Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
MR ROBIN
COOK MP
17 JUNE 2003
Q1 Chairman: Mr Cook, may I on behalf
of the Committee welcome you to start off our inquiry into the
Decision to go to War in Iraq. You had a pretty unequalled position
from your background in seeing the evidence. I understand that
the opening statement which you have given to the Committee of
course is now part of the proceedings and is available in any
event; but perhaps you could give a brief synopsis of the main
points that you make.
Mr Cook: I shall be very brief,
Chairman. Can I just say what a pleasure it is to be appearing
before this Committee no longer as Foreign Secretary, a much easier
position.
Q2 Chairman: With one bound he was
free!
Mr Cook: The full paper has been
circulated to the Committee. I set out in that paper the cluster
of five questions which I think it would be helpful for the Committee
to address. Firstly, why is there such a difference between the
claims made before the war and the reality established after the
war? Much of that is not going to change with any more period
of time. We have found no chemical production plants. We have
found no facilities for a nuclear weapon programme. We have found
no weapons within 45 minutes of artillery positions. Those are
not going to change however much more time is now given. Secondly,
did the Government come to doubt these claims before the war?
It is very well known that the State Department came to have doubts
in February. Did they share those doubts with us? It is interesting
that those key claims in the September dossier were not actually
repeated in the March debate. Had the Government itself come to
lose confidence in them? If so, should it not have corrected the
record before the House voted? Thirdly, could biological or chemical
agents have fallen into the hands of terrorists since the war?
One of the points that was made very strongly, particularly in
the March 18 debate, was the danger that such material would pass
to terrorist organisations? If they existed in Iraq at the time
of the war, they have existed for the past two months unguarded
and unsecured, which is very alarming. Is there any clarity that
that material has now not passed into the hands of terrorists?
Fourthly, why do we not allow the UN Weapon Inspectors back into
Iraq? I find it difficult to avoid the conclusion the reason we
do not is because they would confirm Saddam did not have an immediate
threatening capability. Lastly, does the absence of weapons of
mass destruction undermine the legal basis of the war? The opinion
of the Attorney General is entirely on the justification for war
being the need to carry out the disarmament of Saddam Hussein.
If he can find no weapons to disarm does that legal opinion still
have basis? Finally can I just say, Chairman, reading the record
it is striking that the Foreign Office and Mr Straw were more
cautious in the statements that they made in the run-up to the
war. I understand that your inquiry is looking at the Foreign
Office in the context of the Government as a whole but, in fairness
to the Foreign Office, I hope it will be acknowledged that they
did exercise care in what they said.
Q3 Chairman: Concise as you promised.
Two questions arise: firstly, the quality of the original intelligence;
and, secondly, the use made of that intelligence by the Government
of the September 24 dossier and thereafter? From what must be
a privileged position in the Cabinet, what conclusion do you now
draw generally on the quality of the intelligence material which
came from the agencies?
Mr Cook: I had no access on a
privileged basis to secret material after I had ceased to be Foreign
Secretary. I saw the published dossiers and I took part in the
Cabinet discussions on them, and I also had a briefing from the
SIS[1]
in the way that all members of the Cabinet had in the closing
stages. If I could just say something about the intelligence available
to us up until the time when I left Office in the 2001 General
Election. At that time we were fairly confident that Saddam did
not have a nuclear weapons capability, did not have a long-range
missile capability and indeed, at one point in the late 1990s,
we were willing to consider closing those files and moving from
inspection on to monitoring and verification. We never actually
got to the point of reaching agreement on that, but we were fairly
confident they had been closed down; which is one of the reasons
why I was surprised to see allegations of a nuclear programme
resurfacing. It was very difficult to achieve any precision about
the chemical and biological portfolios because they were much
more easy to hide and to disperse. Nevertheless, we did make a
number of moves in the late 1990s to try and make programmes.
For instance, we did negotiate a new text at the Security Council
in which the removal of sanctions would be dependent upon progress
towards disarmament, not on the completion of disarmament. I was
a bit startled that the general tendency of Western policy up
until 2001 was sharply thrown into reverse thereafter.
Q4 Chairman: Come back to the intelligence,
given the disclaimer you have made that you were aware of the
intelligence which was going to Government?
Mr Cook: I did not see secret
material after I ceased to be Foreign Secretary.
Q5 Chairman: But you were briefed?
Mr Cook: Yes, I was briefed.
Q6 Chairman: Was there any difference
between the briefing which you received and that which appeared
in the dossier to give credence, or not, to the allegation that
the evidence was hyped, sexed up, exaggerated for political purposes?
Mr Cook: I have always been very
careful in how I have expressed myself and have become practised
in evading questions from broadcasters seeking to draw me further
than I wish to go. I actually have no doubt about the good faith
of the Prime Minister and others engaged in this exercise. If
anything, I think perhaps the problem was the burning sincerity
and conviction of those who were involved in the exercise. Intelligence,
one should understand, comes in an enormous broad range. It is
a bit like alphabet soup—you get all the letters of the
alphabet. You can study it carefully to try and come up with a
coherent statement. I fear on this occasion what happened was
that those bits of the alphabet that supported the case were selected.
That is not deceit, it is not invention, it is not coming up with
intelligence that did not exist, but it was not presenting the
whole picture. I fear the fundamental problem is that instead
of using intelligence as evidence on which to base the conclusion
of a policy, we used intelligence as the basis on which we could
justify a policy on which we had already settled.
Q7 Chairman: So the burning conviction
led to a distortion of the evidence?
Mr Cook: I think it would probably
be fair to say there was a selection of evidence to support the
conclusion, rather than a conclusion that arose from a full consideration
of the evidence.
Q8 Sir John Stanley: Mr Cook, from
what you have said, would the Committee be right to conclude that
as Leader of the House you did not have access to Joint Intelligence
Committee papers?
Mr Cook: No, and I would not have
expected to necessarily. That circulation is very tight. On ceasing
to be Foreign Secretary you sign off your clearance under the
Official Secrets Act. That is perfectly proper. I have no objection
to that. I would say that all of us in the Cabinet had briefing
in groups and, in my case, individually with SIS. I heard nothing
in their briefing that was inconsistent with the statement I made
in my resignation speech that Iraq probably does not have weapons
of mass destruction in the normally understood sense of that term,
and that is plainly now the case.
Q9 Sir John Stanley: I was going
to refer to that particular statement you made in your resignation
speech which clearly was very much at variance with what the Government
was saying publicly in the assessment which was produced in September
and then what became known later as the "dodgy dossier".
Can you tell the Committee at what point you came to have serious
anxieties as to the accuracies of the intelligence material that
was being put into the public domain in those two documents?
Mr Cook: My anxiety about the
drift to military confrontation goes back a very long way to the
spring of 2002. I assumed during that summer period it may be
that intelligence had appeared since I had left of which I had
not been aware; but I must say I was disappointed at the quality
of intelligence laid out in the September dossier. If you read
the September dossier very carefully there is a striking absence
of any recent and alarming and confirmed intelligence. The great
majority of the paper is derivative. That is, it starts out from
what we know we had in 1991, what we know he has disposed of since
1991 and, therefore, there is a leap of assumption that the balance
is therefore still around. It is also a highly suggestible document,
in that there are a lot of boxes there telling you how you go
about producing a nuclear weapon, or what sarin does; but there
is no evidence actually that he did have that capacity to produce
a nuclear weapon, nor indeed a capacity to produce sarin. Stripped
down, there was very little in that document that actually represented
intelligence of a new, alarming, urgent and compelling threat.
I remember in the Cabinet discussion saying at the time I was
disappointed just how derivative the document actually was.
Q10 Sir John Stanley: Could I just
ask you about the second document, the one known as the "dodgy
dossier" entitled Iraq—its infrastructure of concealment,
deception and intimidation. I want to ask you this in the
context of your previous appointment as Foreign Secretary. One
of the questions that we have put to the Foreign Office is to
ask them, in connection with the second document, at what dates
were drafts of the second document put to Ministers in the Foreign
Office. The answer we have now received from the Foreign Secretary
is that no Ministers were consulted in the preparation for the
document. How do you react, as a former Foreign Secretary, to
the production of this document, laid before Parliament, subject
to major national, international and parliamentary attention and
one that would not have been at any point put to Foreign Office
Ministers?
Mr Cook: I remember these questions
being put to me when I was Leader of the House. One of the considerations
that impelled me towards resignation was the impossibility of
answering these questions at the time, and I am not sure I am
in any better position to answer them now. The dossier plainly
was a glorious, spectacular own goal. I personally do not think
there is anything wrong whatsoever in re-printing an academic
study of Saddam Hussein's security apparatus, but it ought to
have been labelled as precisely that and taken from an academic
study. Certainly we should not have tampered with the language
in it. I think the most outrageous error, and one that is impossible
to defend, was the decision to remove the words "opposition
groups" and replace them with the phrase "terrorist
organisations", which was not in the original academic study.
What I find interesting about that document is that actually it
does not add an iota to the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction. In all three parts of the entire document
there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that he does have a capacity
for weapons of mass destruction. I do find it extraordinary that
after the September claims nothing subsequently happened either
to advance those claims, in the sense of taking them forward,
or to defend them, or even to repeat them; which does beg the
question of whether the authors of the September dossier themselves
had come to doubt it before they printed the second one.
Q11 Sir John Stanley: Finally, one
of the additional papers we have received is one from a WMD expert
of Cambridge University, Dr Glen Rangwala, which made a very interesting,
detailed textual analysis of the second dossier, the so-called
dodgy dossier. He has said to the Committee that of the 19 pages
of this document, 11 of the pages, 6-16, were directly copied
without acknowledgement of three different sources that are on
the internet. I would like to ask you, if you had been Foreign
Secretary at the time I wonder how you would have reacted to the
Government, of which you were a member, publishing what purported
to be directly from intelligence sources a document, the great
body of which was apparently made up from plagiarised sources
on the internet?
Mr Cook: As I remember, the foreword
actually said "from intelligence sources, among others".
The answer to your question is that I would be livid. Frankly,
I have no reasons to suspect that the present Foreign Secretary
was not equally livid.
Q12 Mr Illsley: Just following on
from Sir John Stanley's point, one of the key issues before us
is the fact that no Minister saw that dodgy dossier. I would like
to ask you some background questions to help the Committee in
relation to the Joint Intelligence Process. Obviously these relate
to a time when you were Foreign Secretary. I would like to ask
whether you as Foreign Secretary did see all the JIC[2]
Reports?
Mr Cook: It would be a very large
question to say I saw them all. I am familiar that if I answer
yes to that question somebody will produce a document that somehow
missed me. All such reports were, as a matter of routine, sent
to my Private Office who would, in turn, draw my attention to
all of those they felt it was important for me to see or be relevant
to the current policy issues. I do not think there is any difficulty
for the Foreign Office, as it were, being plugged into that circulation.
I would also add the point that, during the time I was Foreign
Secretary, we did take care to make sure that the Chairman of
JIC was actually a serving member of the Foreign Office staff,
which made sure that we were firmly linked into it; and also perhaps
gave the Chairman a departmental strength on which he could draw
and make sure that he could maintain the independence of the Committee.
Q13 Mr Illsley: What you have just
said links in to my next couple of questions. Were you able to
contribute to the process? Were your comments taken on board by
the JIC if you questioned anything in the report?
Mr Cook: I would never have dreamt
of trying to influence their assessment of the Report, which was
a technical matter for them on which they draw from a much, much
larger volume of intelligence than I would see. Remember that
the advantage of the JIC assessment is that you are perhaps seeing
1% of the total volume of intelligence that went into that assessment—and
probably much less than 1% in terms of total paperwork. However
sometimes, yes, we would ask the JIC to carry out an assessment
if it would be helpful to policy formulation. There were occasions
when I would not necessarily share the assessment they came to.
For all I know, quite properly, my Private Office would have fed
that back.
Q14 Mr Illsley: It would be fair
to assume that the same principle would have occurred after you
left the Foreign Office? It would have been the assessment which
Ministers would have seen rather than the raw intelligence?
Mr Cook: No, you receive both.
If the intelligence community and the Private Office believe there
are specific items of intelligence that it would be worthwhile
your seeing and important for you to see it can be passed to you.
Sometimes that can be extremely helpful; also because JIC assessments
often do come with a summary of intelligence.
Q15 Mr Illsley: Are those reports
and assessments provided to special advisers in the Foreign Office
or in Number Ten? Do special advisers to Ministers have the opportunity
or an input into those assessments
Mr Cook: Not an input but they
would see it. They do have security clearance and, indeed, could
not do the job if they did not. I repeat the point I made earlier—the
point of that assessment, of course, is in order to inform policy
and to enable you to draw up a policy that is more soundly based.
I fear that in Iraq we got into a reverse process, in which the
intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but
to support policy that had already been settled.
Q16 Mr Illsley: How would your comments
on any intelligence assessment or intelligence report have been
accepted? Were the JIC obliged to take account of any comments
you made? I think you just mentioned you would not have attempted
to try to alter the actual intelligence report. If you are seriously
questioning an assessment how would the JIC respond to that? Would
they take that on board?
Mr Cook: At the end of the day
decisions on policy were a matter for me as Foreign Secretary,
the Prime Minister and the Government as a whole. If I chose to
take the view that I felt this assessment was unsound that was
entirely my prerogative. I was under no pressure to act upon their
assessment. It was a rare occasion when you ended up in that kind
of black and white situation, to put it in those terms. A JIC
assessment is rather more like an academic research paper than
a speech in the House of Commons. In other words, it canvasses
all the evidence; it may well contain contrary pieces of evidence;
it does not necessarily point to one clear conclusion at the end.
It is often very helpful to have the whole package, even if it
does not necessarily lead you to one clear conclusion. I notice
that one of my Special Advisers at the time has since written
of his frustration in reading JIC documents, in that he was not
quite clear what we were supposed to do at the end of it because
it often would have contradictory information.
Q17 Mr Illsley: Finally, was there
any role played by Number Ten in intelligence? I heard you say
that the Chairman of JIC was within the Foreign Office, and was
within your chain of command presumably. Did Number Ten have a
role in this? If it did, did Alastair Campbell have a role in
intelligence reports during the time you were Foreign Secretary?
Mr Cook: First of all, could I
say I have a high regard for the individual who is currently the
chair of JIC, who I know to be a first-class intelligence officer.
The point I made I would not want to be seen in any way as an
ad hominem point, but I think there is a structural point
there which I think is worth reflecting upon. Number Ten of course
would receive all the reports I saw and, indeed, may well themselves
also request particular assessments; but they would not themselves
have any influence on what the assessment was. Certainly I would
not imagine that Alastair Campbell would have any input to an
assessment, although he may well have had access to the assessment.
Q18 Mr Maples: Mr Cook, what I am
interested in is when it is decided to use intelligence in a public
document, as happened in this case, and the roles which various
people play. If we go back to 1998 when the Foreign Office and
the Ministry of Defence did publish a short paper which was sent
to all Members of Parliament over the signature of one of your
Ministers of State at that time about Iraq, there was a three-page
note attached to that about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction
and that is clearly based on intelligence. I wonder how that went
from the point of being a JIC assessment, looked at by you and
the Prime Ministers, into being a published document? Who had
input into that? Who drafted it? Whose hands did it go through?
Mr Cook: I would have to be quite
frank and say that, after five years, I would need to refresh
my memory and go through the papers before I could hope to give
you an authoritative reply to that. 1998 was a time when the inspectors
were being removed from Iraq and when we had a substantial confrontation
over the operation of inspectors. If I am blunt, there was at
the time a lot of frustration, particularly in Washington, with
the repeated political controversy when Saddam had refused to
allow inspectors to go into one building or another. There was
also a sense that we could successfully contain Saddam without
inspectors by making sure we maintained a tight cage of sanctions
around him. That was effectively the policy the West then adopted.
Actually, from what we have learned in Iraq since we went in,
containment worked even better than we had hoped at the time.
Q19 Mr Maples: Coming back to production
of the published document, I understand how the process works
if things are not going to be published, and intelligence is simply
informing policy. Can you remember whether that document was prepared
in the Foreign Office or in Number Ten
Mr Cook: Sadly, as I say, after
five years I have no recollection at the back of my mind. I can
certainly ask to see papers and see what I can find out.
1 Secret Intelligence Service. Back
2
Joint Intelligence Committee. Back
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