Hearsay

“You’ll never guess who I had in the back of my cab the other day…”

It was revealed today in The Daily Mail that the claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes came from an Iraqi cab driver. So now we know why they call it ‘the knowledge’…

The man had apparently overheard two senior Iraqi army officers discussing Saddam’s munitions capability (note: munitions, not weapons) in the back of his cab. He reported it to the British agent he was working for, who reported it to his runner at MI6, who reported it to someone else in MI6 who wrote a report, which was then looked at in detail by the Joint Intelligence Committee members and given to Downing Street (who took it at face value because it suited them to). If this sounds like a case of international Chinese whispers that’s because it was. The fact that this kind of third party hearsay formed the cornerstone of the September dossier, which informed the decision for this country to go to war with Iraq, is deeply troubling.

What is startling is that this cab driver – and we don’t know whether he was in fact a real cab driver turned informant or a ‘moonlighting’ spy – appears to have been not just the best evidence the intelligence services had, but one of the few lines of intelligence they had. In today’s Iraq Inquiry hearing, Sir John Scarlett, the man with ultimate responsibility for preparing the September dossier, admitted that intelligence from Iraq was limited and difficult to get hold of. I don’t doubt this. However, the danger of relying on only a handful of sources for intelligence is that if one of them is compromised, unreliable or a cab driver with dodgy hearing, a large proportion of your intelligence could be wrong.

I once rented a flat in a part of North East London (if this seems like a facetious and offensive comparison, that’s because it is). I went to view it on a nice sunny day when the neighbours were out and it seemed just perfect. A week after I moved in with my flatmate we discovered that the neighbourhood at night resembled the fall of Saigon, teenage prostitutes roamed the street, people liked to set fire to cars outside and I once came home to find two 13-year-old boys unlocking next door with a crow bar. In hindsight, I needed better intelligence and I certainly wouldn’t have made that move if I’d had it. However, my decision only had ramifications for myself and my flatmate, it didn’t lead to wanton destruction and considerable loss of life. I suppose if you extend the metaphor one could view the letting agency as defence contractors – making money from the misery of others – they certainly had better intelligence than we did.

There is always a question hanging over government intelligence when mistakes are made: was it malice or incompetence? One very interesting thing that came out of today’s Inquiry hearing was the definition given by Sir John Scarlett of the role of the intelligence agencies – he made the distinction that intelligence agencies present information but they don’t lay down how to interpret it. That is left to ministers (which is of course a wonderful excuse for the intelligence agencies). During the course of the hearing it transpired that there is and was no system of daily intelligence briefing for the PM, and not even any kind of induction process for ministers. So not only are they left to interpret intelligence, they are often left to interpret it with no training in interpreting intelligence (and sometimes with no intelligence of their own).

However, it turns out the government was not the only member of the Estates to have been left to their own devices. The Daily Mail also said in it’s article today that when the September dossier was published, “some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.”

Sometimes I think I would almost prefer malice over incompetence in Westminster – if only for a change.