Andrew Rawnsley,
political journalist of the year
Sunday June 8, 2003
The Observer
The treacherous trades of politician and spy have a great deal of affinity. Both involve subterfuge, bluff, concealment and, sometimes, downright deceit. Both justify their use of the blacker arts as necessary means to serve higher ends for their country. Both professions attract an unusually large proportion of eccentrics, obsessives, paranoids and conspiracy theorists with a tendency to spot a plot in every shadow. Incidentally, I should add that this could also be said of journalism.
The crucial difference between the politician and the spy is that the one acts in the glare and heat of the public stage while the other is concealed deep in the darkness of the wings. This collision of professional impulses and working cultures is what lies at the heart of the great storm over whether Tony Blair is guilty of a mass deception about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
For many months before the 'Did Blair lie?' frenzy, people inside the intelligence services were sucking their teeth about the Government's public use of their material. These were not the low- level 'rogue elements' railed against by John Reid, the Cabinet's rogue elephant, in an inflammation of the controversy from which Number 10 swiftly retreated for fear that attacking the spooks as seditious will only provoke them into retaliatory leaking. These were extremely senior figures in MI6 who didn't want the Government to publish anything claiming to have their endorsement to justify its case for going to war.
This was partly because they didn't want to jeopardise their sources. It was partly from the very human instinct to cover their own arses. MI6 is rather proud that, unlike its domestic cousins in MI5, the work of the Secret Intelligence Service has not previously been a cause of all that much political contention. The more that the work of MI6 is drawn into the public domain, the more its judgments will be exposed to challenge, the more its mistakes will be revealed to scrutiny and the more the calls for it to be made accountable will swell.
Public use of its material would also strip spying of much of its mystique. Intelligence would be seen for what it is: hit and miss, of variable accuracy and reliability, often confused and sometimes contradictory, not much of a science, more educated guesswork. The desire of the spies to maintain the veil clashes with the politician's need to win his argument in the public arena. Rarely has that need been felt so desperately as it was inside a besieged Number 10 during the build up to the invasion of Iraq.
I don't doubt that Tony Blair sincerely felt that Saddam Hussein was some sort of menace. He had felt so for years before George W. Bush arrived in the White House with a score to settle. He had felt so not least because British intelligence was telling him so.
Some months ago, I drew your attention to a fascinating gem in the diaries of Paddy Ashdown. He records a conversation with Blair about Iraq and Saddam as far back as November 1997. Ashdown quotes Blair saying: 'I have now seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction... we cannot let him get away with it.'
Mr Blair was persuaded that Saddam was a potential threat. His problem was convincing the British public that Saddam was a menace sufficiently imminent to justify a war to the timetable the Americans had become determined on.
From what I have been able to discover, there was some intense argument between Number 10 and the spymasters about the political desire to turn the often turgid and hedged intelligence about Iraq into vivid headlines which would provide electric-shock treatment to public opinion.
MORE...Sunday June 8, 2003
The Observer
The treacherous trades of politician and spy have a great deal of affinity. Both involve subterfuge, bluff, concealment and, sometimes, downright deceit. Both justify their use of the blacker arts as necessary means to serve higher ends for their country. Both professions attract an unusually large proportion of eccentrics, obsessives, paranoids and conspiracy theorists with a tendency to spot a plot in every shadow. Incidentally, I should add that this could also be said of journalism.
The crucial difference between the politician and the spy is that the one acts in the glare and heat of the public stage while the other is concealed deep in the darkness of the wings. This collision of professional impulses and working cultures is what lies at the heart of the great storm over whether Tony Blair is guilty of a mass deception about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
For many months before the 'Did Blair lie?' frenzy, people inside the intelligence services were sucking their teeth about the Government's public use of their material. These were not the low- level 'rogue elements' railed against by John Reid, the Cabinet's rogue elephant, in an inflammation of the controversy from which Number 10 swiftly retreated for fear that attacking the spooks as seditious will only provoke them into retaliatory leaking. These were extremely senior figures in MI6 who didn't want the Government to publish anything claiming to have their endorsement to justify its case for going to war.
This was partly because they didn't want to jeopardise their sources. It was partly from the very human instinct to cover their own arses. MI6 is rather proud that, unlike its domestic cousins in MI5, the work of the Secret Intelligence Service has not previously been a cause of all that much political contention. The more that the work of MI6 is drawn into the public domain, the more its judgments will be exposed to challenge, the more its mistakes will be revealed to scrutiny and the more the calls for it to be made accountable will swell.
Public use of its material would also strip spying of much of its mystique. Intelligence would be seen for what it is: hit and miss, of variable accuracy and reliability, often confused and sometimes contradictory, not much of a science, more educated guesswork. The desire of the spies to maintain the veil clashes with the politician's need to win his argument in the public arena. Rarely has that need been felt so desperately as it was inside a besieged Number 10 during the build up to the invasion of Iraq.
I don't doubt that Tony Blair sincerely felt that Saddam Hussein was some sort of menace. He had felt so for years before George W. Bush arrived in the White House with a score to settle. He had felt so not least because British intelligence was telling him so.
Some months ago, I drew your attention to a fascinating gem in the diaries of Paddy Ashdown. He records a conversation with Blair about Iraq and Saddam as far back as November 1997. Ashdown quotes Blair saying: 'I have now seen some of the stuff on this. It really is pretty scary. He is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction... we cannot let him get away with it.'
Mr Blair was persuaded that Saddam was a potential threat. His problem was convincing the British public that Saddam was a menace sufficiently imminent to justify a war to the timetable the Americans had become determined on.
From what I have been able to discover, there was some intense argument between Number 10 and the spymasters about the political desire to turn the often turgid and hedged intelligence about Iraq into vivid headlines which would provide electric-shock treatment to public opinion.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,11538,973145,00.html
