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Twenty years after the invasion of Iraq, the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs) is still controversial. Britain’s participation in the invasion was justified by the “possession of weapons of mass destruction”.
New details about the search for weapons of mass destruction have emerged as part of the BBC series ‘Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On’. The series is based on interviews with dozens of people directly involved in Iraq’s search for “weapons of mass destruction.”
When a senior MI6 officer was told in December 2001 that the US was escalating the war with Iraq, he was shocked.
A US CIA official confirms the shock of MI6 officers.
“I thought they were going to have a heart attack right next to the table. If they weren’t being polite, they would have slapped me at the other end of the table,” says Luis Ruida, head of the CIA’s Iraq operations team, who recalled the incident.
The news soon reached the British Prime Minister’s Office. It should have been issued by spies instead of embassy officials.
Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, told the BBC that he was the first to inform the British Prime Minister about the invasion of Iraq.
“Start preparing now whether you like it or not because I told the Prime Minister that it seems they (the US) are preparing to attack,” he said.
Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 was about to embark on one of the most controversial and most disturbing episodes in its history.
As far as the US was concerned, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power was more important than the issue of weapons of mass destruction.
“If Saddam Hussein had a rubber band and a paper clip, we would have invaded Iraq,” says Ruida.
Britain was threatened by Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The British government is also said to have accused Iraq of possessing “weapons of mass destruction” at times. But ministers at the time say their own spies told them the weapons were there.
“It was very important for me to understand the intelligence that I received. I believe that whoever I trusted was worthy of that trust,” former prime minister Sir Tony Blair told me.
He says he asked the Joint Investigation Team for a statement the evening before the attack. He refuses to criticize the intelligence services for disinformation.
Other ministers said that there were doubts about this even then.
“In three meetings I interrogated Richard Dearlove. I asked him about the source of the intelligence report.” So says then Foreign Minister Jack Straw.
“I had an uneasy feeling about it. But Dearlove assured me in every case that the agents were trustworthy.”
Jack Straw said leaders should take responsibility for this as they are the ones who make the final decision.
When the BBC asked him if he saw the Iraq affair as an intelligence failure. To this he replied in the negative.
He still believes the weapons were in Iraq and may have been smuggled into Syria.
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Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction?
“It was a colossal failure,” says Sir David Ormond, then Britain’s defense and intelligence coordinator.
He says that only information supporting the idea that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was brought to the attention of government experts, and information that did not support it was dismissed.
Some in MI6 said they too had concerns.
“At the time I felt what we were doing was wrong,” says an officer who served in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Referring to 2002, a senior official says, “There was no new or reliable intelligence or assessment to suggest that Iraq had resumed its weapons of mass destruction program and that it had created a threat.”
“I think that’s the only thing they can do to justify Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ issue in the eyes of the government.”
As of spring 2002, current intelligence was patchy. Even a long-serving MI6 agent had no knowledge of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
To strengthen this suspicion, new intelligence information was collected from new sources. This was when the document was scheduled to be produced in September 2002.
An intelligence operative recalls decoding a message. The report said the role of the intelligence community was no more than urging the British people to take action on Iraq.
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Development of mobile laboratory
On 12 September 2002 Sir Richard Dearlove brought a new news source to Downing Street. The person promised that Saddam Hussein had restarted the weapons program and would provide new details soon.
Although this evidence was not fully scrutinized and his information was not shared with experts, its details were handed over to the Prime Minister.
Sir Richard denies allegations that he has become too close to the British prime minister.
In the coming months the news outlet offered no evidence, and eventually it was accepted that he had no evidence.
It was later thought that he might have wanted to make money in exchange for information or to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq.
“In January 2003, I met someone in Jordan who had turned against Saddam in his intelligence division. He said he was involved in creating mobile laboratories working on biological weapons, out of sight of the United States.
Because of this man’s claims, former US Secretary of State Colin Powell raised the issue at the United Nations. However, the US government issued a ‘notice’ saying that this information cannot be trusted.
Another news source, codenamed ‘Curveball’, relied on by the US and UK governments, also gives information about the lab.
Investigation of weapons of mass destruction
A few weeks before the 2003 war, I visited the village of Halabsa in northern Iraq. I heard locals talk about the day in 1988 when Saddam Hussein’s forces dropped chemical weapons on them.
A top Iraqi scientist later told me that in the early 1990s Saddam had ordered the destruction of most of the WMD (weapons of collective destruction) program in the hope of getting a positive response from UN weapons inspectors.
The Iraqi leader may have later restarted the program, the scientist said. But Iraq secretly destroyed everything. It is also believed that Iraq concocted the hoax to convince itself that it had something it could use against neighboring Iran.
Because of this, when Iraq was later asked for proof that it had destroyed everything, the country could not provide it.
In late 2002, UN inspectors returned to Iraq to investigate weapons of mass destruction. Some of them told the BBC that they remembered sites that had been pointed out by the West as secret mobile laboratories.
In January 2003 Tony Blair joked to Sir Richard “My future is in your hands as the pressure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction increases.”
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“It was very depressing at the time,” recalls Sir Richard.
Sir Richard accuses UN weapons inspectors of being “incompetent”.
Hans Blix, head of UN chemical and biological investigations, told the BBC that until early 2003 he too believed the weapons were present. But when the secret information was received, doubts arose about its existence. Proof took some more time. But he couldn’t get it.
”Until March 2003 no serious evidence was found, but there was no way to stop the war. No WMD have been found since then. Everything fell apart,” recalled a former MI6 officer of an internal review of a post-war source.
This was to have profound and lasting consequences for both spies and politicians.
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