Linda Norgrove

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her questions and wider remarks. She joined me in paying tribute to Linda Norgrove’s family and extending the House’s condolences to them, for which I know that they will be appreciative. The Prime Minister hopes to meet them this afternoon, and he will be able to convey the heartfelt condolences from all quarters of the House.

The right hon. Lady was right to pay tribute to the bravery of the forces involved who, as I said in my statement, operated in total darkness with no moonlight or artificial light of any kind. They disembarked directly into a hostile environment from helicopters that could not land because of the near-vertical nature of the terrain. She was also right to condemn those who were entirely responsible for this chain of events: the people who kidnapped Linda Norgrove and deliberately placed her in grave danger.

As the right hon. Lady acknowledged, the United States has been ready to involve UK officers at a senior level. Our brigadier has had full access to all information and has been fully involved in the investigation, so we have truly had a joint UK-US investigation.

The right hon. Lady was quite right to raise the report of the statement in The Sunday Telegraph at the weekend. I strongly deprecate any advance leaks of, or revelations about, statements to the House, especially those about such a matter. I have made that absolutely clear within Whitehall and I appreciate her reinforcement of that point.

The right hon. Lady asked about the initial information that we gave on the Saturday lunchtime after the rescue operation, when we said it appeared that Linda had died at the hands of her captors or due to the explosion of a suicide vest. We were clear about that because that was the unequivocal information that was given to the Government, and to our embassy and military in Afghanistan. Indeed, that was how senior US officers understood it. During our exchanges on the October statement, I think I said that if we err on the side of transparency, as we try to do in governmental matters these days, it can sometimes lead to apparent certainty. We made a correction as soon as possible. As soon as General Petraeus and his colleagues realised that an inaccurate account might have been given, he was straight on the telephone to No. 10 Downing street and the Prime Minister, and we immediately made a correction that morning. We will all reflect on the dilemma when balancing transparency and showing certainty. However, the Government gave the information that was available to them in good faith.

The investigative team examined the surveillance and intelligence that was available before the operation, and it will make further comments about that in its final report, which will be published at the time of the coroner’s verdict. However, as the House will understand, any details that would reveal how we gather intelligence will, of course, have to be withheld. Nothing in the investigative team’s analysis contradicts the overall analysis that all of us involved came to, which was that the best chance—the only credible chance—for Linda Norgrove to return alive was to mount a rescue operation. However, the team has examined the use of intelligence and the belief that she was being held in a particular group of buildings distinct from the group where she was actually killed.

It is hard for me to make further detailed comments about the use of a grenade without cutting across what the coroner might wish to pursue although, as I said in my statement, the investigative team will make further comments about that in its full report. We should be clear that it is not normal practice for special forces of the United States or the United Kingdom to use grenades—to employ explosive munitions—in a hostage rescue operation. Nevertheless, there are issues in this case about when a hostage rescue operation begins, because the troops involved believed that Linda Norgrove was being held in a different set of buildings from those around which they were fighting at the time a grenade was thrown. We have to understand that to be fair to all concerned.

The right hon. Lady asked about responsibility for not giving information in a timely fashion. I think that I can go so far as to say that responsibility lay with the rescue team, but not its junior members. The disciplinary action has fully reflected the responsibility of the individuals identified by the investigative team as not having passed on information in a timely way.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, and join him and the shadow Foreign Secretary in paying tribute to the Norgrove family. The House will want time to digest the contents of the statement, but in the meantime, will my right hon. Friend say a little more about the procedure for authorising rescue attempts of this nature? He said that he had authorised such an attempt to be made. Was that part of a standard operating procedure, and did he actually give the order himself or did he delegate it to others?

[Mr Hague]

I gave the general authority for a rescue attempt to be made, based on the intelligence that we had received, which covered the intelligence and other information that we had received that gave rise to our fears that Linda Norgrove would be taken to more and more inaccessible places, and that she would be passed higher and higher up the Taliban chain of command. We were aware that her life was in grave danger at the time, and within a very short time after her kidnap. Based on that, the normal procedure is for the Foreign Secretary—in this case, with the knowledge and agreement of the Prime Minister—to give the authority for a rescue operation to take place, if he or she thinks that that is the right thing to do. It is also entirely common—and, as in this case, the normal procedure—for the actual details of such an operation to be worked out on the ground in Afghanistan by the forces involved, with a final go-ahead to be given by our representatives in Afghanistan, in this case in the British embassy. So that was the procedure involved.

I would also stress that, in this case, all involved—the military commanders, the staff of our embassy in Kabul and everyone involved in COBRA here in London, as well as the Ministers involved—were clear that this was the best course of action. Risky as it was, the risks associated with inaction were greater. The procedure therefore involved an authority to proceed, which came from me, but with a final go-ahead based on the details cleared by our embassy in Kabul.