsmith told the cabinet that this, after all, was not absolutely necessary. This was after Britain had failed to secure a second resolution.

“We stretched the legal argument to breaking point and the fact that we didn’t have that authority does set a dangerous precedent,” says Sir Stephen Wall, Blair’s former European affairs adviser.

The programme also reveals Blair deliberately misrepresented the views of Jacques Chirac, the French president, to strengthen support in parliament. When Chirac said on the eve of war in March 2003 that France would veto a second UN resolution, Blair seized on it. He claimed Chirac was planning a veto “no matter what” and failed to make clear that France would in fact back an invasion if Iraq impeded the efforts of UN weapons inspectors.

Senior civil servants became alarmed by Blair’s rhetoric. Carne Ross, the diplomat responsible for Iraq policy at the British mission to the UN from 1998 to 2002, tells the programme he can no longer trust Blair: “I’m afraid that the government did not tell the whole truth about the alleged threat that Iraq posed, that’s why I think it’s a tawdry story.”

The programme will be seen as an attempt by the BBC to reassert its editorial independence after it was criticised by the Hutton report into Kelly’s death. The BBC row with ministers was ignited by a report by Andrew Gilligan claiming the government dossier on Iraq’s weapons had been “sexed up”.

Kelly was revealed as the source for the story and committed suicide two years ago. Thousands of protesters marched in London yesterday on the second anniversary of the start of the war. Police put the number on the Bring the Troops Home march at 45,000, organisers put it at nearer 100,000.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1533385,00.html