Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780-799)
MR MARTIN
IVENS, MR
ALEX THOMSON
AND MR
MARK URBAN
2 JULY 2003
Q780 Mr Howarth: Yes; or not being
done.
Mr Thomson: Or not being done.
One of the greatest sensitivities, perhaps less front line stuff,
is the treatment of POWs, the filming of POWs, for instance. I
felt the military on the ground were quite astonishingly aware
of Geneva Convention sensitivities and so forth in a way which
certainly surprised me compared with 1991. I did not personally
detect that anything was being done or not done for the cameras
in terms of the assault on Basra.
Q781 Mr Howarth: You did not feel
that the presence of media folk right alongside them was in any
way influential in the way they treated civilian casualties or
in the way they prosecuted the campaign. They did not hold back
because they knew there was somebody sitting alongside them, whereas
if there had not been somebody sitting alongside them, they might
have been rather more robust.
Mr Thomson: I did not see that
and actually they did not fully know perhaps that we were even
there, because the only reason I went into Basra with the troops
when they first went in was because we had peeled off from our
embed in an armed Land Rover and just drove in with them. It was
a fairly ad hoc arrangement. I am sure they had radios and they
had eyes and they saw there was a white armoured Land Rover suddenly
between their tanks. The best laid plans and all of that, but
actually on the day that is how it happened for us.
Q782 Mr Howarth: There have been
reports of an intelligence failure in assessing the threat posed
by the Fedayeen, who turned out to be more formidable than had
been expected. How do you assess the reaction to a tax by the
Fedayeen on coalition forces?
Mr Urban: The media, military
or public reaction?
Q783 Mr Howarth: All. You were not
there, but perhaps Mr Thomson.
Mr Thomson: I was surprised. I
saw—and you have probably seen it too—the second directive
which Robin Brims sent out prior to the war and he basically says
in black and white that he had no idea, they did not have any
human intelligence on Iraq. This is probably the most photographed
piece of desert on the planet with satellite technology, but in
terms of having people on the ground prepared to live there and
all the dangers which go with that, you are almost in a situation
of the Americans in Afghanistan. They did not have it and Brims
wrote that in his directive. I am sure you can see that. Basically
they did not know what to expect. It could have been great, it
could have been Kosovo, flowers could have been thrown in front
of the vehicles as they went in, it could have been muted. I think
Brims would have sent that message very forcefully down the line:
go carefully, we have no idea what to expect.
Mr Ivens: We found that one of
the advantages of having correspondents in Baghdad, one of whom
was an Arab speaker, was that quite early on in the course of
the campaign, we were able to establish the presence of an Arab
foreign legion, people who had already not gone as far as becoming
suicide bombers, but they had gone there in one form or another
idealistically to fight. So it was not entirely surprising to
us and to the readers of our newspaper that such attacks might
occur.
Q784 Mr Howarth: So were you building
a picture of the prospects of Fedayeen actually inflicting damage
and suicide bombing likely to take place?
Mr Ivens: We had established the
fact, mostly from Syria, that there were people who were willing
to fight and die in a way which was not expected of the Iraqi
Army.
Q785 Chairman: Gerald asked whether
the media had any effect on the military conduct of the war in
the desert. Did you discern the media had any effect on decision
making in national governments, national parliaments?
Mr Urban: Both types of question,
the parliament and the military one, require us to get inside
the decision-making loop, as I believe the military types call
it. I will not say "of the enemy", but they require
us to get inside someone else's decision-making loop and clearly
your general from PJHQ or Chief of Defence Staff or someone else
is much better able to say whether a specific report caused questions
to be asked by the Secretary of State, statements to be issued
and some alteration to happen on the ground, than we would be.
Similarly being in the lobby and feeling the mood of parliament
yourselves, you might be better equipped to know whether some
specific report changed the atmosphere here in a very dramatic
way. If we throw back to 1991, one of the very difficult things
about trying to make an honest assessment—they are key questions
after all about whether the conduct of a campaign or a political
atmosphere has been changed by coverage—is that you will
always get the issue of, in the 1991 context for example, whether
it is the Scud threat that causes the change in the pattern of
the campaign or whether it is the reporting of it. A certain type
of reporting which was going on, particularly from Israel, that
the missiles were coming in, was engendering a feeling that the
whole thing was on the edge, what if the Israelis strike back,
etcetera. In the context of the 1991 Scud threat, I remember two
weeks into the war Schwarzkopf gave a press conference in Riyadh,
which I attended. Basically he described the Scud threat as "a
non-militarily significant weapon" at one point. Then he
went on to point out that over 2,500 sorties had been devoted
to Scud hunting. So I put my hand up and gave him what I naturally
assumed was the killer question, which was to say "You just
said you have devoted more sorties to `a non-militarily significant'
item than any other type of target. How does that square with
what you said before the war started, that you do it by military
principles alone?". Of course he did not say "You've
got me there". He just said "Well, it was a military
target and that is all that matters" and he moved onto the
next question. From his perspective, he could justify the activity
in terms of the military significance of the Scud and clearly
it was highly politically significant. How far the coverage played
in, is a very complex question. If you bring it up to this year,
okay, attacks going in, particularly on American supply echelons,
Nasiriyah, Najaf, as they were moving up towards Baghdad. How
far those altered the conduct of the war because of the military
circumstances of losing a couple of dozen troops, having people
captured, all very difficult questions for them in trying to secure
their lines of communication, and how far it was the coverage
itself of those issues is a very, very tough one and clearly you
would almost have to have someone who was inside the war to make
an assessment on that.
Q786 Syd Rapson: The Committee has
received consistent reports about equipment shortages. In your
capacity you have to choose which information coming in you put
out to the public. How significant were the shortages of equipment
reported to you at the time? Were they significant? Some people
say we have always been short of toilet rolls, short of this,
short of that, but some concerns were being raised and there are
even more now. How significant was the reporting of those equipment
shortages at the time? Did it appear to be interesting or relevant?
Mr Thomson: It was not particularly
relevant. I got there a week or two before the invasion. I think
I was just post loo rolls actually, if I might put it in non-military
terms. There had been a number of those sorts of stories. You
got there, you poked around to see whether there was anything
really significant to any of this and in all honesty, I do not
think there was. The greatest concerns were around the calibre
of the equipment, the radio equipment and, amongst soldiers and
officers particularly, concerns about friendly fire. Those were
pretty much in the forefront of people's minds rather than actual
equipment. My understanding is that although an awful lot of equipment
did arrive there very late, it did actually arrive. I am only
talking about the parts of the British Army with whom I had contact.
Q787 Syd Rapson: So there was no
real difference between this campaign and others as far as shortages
are concerned and the relevance of it to you? There seemed to
be quite a lot of interest at one time when it was being reported
in the newspapers and seemed to get out of hand. After the event
we are now getting more positive stories about bullets not being
right and flak jackets not being available, but at the time it
was apparently not significant.
Mr Thomson: No. They all thought
our flak jackets were better than theirs were and wanted to swop.
Apart from that I cannot honestly say, in terms of being on the
ground, that was of enormous significance. Friendly fire was a
much bigger concern.
Q788 Syd Rapson: May I ask your opinion?
How well do you think the British were able to handle the transition
from war fighting to peace keeping? There is a general feeling
that we did reasonably well compared with the Americans but what
is your opinion on how we coped with that transition?
Mr Thomson: It is too early to
tell. On the day the tanks went in on the Sunday, the paras went
in on foot the next day. I cannot actually remember, but they
were probably wearing helmets the first morning and then they
came off. As tanks went past on the main route into Basra, people
were queuing for buses; normal Basra life simply went on without
so much as a blip.
Q789 Syd Rapson: From the information
you got, would you know whether the troops were prepared psychologically
for the transition or whether they were going in to fight and
to win the battle and had no understanding of what was to be done
afterwards? I am talking about the British forces. Do you have
any knowledge of that at all from what you were picking up?
Mr Thomson: I saw, for instance,
the surrender documents which they were dropping in the desert;
I am sure you have seen a copy too. They were bending over backwards
to go over the border and have a cup of tea with people and persuade
them it was not a good idea to fight. Very considerable effort
was put in to doing that. Clearly, if it came to a fight, they
were prepared to give people a fight and the people who wanted
one certainly got one. In terms of speaking to soldiers on the
streets of Basra, the paras that afternoon were jumpy but frankly
amazed and very pleased. They did not particularly want to be
in a situation . . . Well, I am sure there were some who did want
to be in a situation where they could have a bit of a fire fight
and some did say that, but most were astonished. Only 24 hours
before, the tanks, the Challengers, had been on the streets and
there they were, walking up and down; one or two people were waving
but mostly they were ignored.
Q790 Syd Rapson: I watched the television,
as did everyone else, and collectively I cannot remember who reported
what, but I always watch Newsnight and probably they covered it
very well. There appeared to be a lot of looting and criminality
and that still carries on. We did not seem to react to that as
fast as we could. From a layman's point of view, there seemed
to be a feeling of letting them get the anger out of their system
and that they wanted to get their own back. The troops did not
appear to be prepared to stop the looting as fast as they could
or to protect specific critical facilities and the criminality
continued. Do you have any collective views on that? Was the appearance
of a lack of reaction from our troops real, as suggested by the
pictures we were given?
Mr Thomson: Damn right it was;
absolutely inaction. What could they do? Basra, depending on what
you believe, has anything up to two million people, who have been
completely deprived. This is a place which has the two things
the area most needs: oil in abundance and water in abundance.
The pavements should be made out of marble and you know what Basra
looks like from the TV images. When there has been a kleptocracy
in place for that long, which has been thieving from the people
and depriving them of what they need, then one afternoon a very
small number of heavily armed soldiers comes in tanks and sits
in a compound, of course people are going to set fire to things
and steal everything and remove everything—and I mean everything—that
can be removed. We had a shot of somebody with a flatbed truck
dragging a cruiser along the road, everything which could be got
was got. The British Army's attitude, not unreasonably, was "Let
`em get on with it. We can't stop them" which they could
not. Probably they had no orders to stop them; their orders were
to go in and to secure their lodgements, the first places they
could secure in the town, and go from there and in a few days
it would burn itself out. In a few days, on that sort of scale,
it did burn itself out.
Q791 Syd Rapson: So it was an acceptable
way for it to happen.
Mr Thomson: Criminality is the
wrong term to use.
Q792 Syd Rapson: It did appear to
be an unexpected way to deal with it, but perhaps we could not
have done more as a country to prepare to shore up that part of
the peace keeping faster and to gain the support of the people
and not lose it. I think we gained a great deal of credibility
by coming in and taking over and then that suddenly dispersed
when we were unable to protect their hospitals and their supplies
of electricity as well as we should. We seemed to have won the
battle and lost the hearts and minds. It is very easy for us after
the event and I am not trying to be smart, but could we have done
more, should we have been more prepared and should we have been
trained to be aware of the transition which could happen? We did
not appear to be.
Mr Urban: There are some interesting
questions, both this one and the question about the Fedayeen which
related to internal communications within the armed forces and
the people who were planning this operation. It is certainly the
case that a contact said to me a few weeks before the war that
the main thing they were trying to get their heads round at the
moment was what they were calling in Whitehall "catastrophic
collapse". I asked what that was. He said it was a planning
assumption that because of the nature of the state, the whole
thing just implodes and there is absolutely no authority, no order
or whatever. Clearly from that evidence you can say that in some
department of MoD or cell of the forces or wherever there clearly
were some people thinking about that. Equally, one can say with
looting, one saw how the Iraqi army left Kuwait City in 1991;
one saw trucks driving up the [Mutla] ridge towing steps to aircraft
from the airport behind them. Quite why they were taking those
home ...? Clearly in that sense one can say that there was some
form here as to what might happen in a power vacuum situation,
if you allowed a lot of armed people to be let loose on a modern
urban centre. On the Fedayeen, I certainly know from conversations
I have had, that as soon as you understood from your intelligence
gathering methods that the Iraqis did not intend to attempt a
conventional defence of their borders—and that was pretty
clear a week or two before the operation began—you then
began to ask yourself what their strategies were for defending
themselves. It was calculated to be a three-tier [ring] of an
inner defence in the Baghdad area, the so-called red zone, by
the Republican Guard, a guerilla style defence—and I certainly
had discussions about this with contacts and it was reported in
a piece we did a week before the war started that a guerilla defence
was one of the main options—and the possible use of WMD,
which was talked about a lot but clearly did not happen. It is
interesting in that context that General McKiernan, made his famous
remark about not having war-gamed that option, which was carried
by the American press and caused a bit of a stir in Washington
about ten days into the war. It is curious, because clearly some
people were considering the possibility of the Fedayeen or guerilla
type resistance. I am sure of it and it was reflected in some
of the coverage even before the war started that this was one
of the principal options open to the Iraqis. Similarly the catastrophic
collapse was definitely being thought about and discussed and
planned for by some people. The question of why these things did
not get down to the soldiers on the ground is an interesting one.
Mr Thomson: Although some clearly
did, to protect the Al Faw peninsula oil installations in the
south and at the other end of the infrastructure the gas oil separation
plants (GOSPs) in the desert in the Rumaylah field was an absolute
military priority from the word go. There was some thinking along
those lines, but frankly they thought "Looting? Civil unrest?
Let it go".
Q793 Mr Cran: One of the novel aspects
of this particular war was the whole concept of embedded journalists.
There have been different views about how successful it has been.
I am getting the impression from you that you thought it was successful.
I was just looking at a quote from Air Marshal Brian Burridge,
and all he was able to say was ". . . on balance . . . the
use of the embedded media was just positive". That is not
a ringing tone. Could you answer against the background of one
other point, which is this. It seemed to me that the embedded
journalists were bogged down by a mass of tactical detail, which
they were unable to assess and put into a bigger strategic context.
Is all of that fair? Against that background was the embedding
principle successful?
Mr Ivens: It is half and half,
is it not? In Gulf War 1 the embedded journalists had a rather
tough time of it and often found themselves locked up either at
sea or on land in quarters where they could observe nothing at
all. Embedding in this war to a certain extent gave them an opportunity
to see things and report on things which would otherwise never
have been reported. Speaking in the interests of print media,
we found it useful to have both, both the embedded and the unembedded.
The MoD and soldiers on the spot were not always very happy with
unembedded forces, given the system that they chose to operate,
but we would like to have both systems.
Q794 Mr Cran: Mr Thomson, you were
embedded, you must have a view on whether the whole thing was
successful. Do you have any reservations?
Mr Thomson: Yes, I have plenty
of reservations. Of course in some senses it suits the military
to have people at the front end—or the second front end,
because nobody was at the very front end, let us disabuse ourselves
of that from the word go. Being an embed on a spoke means you
were probably in the second run of people going up the Al Faw
or on the west of Az Zubayr or whatever it was. In a sense, having
people there who, when it is going well, can give you, in television
terms, all the pictures, because television is a crude beast,
it needs the pictures, we live or die by that and frankly whether
there is a journalist behind who can understand what is going
on is in some senses not the major thing. You need the pictures
and at least under this system the pictures can be brought in
either to London or to the hub where we were, where we have someone
like Chris Vernon or Robin Brims, who can take us on one side
and tell us what is going on. It does not matter that there are
X hundred people there, what matters is what they are doing and
you cannot use that because it is future intent. Do you see what
I mean? They did try very hard to put this future intent into
context so that we could see what was happening today in the context
of what would be happening tomorrow. That was what you had in
this hub in the strategic sense, but clearly there are problems
and one of the many problems was in fact that you had somebody
out on one of the spokes whose material would simply be sent with
a track and a commentary, straight back into London, turned round,
edited together, bang it is out and it bypassed any kind of process
of setting it in context and strategy and detail. I guess if you
want a lot of that you would probably read a newspaper.
Q795 Mr Cran: Do you accept that
one of the weaknesses of the embedded principle is that the pressure
is to get the stuff into a twenty-four-hour media, a lot of tactical
detail gets broadcast but no context. Do you accept that?
Mr Thomson: I accept that entirely,
yes. To go back to Brian Burridge's comment, that is a senior
officer commenting in a situation where, by and large, it went
pretty well. You have only to imagine what it would be like if
things went badly; material simply would not get out. We did not
have many examples, but one was when we did a food distribution
in Az Zubayr, as I am sure you are aware, and material was held
over by at least 24 hours because the food distribution had gone
badly, there was a mini riot, somebody let off a few rounds and
it was all a bit chaotic and the Brits pulled out. That was basically
censored, quite against the censorship rules, but it was censored
and that was a very, very minor incident; nobody got hurt, it
just did not look particularly good. It looked rather chaotic
and it looked as though hearts and minds had not been won. If
Brian Burridge said that on a war which went like this did, I
think he would tell you pretty clearly what he felt if it had
gone badly.
Q796 Mr Cran: Mr Urban, you were
back here and I guess you are the individual to whom all of us
would look to give context to the material you were getting. Did
you feel you succeeded or partially succeeded?
Mr Urban: That really is in the
eye of the beholder. Certainly I felt I had quite a lot of good
material from the embeds. If you look at the system which was
created and the numbers of journalists involved, I do not think
you can be left in any doubt—and I am talking now about
the central planning, the central command, the American planning
rather than any MoD or British aspect of this—that getting
the message out or allowing people a window into the military
action was deemed more important than operational security. They
would not have crafted a system like the one they created, if
operational security had been a higher issue on their list of
concerns than, call it what you will, information. That is perfectly
clear. When I was preparing my presentations each night and assessing
where the 1st Marine Division was and the Brigade of the 82nd
Airborne had become committed, I had a mental list of which embeds
were with which unit of the American Army. I would check the website
of the Boston Globe, the New York Times, whoever
it was, I would listen to Voice of America, whatever was
necessary to find out what the 82nd Airborne Division were doing
today. Despite the restrictions about not saying exactly where
they were, I was normally able to gain a very good idea both of
their activity and their location. It became a daily routine for
me to collate all the information which was available, almost
all of it, just through the obvious expedient of using the net,
or just consuming the media, whether video media, ABC, Fox, whoever,
and just by knowing who was embedded with the 2nd Brigade of the
3rd Infantry Division, checking their output, seeing where they
were, it was always pretty obvious. In that sense, you could see
that the whole way the operation was crafted assumed in a way,
rightly, that you were not operating against an enemy who would
have sufficient military power and cohesion to respond to that
information quickly and effectively and say if they are there,
then we can attack at points A and B. That was a safe assumption
on the part of the American planners, but it was certainly possible
to pull that information together and to do so on a daily basis.
There were unanswered questions for example, about certain Special
Operations Forces or certain squadrons of the Air Force. Apart
from that it was pretty clear where everybody was on any given
day and what they were doing.
Q797 Mr Cran: I think I am speaking
more about the visual media than I am about Sunday heavyweights,
which have time to work out the context. Would it be fair to say
that in programmes like yours, where at the end of the day you
have had time to think about it, you have had time to make the
calls and so on, there you do get the context? Where it may go
wrong is where you have BBC2 or BBC1 or whatever devoting a whole
morning to the war and there is no context at all, it is just
moving from one pinprick to another. That is fair, is it not?
Mr Thomson: Yes; if you are saying
Newsnight and Channel Four News are so much better than twenty-four-hour
news, that is entirely fair.
Q798 Mr Cran: No, I was not saying
that at all.
Mr Thomson: I jest. Of course,
there is the time to check things and actually make phone calls
and check what we think is about right and that can be done in
the context of in-depth one-bulletin-a-day news programmes. It
cannot always be done in the same way in terms of twenty-four-hour
news. That is not to denigrate twenty-four-hour news; twenty-four-hour
news is simply doing a different job. I think that they are both
perfectly valid.
Mr Urban: Absolutely; it is horses
for courses. Clearly in any rolling output there will be an immediacy
which has a value to the viewer and what one can say at the end
of it all is that for all that output and the angst it causes
in some quarters in government, it leaves people much better informed.
Generally speaking the results one got from soundings of the audience
were generally that it is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence
of the audience.
Q799 Mr Cran: I was not implying
anything other than the opposite of what you said.
Mr Urban: It is horses for courses.
The analytical function of Newsnight or Channel Four News is clearly
different to the immediacy type of material and the value of immediacy
that you get, whether it is Sky, News 24, whoever, from those
networks.
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