Jewish Chronicle, 9 July 2004

Next week, Lord Butler will publish his eagerly awaited report on the use of intelligence on Iraq. Already, pre-emptive strikes and counter-strikes are whistling around his head. Speculation that he will put the boot into flawed intelligence has produced pre-emptive buck-passing from government ministers, who stand to be accused all over again that they ‘lied’ about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Such premature speculation may or may not be borne out by the actual report. But we can already detect the crashing sound of competing agendas. Lord Butler himself will be desperate to avoid the fate of Lord Hutton and be pilloried as a government stooge. Assorted Whitehall officials are furious at what they see as the government’s politicisation of intelligence which has compromised the independence of the security service.

Most important of all, there are intelligence officers who either violently disagree with the war in Iraq or are desperate to shift the blame away from themselves for having failed to anticipate the threat posed by the Islamic jihad.

It is these anti-war and buck-passing exercises that have galvanised both British and American anti-terrorism experts and anonymous intelligence officers into queuing up to cast doubt on the intelligence about Iraq. As a result, the public already ‘know’ beyond doubt that the intelligence was wrong or ramped up.

But the real story is surely that, at the very least, there is monumental and unresolved conflict over that intelligence. Some analysts claim the CIA failed to draw the correct conclusions from the intelligence they amassed throughout the 1990s, so that even when the evidence screamed out that Iraq was involved in acts of terror the spymasters refused to acknowledge it.

This is laid out in graphic detail in ‘Bush vs the Beltway’ by Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie, an adviser on Iraq to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, says the CIA deliberately ignored or played down clear evidence linking Saddam to terrorist acts against America. It did so, she says, because of the unshakeable belief that strong men like Saddam needed to be kept in power. As a result, the evidence that Iraq was in with al Qaeda up to its neck was denied, and the theory that ragbag groups were promoting terror of a sophistication they could never have achieved by themselves was promoted instead.

The evidence she adduces to support this theory is circumstantial and inconclusive; but even so, it is voluminous and hard to ignore. For example, at the Salman Pak training camp during the 1990s, Iraqi intelligence trained groups of Islamists in hijacking aeroplanes. She reports an Iraqi defector, Sabah Khodada, who taught such recruits on a real plane at the camp, saying that in 1996 Saddam told these trainers that they had to attack American interests all over he world. Khodada told the Americans: ‘I don’t know why you can’t see it. ..We saw people getting trained to hijack airplanes, to put explosives. How could anybody not think this is not [sic] done by Saddam?..some of these groups were taken and trained to drive airplanes at the school of aviation, northern of Baghdad. Everything coincides with what’s happening.’

But the CIA dismissed this on the grounds that the defectors were hostile to Saddam and —incredibly —that they might have been using the plane for counter-terrorism training. There is much more along these lines— and Mylroie claims that now the CIA is busy sanitising its years of conspicuous ineptitude. For her pains, she has been accused of being a paranoid conspiracy fantasist. But more and more evidence is emerging to support her thesis — not that you’d know it in Britain, where it is rarely reported.

These undercurrents have caused deep divisions within the intelligence world. This became obvious when Dr David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that the intelligence about WMD had been wrong and there never were any stockpiles —but also that he had discovered evidence of clandestine biological warfare programmes, that some WMD had been secretly transported to Syria, and that there was a terrifying trade in WMD between Saddam and assorted terrorists.

So why did he rubbish the CIA and thus aid the anti-war camp? Almost certainly to settle scores; he was incandescent that, straight after the war, the Americans had failed to prevent the wholesale destruction of both weapons stores and the all-important documentary records. And so, like Samson, he proceeded to pull the temple down around him.

It is this internal, back-protecting, score-settling warfare whose effects are simply poisoning the public debate over Iraq. We don’t yet know whether people like Laurie Mylroie are right. But her warning that intelligence officers are now cynically denying their own findings to protect their reputations should surely be uppermost in our minds when the Butler report finally sees the light of day.