CM

Chilcot says that the JIC assessments were quite carefully worded to put in caveats about how reliable the intelligence was, and that those caveats were removed when it was presented to Parliament in order to make it sound more certain.

I’d say it was worse than that. A lot of material went into the JIC assessments that would never have got through the standard set of filters, had civil servants not been aware that the government really wanted it in.

This was largely conscious and intentional — I think people did it from a sense of “this is what government wants, and I’d better give it them.”

In fact, there were memos going round from senior officials telling people to do exactly that, that we should fix the intelligence to give this impression. I quote one of these messages in my review of Peter Oborne’s book, Not the Chilcot Report. So some of it was explicit. Other bits were simply that you know what government wants, so you give it to them.

And I have to say that, having been a civil servant in a policy department, that’s something you do all the time. It’s kind of natural.

For example, when I was on the Foreign Office South Africa desk during apartheid, everyone knew that Thatcher was very supportive of the existing regime. The official government line at that time was that Mandela was a terrorist and he should be in prison.

There would have absolutely no point in me drafting minutes saying “he is a good man and we should be campaigning to get him out,” because they wouldn’t get anywhere.

So I drafted minutes explaining that it was in the British “business interest” to secure his release, arguing that it would be best not to annoy the black community in South Africa, because one day they might be in power and we would have to deal with them to make money. That’s the only kind of argument that would get anywhere with the government.

As a civil servant your job is to implement the policy the government wants. You can try to do some good by coming up with a financial argument, rather than a moral one, for opposing apartheid or whatever, but you have to go with the flow of what the government wants.

In a sense, that’s what people were doing with the intelligence. If I’ve used the word “fabricated,” that’s probably not quite right. What they did was remove the filters.

In this regard, it’s important to understand that there are two different types of intelligence. There’s “signal intelligence,” known as “SigInt,” and “human intelligence,” or “HumInt.” Signal intelligence is any form of intercepted communication.

At that time, it would have mostly been phone taps and stuff that doesn’t really exist much anymore, like telex and that sort of thing. Not much of it would have been internet-based.

With signal intelligence, unless it has been deliberately faked because they knew it would be intercepted, most of the time it’s simple: what you see is what you get. Human intelligence is very different. Someone is telling you something, and you have to assess its validity.

The vast majority of human intelligence comes from people whose motivation for talking is that they are being paid to do so — that’s how Mi6 works. So you have to assess whether you trust the person, how much access they really have to the relevant material, and so on.

An awfully high percentage of human intelligence is of very low quality, and a lot of it is absolute dross. When you think about it, it’s bound to be. Anyone who’s giving information to a foreign government for cash is by definition not the most scrupulous person. And the information they provide is often unreliable.

In the case of the Iraqi WMD information in the “dodgy dossier,” I know that the source was an Iraqi colonel who was meeting Mi6 in a hotel room in Egypt and was being given literally millions of dollars in cash in a briefcase for the information he provided. There was no corroboration for this — it was was just his word.

Normally, you would put huge question marks over the intelligence he provided and his motive for giving it — as you would with anyone who’s being paid millions of dollars to tell you stuff. So all this intelligence existed, in the sense that people like this Iraqi colonel provided it to us. Whether it was true or false or not is another question.

Normally, there are very strong filters to eliminate this kind of thing. When you sit on committees of the JIC, as I have done, you go through this sort of intelligence. You query it, and you say to Mi6, “This doesn’t seem very credible. How good is your source? Where did he get his access? Why is he telling you this?” And so on.

So very often, before it goes up to a higher level, material will get left out. That’s what the JIC and the sub-committees are for. You can reject things as unreliable.