Iraq Inquiry: evidence from the un-named spy

I’m a little late catching up with the evidence of un-named witness to the Iraq Inquiry listed as SIS4. Apologies. You can read it all here, and it is quite a read. I’m grateful to the ever-sharp FT Westminster Blog for pointing me towards this. Here are some highlights:

This on whether the UK was doing enough to be on the backs of the US:

“But I think that’s a constant theme throughout this whole story. People in London might do the thinking. Then the thinking stalls when people say it’s up to the Americans, when actually, if we had been good allies, we would have been on the Americans’ backs in Washington, ****************** about this because it was going to matter. It was going to matter to them too.”

Here he is on what it felt like to be in SIS (MI6) in the period leading up to the Iraq war – he was a very senior officer specialising in the Arab world:

“We were small animals in a dark wood with the wind getting up and changing direction the whole time. These were very, very difficult days. None of us had experience of our work being so critical to major policy dramas, and I venture in an ignorant kind of way to suggest you would have to go back to the Cuban missile crisis to find something similar.

“But we also had to have regard – and I remember myself having regard, worrying about this – for the morale of the Service, the integrity of the Service, and so our performance. Spying, like many other field sports, is very dependent on good heart and good fitness. You can’t do it off form. You can’t do it in a hostile environment without a very strong sense of corporate collective will power and mutual support. All these things were possibly being endangered by the situation we were finding ourselves moving into.”

Here he is on the scale of WMD we might ever have expected to find in Iraq:

“We didn’t have any evidence that there was any volume of deployed weaponry. As I’m sure others have told you, one thing about WMD, bio and chemical, you don’t want to keep too much of this stuff. It’s very, very difficult to keep, and to keep in good repair, keep fresh. So break-out is more important than stocks, and the people who understand break-out are the scientists.”

And whether we might yet find any evidence of WMD:

“I still believe that that story is not concluded, but it’s not a matter of someone pushing a hammer through a plaster wall and finding something, probably.”

This is what he told the Inquiry about the lack of clarity about exactly where British policy on Iraq was going contributed to fuzzy thinking and mistakes (my words not his – his are rather more erudite and sometimes in Latin, if you read the whole transcript):

“There was still the Attorney General drama, Parliament, the UN, the Foreign Office standing on the brake. That didn’t contribute to the kind of coherent team effort which most people would think would be appropriate to the run-in to a war.”

That point seems to me very important in relation to Tony Blair’s evidence because although he repeatedly and forcefully insisted yet again on Friday in his evidence that he was being clear about the fact we could well be going to war in Iraq alongside the US and folk in Parliament or elsewhere would have to be daft not to know that, my memory of those months in 2002 is that we were all saying that was where things were heading but were being told to calm down and not get so excited.

Here, finally, is SIS4’s overview of what the WMD risk was:

“… we have had difficulty – maybe I and other witnesses – in getting across to you the very, very fragile and difficult to identify quality of the danger from WMD, how it’s all in the cranium of just a few scientists, who we never did meet and we have been unable to meet ever since.

“That remains a huge problem for the world because what these people know and what they can do – break-out is very, very quick – is a huge issue for our security, in my view, and it would be a terrible thing if generalisation and Magimix processing of the Iraq story left people thinking that WMD are a done and dusted threat.”