Iraq Inquiry

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall concentrate on what one might call the fiasco of the intelligence being over-egged. The Chilcot report is very thorough. In a sense, the Government come out with a clean sheet for honest dealing. With regard to my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, there is no finding that the legal controversy was hidden from Cabinet. Indeed paragraph 953 of vol. 5 of the report clearly states that:

“Cabinet was not misled on 17 March and the exchange of letters between the Attorney General’s office and No. 10 on 14 and 15 March did not constitute, as suggested to the Inquiry by Ms Short, a ‘side deal’”.

However, in the whole network, something did go badly wrong somewhere in the area of MI6 or GCHQ.

I have noticed today an interesting theme. Many questions that are answerable have been answered but I do not think that anyone has answered a couple of questions that, at the moment, are unanswerable.

One of the problems concerns the relationship between what we as parliamentarians know and parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services, in which the noble Lord, Lord King, has been heavily involved. This led to something that was unsatisfactory. Dr Hans Blix, the distinguished former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, has on several occasions said that he was not satisfied with the quality of the information given to him by the British Government. Is that partly because the British Government were not satisfied with the sort of intelligence that they were getting?

Pages 64 and 65 of vol. 3 of the report record:

“Sir Jeremy Greenstock also reported that Dr ElBaradei had appealed to Member States to offer whatever information they had to assist UNMOVIC and the IAEA in reaching credible conclusions on Iraq’s weapons programmes …

Mr Campbell recorded that Mr Blair was ‘worried about Blix’s comments that we had not been helping enough with the intelligence’. Mr William Ehrman, FCO Director General of Defence and Intelligence, advised Mr Straw’s Private Secretary on 19 December”—

I think that that is 2002—

“that the UK was passing intelligence to UNMOVIC but ‘We had not found a silver bullet yet’”.

Will the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, when he replies, address the transparency of the work of parliamentary scrutiny committees on the relations between the Cabinet and the intelligence services?

I think that we are saying that what went wrong was not really the way in which people dealt with the intelligence. What went wrong was that the intelligence was faulty. Intelligence cannot always be right, but the fact is that no one seems to have drilled down satisfactorily into what seems to be the highly critical question of the quality of the intelligence. I thought that last week’s government Statement could have said more about that.

The concern about the intelligence services is not only that ordinary mortals cannot be given all the state secrets but that you do not need to be a fan of all the novels by John Le Carré, such as The Night Manager, to know that there are interests within the security services in terms of their own turf. We saw, as we have seen in other fields as well, reluctance to let someone as distinguished as the United Nations weapons inspector have all the information that we had. Why not give him the opportunity to cross-question the suppliers of the information if in his judgment he thought the information did not prove that there were weapons of mass destruction? If the intelligence services are saying, “Yes, it did prove that”, we need a much clearer process regarding why they were not confronted very explicitly in the course of the end of 2002 and the first part of 2003.

That means that people like the Attorney-General are in a very difficult position because they have to go on the conclusion of a Government on the basis of information that is given to them by the security services. This is a point that I have not heard elaborated on sufficiently in the debate so far. Right from the start, there was dubiety about this whole question. This is not hindsight. I asked a question on 8 January 2003:

“My Lords, given press reports that some circles in Washington are sedulously denigrating the work of Hans Blix, can my noble friend the Minister assure us that there is no question of a casus belli being constructed from information that has not been corroborated by Hans Blix, simply on the grounds that it has not been passed to him?”—

let alone him being able to scrutinise it. The Minister of State said:

“My Lords, there have been voices in the background criticising Dr Blix since before he got to Iraq in the first place. I repeat to your Lordships that Her Majesty's Government has the utmost confidence in Dr Blix and in Dr El Baradei. There will be a discussion on the Iraqi declaration made on 8th September … at the UNSC tomorrow, 9th January. That will be an opportunity for Dr Blix and Dr El Baradei to give an update on their work, and I suggest that that will be an opportunity for any of the worries that the noble Lord mentioned to be aired in the most suitable place—the Security Council”.—[Official Report, 8/1/03; cols. 1015-16.]

Well, not quite.