Countdown to conflict
First casualties in the
propaganda firefight
All's fair in the war for hearts and minds: frustrated by
the failure of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq to find
the 'smoking gun', Downing Street resorted to
plagiarising a 12-year-old US doctoral thesis
Gaby Hinsliff, Martin Bright, Peter Beaumont and Ed
Vulliamy
Sunday February 9, 2003
The Observer
Late last Tuesday night, a three-page email started circulating
among a select group of friends concerned about the impact of
sanctions on Iraq.
Full of academic outrage, it explained how the so-called 'secret
spy dossier' published last week by the Government as a crucial
plank in the argument for why the West should go to war was
largely cribbed from an American postgraduate's doctoral thesis
- grammatical mistakes and all - based on evidence 12 years
out of date.
And, to cap it all, the finished document appeared to have been
cobbled together not by Middle East experts, but by the
secretary of Alastair Campbell, the Government's chief spin
doctor, and some gofers.
It is no surprise, then, that when the email from Glen Rangwala -
a 28-year-old Cambridge politics lecturer who stumbled across
the plagiarism when he was sent a copy of the dossier by
researchers in Sweden - reached two teenage Cambridge
students they decided it deserved a wider audience.
One, 19-year-old Daniel O'Huiginn, forwarded the email to
journalists.
In the propaganda wars that are now as crucial as any military
build-up in the Gulf, Tony Blair last week fell victim to friendly
fire.
There has been significant collateral damage - and at the worst
possible time. A crucial vote in the UN Security Council is
pending. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, praised the
document as a 'fine paper' and has been embarrassed by
association.The anti-war campaign has been handed a large
stick with which to beat the Government.
As Downing Street mounts an investigation into how it went
wrong, questions are being asked by a public that is still
sceptical of the case for war on Iraq. Does this mean that the
Government is starved of decent intelligence? If our security
services are coming up with good material, why are we not being
shown it? If our information is untrustworthy, what about that
gathered by the Americans? Who - what - can we believe?
The debacle stems from Downing Street's desire to combat
charges that the reason why UN inspectors hunting weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq had found no 'smoking gun' was
because there was nothing to find.
Discussions between the Prime Minister's head of strategic
communications, Alastair Campbell, his foreign policy adviser,
Sir David Manning, senior officials in MI5 and MI6 and the new
head of homeland security, Sir David Omand, resulted in a
decision to repeat a wheeze from last autumn: publishing a
dossier of 'intelligence-based evidence'.
This time it would focus on Saddam's history of deception. But
with Hans Blix, the head of the inspection programme, due to
make a crucial report to the UN in mid-February, time was short.
The publication of the previous dossier, focusing on Saddam's
human rights record and making the case that the dictator was
a threat to the West, had led to several stand-up rows between
Omand and Campbell, with the former accusing the latter of
sprinkling too much 'magic dust' over the facts to spice it up for
public consumption. In the end, the more sensationalist
elements were confined to a foreword written by Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw, while the facts were left to speak for
themselves.
But when it came to the most recent document, there was no
time for such niceties. Led by Campbell, a team from the
Coalition Information Centre - the group set up by Campbell and
his American counterpart during the war on the Taliban - began
collecting published information that touched on useful themes.
The key element was an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a
postgraduate student from Monterrey in California, which
seemed to illustrate some of the key arguments about
deception, even though it was based on evidence dating back to
1991. Two further chunks from articles in Jane's Intelligence
Review - one written by Sean Boyne, an analyst opposed to war
on Iraq - were downloaded straight from a website.
Working against the clock with fairly thin material, insiders
admit that corners were cut. Marahashi's words were changed to
exaggerate their meaning: 'monitoring' foreign embassies
became 'spying', while 'opposition groups' was transformed into
'terrorist organisations'. The cut-and-paste job was so
incompetent that, in combining al-Marashi's work with Boyne's,
it confuses two different organisations.
Had it really been written by the four authors credited on the
email - Paul Hamill, a Foreign Office official; John Pratt, a junior
gofer from Number 10's Strategic Communications Unit; Alison
Blackshaw, Campbell's PA; and Mustaza Khan, another official
working under Campbell - that might not be surprising.
But Campbell himself is said to have edited and cleared the
finished version. Downing Street insists that, for all the red
faces, nobody - including al-Marashi - has challenged the
accuracy of what is in the dossier. Academics disagree. 'The
information presented as being an accurate statement of the
current state of Iraq's security organisations may not be
anything of the sort,' Rangwala's email concluded.
And that more damaging accusation reflects a murkier power
struggle over the Government's use - some say abuse - of
intelligence material in the desperate battle to win support for
war.
When on Wednesday morning the BBC's Today programme
started broadcasting the contents of a classified defence
intelligence briefing warning bluntly that there was no link
between Iraq and al-Qaeda - there had been contacts in the past
but, as a secular state, Iraq was anathema to the fundamentalist
terror group -- ears pricked up all over Whitehall.
An unprecedented leak, it was immediately interpreted as a
warning: if Blair continued to imply, in the teeth of the evidence,
that there was some kind of connection between Iraq and
al-Qaeda he would not be able to get away with it.
It is not that the intelligence services are necessary anti-war.
Intelligence sources told The Observer this weekend that the
case for war was a good one, but complex. 'People want to be
shown something cut and dried,' one source said. 'They want
evidence of a big shiny warhead. The real case is... that, after 11
September, the world changed in such a way that we can no
longer accept risks to our security.
'Here we are dealing with a rogue regime that is potentially one
of the biggest proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. So
the question is: do we let that go on and face a real and terrible
risk some time down the road, or do we insist that Iraq abides
by its commitments to disarm? It is a serious issue... but it is
not a great story to sell the British public.'
But this is at the very heart of Blair's problem. Faced with a
issue that even his intelligence advisers have long known is
impossible to dramatise, Number 10 has instead tried to argue
its way around opposition to intervention. And journalists, peace
activists and the British voters have not been blind to these
evasions.
Downing Street's efforts to sell the case for war have created a
tension with MI6 that has mirrored that between the White
House and Pentagon civilian staff and the CIA, DIA and FBI
across the Atlantic. There the White House has established a
shadow, parallel intelligence network staffed, not by espionage
professionals but by favoured political appointees who are
providing answers far closer to what the administration want to
hear.
For months British intelligence officers - like their counterparts in
the US - have been insisting that there is no hard evidence of a
link between Saddam and al-Qaeda, while at every turn their
political masters have been insisting the opposite. They have
been briefing that Saddam's weapons programme has been so
disrupted it is almost utterly redundant: meanwhile, the
politicians have insisted that it is still a threat.
But what all do agree on is that Saddam is hiding chemical and
biological weapons or the ability to make them.
One further issue has proved contentious. While US spy
agencies have produced their best material for Powell, in Britain
there has been resistance from MI6, which has been unwilling to
allow material from human intelligence sources to be used in the
propaganda effort.
British intelligence officials admit that the cumulative effect of all
these issues has been to give the impression of an 'incoherent'
argument about Iraq that has appeared to be deeply inconsistent
in both detail and focus.
This has affected the international stage, too. There are scornful
mutterings in French political circles this weekend that they
cannot be expected to back a war on Iraq until Britain produces
something more compelling than a 'failed doctoral thesis'.
Diplomatic sources say French Ministers are now openly
'vitriolic' in their opinions of George Bush.
The irony is that it might otherwise have been a successful week
in the battle for hearts and minds. Four million Britons switched
on to BBC1 on Thursday night to watch Jeremy Paxman grill a
shirt-sleeved, earnest Blair over the war, a performance with
which his aides were happy. In front of an almost uniformly
hostile audience in Newcastle, the only moment of tension
came when Paxman asked Blair if, as a religious man, he
prayed with Bush. The Prime Minister let his irritation show: he
knows the single most damaging charge in the Arab world is
that a war would be a Christian crusade against Islam.
Even Tony Benn's interview with Saddam, broadcast on Channel
Four on Tuesday night, ended almost satisfactorily for Downing
Street. Aides watched first with disbelief, then with mounting
anger, as Benn put a series of unchallenging questions to the
Iraqi dictator. By the end of the interview, the mood had turned
to one of wry amusement. The consensus was that Benn, one of
the most dangerously popular stars of the anti-war movement,
had fumbled the ball badly.
Yet all of that has been undermined by a government spin too
far.
One crumb of comfort is that with Blair's reputation for
trustworthiness on the war already dented - a poll last week
found that, while 81 per cent of Britons believe UN inspector
Hans Blix, only 43 per cent trust Blair to tell the truth over the
war and only 22 per cent trust Bush - the dossier debacle is
unlikely to make it any worse.
'This is a lot like the way sleaze affected the Tories: after a while
it confirms people's distrust. I don't think it creates distrust,'
says Peter Kellner, the YouGov pollster and Westminster
analyst.
And Downing Street will try to get back on track this week, in
the run-up to Blix's crucial Friday statement on how far the Iraqis
have co-operated with his inspections.
Wary of being seen to desert the home front in favour of war,
Blair has planned a 'domestic blitz' this week to show that he
has not taken his eye off the ball: there will be announcements
on choice in health and education, and a visit to Belfast to
demonstrate that he has not forgotten the peace process.
Similarly the pledge to halve the number of asylum seekers
reaching Britain may have horrified many on his own
backbenches, but was judged necessary to defuse simmering
resentment inflamed both by the war on terror and a vigorous
tabloid newspaper campaign against immigration.
As for the future of such dossiers, the Whitehall consensus is
that it will be a long time before anyone tries that trick again.
However, the final shots have not been fired in the propaganda
war.
'What we are absolutely determined is that this will not stop us
sharing information with the public as and when we think we
can,' says one Downing Street source.
They said, No 10 said
'Monitoring the Baath Party, as well as other political
parties [...] monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq;
monitoring foreigners in Iraq.'
- Article by Ibrahim al-Marashi on the internal activities of the
Iraqi Intelligence Service
'Spying within the Baath Party, as well as other political
parties [...] spying on foreign embassies in Iraq and
foreigners in Iraq.'
- No 10 dossier on the internal activities of Iraqi Intelligence
Service
'Monitoring Iraqi embassies abroad [...] aiding opposition
groups in hostile regimes.'
- Article on external activities of the Iraqi Intelligence Service
'Spying on Iraqi diplomats abroad [...] supporting terrorist
organisations in hostile regimes.'
- No 10 dossier
18,000 to 40,000
- Sean Boyne's original estimate of numbers of Fedayeen
Saddam (Martyrs)
30,000-40,000 young people
- No 10 dossier