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Andrew Mackinlay: The special branch is never there.
Simon Hughes: The special branch, as the hon. Gentleman says, is often not where it is needed. Lord Carlile of Berriew made that very point about many airports and seaports.
My second point concerns something that arises out of reading between the lines of the report. Perhaps the Committee could not agree on the matter, but we need to review whether every police force has a special branch. It seems to me that the time for that has come. Some forces are small, some are very big, as the report notes. Only the Metropolitan force has special dedicated funds for its special branch. Other forces have to take account of the other pressures that they face. If the special branch forces do a special job, we need to allow them to do that job in a proper and guaranteed way.
We may need to have a further debate to work out how regional special branch forces could be set up. Accountability is essential, but it is possible that regional assemblies will be set up in the north-east, north-west, Yorkshire and Humberside in the next five years. Perhaps regional special branch forces should be set up in those places first. We in London have a regional special branch, and regional government. I believe that the present regime, in which police forces have a special branch but no guaranteed funds for it, is beginning to fail the country.
An interesting point was made about Foreign Office official advice. That advice is important; it is now up to date and adequately updated. However, as I have said to the Foreign Secretary, if we tell people that they should not visit countries because they are unsafe and there are civil disturbances and difficulties, it is inconsistent that such countries are placed on a white list and their citizens cannot be treated as necessarily having a prima facie case for leaving and seeking asylum elsewhere. We cannot have it both ways. If a country is not safe for us due to internal disorder, it cannot be safe for its own citizens either. We cannot continue that inconsistency.
Lastly, on recruitment and retention, vacancies and training, it is worrying that, although we appear to have recruited most of the people we need, especially for difficult areas of the world, there are still gaps in intelligence in certain parts of the world, as the report highlights and as my hon. Friends have pointed out. If we are deficient in collecting, analysing and assessing intelligence from key areas of the world that are necessary for our national security, the resources needed to deliver that must be produced.
Some of us argue that we may need to look again at the Government structures that deal with these and other matters. My plea is that we learn the lessons of this year, last year and previous years. If there is to be major restructuring of Government, let us not do it on the back of an envelope, driven by personalities and on the basis of three days of turmoil and a year of regret and recrimination. Let us do it in an orderly way: take evidence, proceed carefully and get it right. The intelligence and security services and the Departments that administer them deserve nothing less.
5.26 pm
Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East): Hon. Members may be interested to know that when the Joint Intelligence Committee was founded in 1936, it was as a sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, although even at that time—as in later years—it had a Foreign Office Chairman. In 1976, in the course of researching Chiefs of Staff Committee material, I came across a JIC document, which—if only, if only—might have been the research discovery of a lifetime. That document, a copy of which I have before me, was entitled, "Use of Special Intelligence by Official Historians", and had been lying undiscovered in the Public Record Office files for four years, having been inadvertently released with a mass of other material in 1972. It did nothing less than reveal the entire Ultra secret.
The document explained that when official historians came to compare captured German documents with the timings of orders given to allied forces in our own records, they would come to the inescapable conclusion that this could have been done only as a result of our being able to read the enemy's ciphers. As a result, the following instructions were given to the head historians in the Cabinet Office and in each of the three service Ministries:
- "It is imperative that the fact that such intelligence was available should NEVER be disclosed—(a) even though European hostilities have now ceased"—
- "(b) even after the conclusion of the far eastern war."
- "Not to probe too deeply into the reasons for apparently unaccountable operational orders being issued . . . To observe absolute and complete reticence concerning these matters even amongst themselves."
Why was that never quite the research discovery of a lifetime? Because two years earlier, in 1974—two years after the document had been inadvertently released to the PRO, but two years before I was lucky enough to discover it—F.W. Winterbotham blew the lid off the Ultra secret by publishing his book on that subject. So my little moment of glory as an academic historian was, in a sense, snuffed out before it even began.
Churchill described the work of Bletchley Park as having been carried out by people whom he characterised as:
- "The geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled."
I took the trouble to use a bit of modern technology, called LexisNexis, which is a newspaper database that hon. Members can access through the Library. I did a little search for the words, "Joint Intelligence Committee", and I have to tell the House that, in the 10 years from 1982 to the beginning of 1992—which includes the first Gulf war—there were just 99 references to the JIC in British newspapers. Even in the 10 years from the beginning of 1992 to the beginning of 2002—which includes the events of 11 September—there were only 431 such references. However, in the 18 months from January 2002 until now—in that year and a half alone—there have been a massive 502 references, of which 347 were in the past six months. [Hon. Members: "What is your point?"] My point is that, as a result of the misbehaviour over the dodgy dossier, the JIC has become a matter of common currency and political controversy.
I refer to a brief and apparently well-informed report in The Guardian on 1 July, which states:
- "Downing Street's determination to publish a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction provoked serious divisions in the intelligence agencies, senior Whitehall officials disclosed yesterday . . . The trouble, say officials, is that No 10 wanted to use intelligence as a trump card for war."
- "A source close to British intelligence has told BBC diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason that Downing Street returned draft versions of the dossier to the Joint Intelligence Committee 'six to eight times'. . . Responding to Barnaby Mason's report, Mr Blair's office again said no pressure had been put on the intelligence services to change the document."
Indeed, on Friday 27 June, the Foreign Secretary stated in his evidence to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs that Mr. Campbell was preparing
- "a detailed summary of the exchanges between him and the JIC—saying 'Can I suggest this? What about that?'—and the response from the JIC, which will give you, as it were, the most complete and accurate running commentary on that process."
Whatever the answers were as to whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and as to whether the stocks that were made were destroyed, concealed or exported, they would more easily have been found had the proper steps been taken to secure secret documentation immediately after the fall of Saddam.
In the brief time that I have left, I shall turn once again to the testimony of Ibrahim al-Marashi, the researcher, as I said in an earlier intervention, whose work was plagiarised in the second dossier—popularly known as the dodgy dossier. You will recall, Madam Deputy Speaker, that his testimony was that 90 per cent. of that second dossier came from his article, and from two other articles in Jane's Intelligence Review. On the question of documentation, he was asked by the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee:
- "Is it fair to say that the Iraqi regime was extremely meticulous in its bookkeeping?"
- "Any incident, no matter how minuscule, was recorded in the Iraqi intelligence files. I will just give you an example. A solider deserted to Saudi Arabia. They even knew he had six bullets in the cartridge of his Kalashnikov rifle. This is how minutely Iraqi intelligence kept track of matters. If they could keep track of how many bullets are in a Kalashnikov rifle it is most likely that key documentation or evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme or any other kind of programme or human rights abuses were documented in Iraq. It was a bureaucracy that kept a record of almost anything that was of any significance or insignificance in Iraq."
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