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Britain's intelligence crisis
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| 14 February 2003 |
The recent fiasco surrounding the British government's "exquisitely detailed" dossier on Iraq has raised key questions about intelligence gathering ahead of conflict with Iraq. Variously described as "plagiarism", "passing off" or, more charitably, as "using unattributed research sources" the end result is the same: a serious credibility problem.
JID examines whether the UK's intelligence services are really to blame.
There can be no doubt that the UK's Iraqi dossier affair has inflicted serious damage on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's campaign to build a solid consensus of domestic support for a US-led war to oust Saddam Hussein. The subsequent rear-guard defence by the government's red-faced spin-doctors has had little impact on the widespread view that if the UK intelligence services can do no better than cut and paste whole sections (without a hint of attribution) from a Cambridge PhD student's recently published paper on the Iraqi security and intelligence structures prior to the 1991 Gulf war, as well as from our monthly sister publication Jane's Intelligence Review, then the situation at MI6 must be very desperate indeed.
However, it is also important to note that - at least in its final form - the Iraq dossier was assembled not by intelligence service operatives, but by civil servants working in the British government's media department and the Foreign Office. As one British intelligence community source told JID, the manner in which the dossier was presented "had the hallmarks of propaganda, rather than intelligence." And here lies the essential problem.
Hard intelligence on what is happening inside Iraq's inner circles is extremely difficult to obtain.
The mistake - as Downing Street has since acknowledged - was the publication of the Iraq dossier without proper attribution of the 'open source' published material. Far more serious in the eyes of many critics, however, is the implication that the British government allowed its allies (particularly the USA) and the general public to remain under the mistaken impression that the entire document was the work of the British intelligence services, rather than of civil servants. When the scandal broke in the UK media, the Blair administration appeared incompetent at best and, at worst, dishonest.
In fact, much of the data contained in the report is reliable and accurate. Dr Ibrahim al-Marashi, Sean Boyne and Ken Gause - authors whose previously published material in the Middle East Review of International Affairs and Jane's Intelligence Review was copied into the British Iraq dossier - are all well-respected analysts in their respective fields.
More controversial, however, are passages that have been rewritten or interpolated into this material to strengthen the allegation being made by the USA and the UK that Iraq has been actively supporting international terrorism.
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