Intelligence imbroglio over Iraq war Will needed lessons ever be learnt?

- B.S.Raghavan

For the nether world of intelligence, the last four weeks have been momentous in that both the Senate Intelligence Committee of the US and the Lord Butler Committee of the UK have come out with their reports on the manner in which the intelligence agencies of both countries, in the run-up to the Iraq war, purveyed unsubstantiated and tenuous intelligence on Saddam Hussein's mythical stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, his developing an unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver them and his pushing ahead with his nuclear programme. The ruling establishments of the US and UK further foisted their own tendentious versions of it on their representative institutions, the media and the people at large to inveigle them into supporting their attack on Iraq .

It is hard to believe that such things could happen in two long-standing and supposedly mature democracies, whose governments are believed to be shining models of propriety, accountability and transparency, and vigilant guardians and custodians of national interest. However, in fairness, it must also be said that the self-correcting and self-healing mechanisms built into their pulsating democracies immediately come into play, giving wide publicity to the misdeeds and forcing the powers-that-be to pay for them

Damning castigation

When you read the criticisms of their Governments made by the two committees, remember, a majority of members as well as the chairman of the US Committee belong to the ruling Republican Party, and Lord Butler was handpicked by the British Prime Minister, Mr.Tony Blair, because as a career civil servant who retired as the Cabinet Secretary, he was expected to toe the official line, much as Mr.Blair’s buddy Lord Hutton, nicknamed Lord Whitewash by the media, did chairing the inquiry into BBC’s allegations of pressure on intelligence agencies by the Prime Minister’s Office.
There has been no more damning castigation of the US intelligence in the period since the CIA came into existence than by the Senate Committee. It has flatly accused the analysts for exaggerating over and over again what they knew and leaving out, glossing over or simply dismissing dissenting views.
It has variously denounced the intelligence based on which the Secretary of State, Mr.Colin Powell, built the sand-castle of the case for the invasion before the UN Security Council, and the President and the Congress sent the country to war, as “flawed”, "overstated”, “misleading” “incorrect” or "not supported by the raw intelligence reporting”. It held a “collective groupthink” responsible for presuming that Iraq had active and growing programmes for producing and using weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In sum, the establishment had first decided to go to war at any cost and then began inventing pretexts for it.

As for the Butler Committee, as an editorial in The Guardian put it, “For all their fine chiselling, the former cabinet secretary's findings throw a harsh light on Tony Blair's conduct of government, as well as on the performance of the intelligence agencies…. he is damning about the weakness of intelligence from Iraq, the shortage of human sources, their unreliability and, crucially, the pressure put on them and the analysts by what he calls ‘the urgent requirement for intelligence’. He describes a tendency to assume the worst, and to allow the worst to become the baseline.”

In specific terms, Lord Butler found British intelligence estimates "open to doubt" and "seriously flawed", and he faults the Government for including in its dossier issued before the war the false alarm that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. It said that Mr Blair's statement in the Commons may have "reinforced the impression" that there was "fuller and firmer" intelligence behind the assessments in the dossier than was actually the case. In his opinion, when the government began considering military action against Iraq in March 2002, the intelligence was "insufficiently robust" to justify claims that Iraq was in breach of United Nations resolutions requiring it to disarm. In an unprecedented development unheard of in the history of intelligence gathering, the MI6 found it necessary to withdraw these spurious claims just a few days before the handing over of the Butler Committee report.

“Greatest intelligence failing”

What the agencies had been peddling to the world from the earliest stages of the run-up to the Iraq war until recent weeks as grounds for launching the massive military attack on Iraq, have now been authoritatively exposed as either cooked up at best or, to use the delicious semantic concoction of Winston Churchill, “terminological inexactitudes” at worst. Indeed, the Senate Committee has called it the greatest intelligence failing in the history of the nation. Mark the word “failing” which carries a nuance different from failure, and implies a fall from high standards of rectitude because of a defect in character, conduct or ability.

The two Committees have only supplemented what the teams of Inspectors appointed by the UN had been unwaveringly hammering home before, during and after the war in their reports to the UN Security Council and documented and confirmed what the countries’ representative bodies, professionals in the field of international affairs, discerning sections of the media (barring the “embedded” ones), and the people had long suspected. On the same charge of trumped up excuses to attack and annex countries, and send Jews to gas chambers, the top Nazi leaders of Germany were tried and mercilessly hanged. Of course, the vanquished always have to pay the price, while the victors, committing the same crimes, can go scot free.

That the leaders of the US and the UK are preferring to brazen it out rather than learning their lessons is obvious from the reactions of the US President, Mr.George Bush, and the British Prime Minister, Mr.Tony Blair. Reminiscent of the story of the wolf and the lamb story in the Aesop’s fable, both are continuing to insist that what they did was right, that the fact that no WMD were found did not mean that they were not there at the time of the decision to go to war, that Saddam could have hidden or destroyed them and that the possibility of their being found still exists.

Both asseverate that regardless of the WMD, Saddam had to be overthrown as he was a tyrant who inflicted untold cruelties on the people of Iraq. (Here again, one of the pieces of intelligence which turned out to be a fib, was that in the Abu Ghraib prison, ironically the same where sections of the US military perpetrated barbaric atrocities on Iraqi prisoners, Saddam had a giant shredder working overtime to cut dissidents and opponents to pieces!) At least, Mr.Blair accepted responsibility for his decision and judgment, but Mr.Bush is quite oblivious to any such obligation.

Except in the case of the events leading to, and connected with, the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, there had been no occasion in modern history when the sources, the nature and the content of intelligence on the one hand, and the veracity and trustworthiness of the intelligence agencies themselves on the other, became an issue. This is because at no time in living memory had elected leaders heading governments or in high authority sought to pressure intelligence machinery to tailor intelligence suited to their prejudices or pre-determined courses of action, or dish out speculative and untenable canards as hard intelligence. It was always assumed that the professional and intellectual integrity of the intelligence community will never allow it to succumb to pressure or manipulation, or take lying down any attempt on the part of persons in authority in government to distort, misuse or pervert intelligence to mislead the entire comity of nations and engulf their countries in a murderous misadventure leading to the deaths of armed personnel and civilian population in their thousands.

Whether the governments and intelligence communities of the US and the UK learn their lessons or not, their counterparts in India have plenty to mull over. All the more so because the governing class here ensures that Parliament and the civil society are out of bounds for intelligence matters which, in any case, are arcane and incomprehensible to them. That explains why there had been no committee of the type set up in the US and the UK to go into possible intelligence failures behind, say, the Chinese invasion, the Mumbai or Coimbatore blasts, or the Godhra carnage. The only such post-mortem I know of is a one man committee (that is myself!) which was asked to advise whether there the Mizo incursion of February 1966 occurred for want of warning by intelligence. I cleared the intelligence machinery of blame.

Generally, though, India 's intelligence agencies have been thoroughly professional, dedicated, hard-working and objective. Intelligence stalwarts such as B.N.Mullick, R.N.Kao, M.M.L.Hoojah and A.K.Dave were in calibre equal, if not superior, to legendary figures we read about in other countries. Because of the strong foundation for fairness and accuracy laid by them, instances of deliberate falsification, fabrication or manipulation are virtually unknown.

Nevertheless, during the Emergency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was said to have been used to gather political intelligence, but this was subsequently found to be baseless. However, some toadies of Sanjay Gandhi in the Intelligence Bureau (IB) curried favour by mounting surveillance on Indira Gandhi's own Ministers such as Morarji Desai and Jagjivan Ram, eminent public figures such as Jayaprakash Narayan, political opponents and media critics. (There was an uncontradicted media report some years ago that the UK Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, himself was kept under surveillance by MI5!)

But these were aberrations which, in any event, got full airing before the Commission presided over by ex-Supreme Court Justice J.C.Shah to inquire into the excesses of the Emergency. Successive Governments at the Centre have neglected to implement two of his recommendations which are crucial to the buttressing of the independence and impartiality of domestic and foreign intelligence. The first is the establishment of an oversight committee comprising eminent individuals experienced in public affairs drawn from different fields which will periodically review the activities, priorities, methodologies and reports of intelligence agencies. The other is to cast the net wide for selecting the best person for heading the agencies instead of confining the search to the police service. The sooner these two reforms are implemented, the better the insurance against the kind of perversions witnessed in the US and the UK .

In addition, the charters both the IB and the RAW should be made explicit and public, and comprehensively discussed in Parliament, the civil society and the media, and thereafter, incorporated into specific laws enacted for the purpose.

Terrorists online: a 21st century battlefront

- Francis Till