The UK Iraq dossier and its use of open sources

By Christopher Aaron, Editor, Jane’s Intelligence Review

The dossier on Iraq’s concealment infrastructure published on 3 February 2002 used open sources to make much of its case. These sources included articles from Jane’s Intelligence Review dating from 1997 and November 2002, as well as an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi published in the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA).

That open sources should be used to compile such a report is not in itself surprising – indeed, the use of open sources was acknowledged in the introduction to the document. However, the direct copying of entire paragraphs casts some doubt on the processes used to create dossiers of this type.

The extract below comes from the UK dossier: The Presidential Secretariat

The Presidential Secretariat has around 100 staff, who are drawn from the security agencies. The Secretariat is responsible for Saddam's personal security, as well as defence, security and intelligence issues. It is overseen by Saddam's personal secretary, Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud. Mahmud is Saddam's distant cousin and is the sheikh of both the Al-Bu-Nasir and Al-Khattab tribes.

Mahmud is regarded by some as the real number two figure in the Iraqi leadership. He controls all access to Saddam - possibly with the exception of Qusay and Uday Hussein - and has the ability to override government decisions. The following extract comes from Ken Gause’s Jane’s Intelligence Review article in November 2002. The Presidential Secretariat

A more shadowy, and more powerful, office is that of the Presidential Secretariat. Its staff is much smaller than that of the Diwan (around 100) who are drawn from the SSO and other security agencies. The Secretariat has responsibility for Saddam's personal security, as well as defence, security and intelligence issues. It is overseen by Saddam's personal secretary, Lieutenant General Abd al-Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. Mahmud is Saddam's distant cousin and is the sheikh of both the Al-Bu-Nasir and Al-Khattab tribes.

According to some accounts, Mahmud is the number two figure in the Iraqi leadership. He controls all access to Saddam (possibly with the exception of Qusay and Uday) and has the ability to override government decisions. Larger extracts were copied from Ibrahim al-Marashi’s article and many points were taken with slight alteration from Sean Boyne’s 1997 articles in Jane’s Intelligence Review.

It is usual working practice for the intelligence community to use open sources when they are of sufficient quality. In this way it can focus effort on gathering information that is not so readily available, thereby avoiding wasteful duplication of research. The articles by Gause, Boyne and Marishi present an accurate and comprehensive picture of Saddam’s security apparatus, and hence so does the UK dossier.

However, when an agency produces a report for classified consumption it will usually identify the nature of the sources used. The fact that the UK dossier does not identify the source for each bit of evidence in the report could be taken as misleading, or taken to be an effort to disguise the classified material included in the dossier.

The real mistake seems to have been to copy sections wholesale, thus making it obvious which parts of the report come from open sources and which are based on information from the intelligence community.