Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540-559)
MR ANDREW
GILLIGAN AND
MR MARK
DAMAZER
19 JUNE 2003
Q540 Andrew Mackinlay: I am sure
you are right on that and I share your view of cynicism, but I
think that is the law, is it not, Mr Damazer?
Mr Damazer: There are circumstances
in which obtaining and publishing top secret information would
be considered to be a prosecutable offence.
Q541 Andrew Mackinlay: I did not
say publication of, but just actually to have sight of.
Mr Damazer: I am not certain about
that and I would need to refer back to the books in order to answer
that.
Andrew Mackinlay: The only thing that
many Members of Parliament will be concerned about, and you might
share this view, is that there clearly is this continuous dialogue,
relationship between the journalists, and I understand what your
duty is, and that of the security and intelligence services, yet
Members of Parliament cannot see these people, we are not supposed
to know who they are, and then the Security and Intelligence Committee
go away in a white van or something or other. There really is
something very wrong.
Chairman: It is an interesting comment,
but not for this witness, I think.
Q542 Mr Chidgey: If I can just take
us back, Mr Gilligan, to some comments you were making, it seems,
a long while ago now and back to the discussion we were having
with you around the 45 minute claim, can I just check with you
first to see if I have understood this correctly. Was it the same
source to whom you were speaking who discussed the credibility
of the 45 minute claim, the uranium from Niger claim and the one
who discussed the capability of Iraq in its chemical weapons programme,
was that the same source?
Mr Gilligan: No, there were four
different people, as I say.
Q543 Mr Chidgey: The reason I ask
that is because I particularly wanted to ask you a little more
about the preparedness of Iraq on the chemical weapons front.
You said that there was, was it, a 30% chance that they had small
quantities?
Mr Gilligan: Yes, this is a quote
from my source and I will give it to you again. "I believe
it is 30% likely there was a CW programme in the six months before
the war and more likely that there was a BW programme, but it
was small."
Q544 Mr Chidgey: When you say "small",
can you quantify that?
Mr Gilligan: Small enough to be
heavily concealed.
Q545 Mr Chidgey: Yes, but there is
a difference between having a sufficient chemical weapons arsenal
for a particular type of military action and, if you like, a country-wide
action. It depends what the Iraqis were preparing for.
Mr Gilligan: He did not quantify
that, I am afraid.
Q546 Mr Chidgey: Did you at any time
discuss with any of your sources, as you might have done as a
journalist, what the intelligence services foresaw as to what
would happen next? I will give you an example. Did you discuss
with them at all whether or not Saddam Hussein may have a plan
B in the event that if war was inevitable, he would immediately
leave the country with most of his family, his entourage and a
huge amount of cash, which would not just happen instantly, but
there would have to be planning about that, and whether or not
there was any indication that, as was subsequently reported, there
were plans to move chemical weapons out of the country and just
ship them out to somewhere else, moving them around the world
in converted cargo vessels? Were there any of those sorts of discussions?
Mr Gilligan: I was personally
quite concerned about what might happen next because I was in
Iraq during the war. It was the subject of a lot of anxious speculation
among the journalists there. I was in Baghdad. This was not something
discussed by my source, I am afraid. Clearly there are a number
of hypotheses and we can go through them if you want, but I do
not think my hypothesis—
Q547 Mr Chidgey: No, I want to stick
fairly close to the terms of the inquiry. The real issue I have
here is that you did make a comment earlier on that one of the
reasons which verified the views which you have expressed was
that we had not found any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
I want to test with you that one of the options was that they
actually had been removed and removed from the battlefield before
the war even got underway.
Mr Gilligan: I said earlier, and
this is really a personal view, I think it would be illogical
to do that in the face of an imminent existential threat.
Q548 Mr Chidgey: Not if you have
decided you are going to leave the country, and you might have
planned already to take billions out of the bank.
Mr Gilligan: I think it is a bit
difficult to say because there is just no final certainty on this
issue.
Q549 Mr Chidgey: But it did not just
happen, it must have been planned. That is the point I am making
to you.
Mr Gilligan: It is just a little
bit difficult to get into this kind of hypothesis on what is almost
certainly insufficient evidence. Saddam may have dispersed or
abandoned the programme because of the activities of the UN rather
than because of the imminence of the war. He may never have had
a particularly big programme, but wanted to maintain strategic
ambiguity in the belief that that would deter potential aggressors,
a sadly mistaken belief obviously because that was exactly the
thing that encouraged the United States to attack it. He always
had manoeuvrability—
Q550 Mr Chidgey: It does rather reinforce
the point made by Mr Pope earlier that just because we have not
found them does not mean they do not exist.
Mr Gilligan: All I would say is
that none of these things can be said with any certainty.
Q551 Mr Chidgey: Precisely.
Mr Gilligan: And certainly cannot
be said by my source or by anyone else in the intelligence community
and I would not wish to characterise my source.
Q552 Mr Chidgey: So the only degree
of certainty that your source has or had was that he did not believe
the 45 minutes?
Mr Gilligan: No, as I say, my
source was reasonably sure, as are all the other intelligence
people I have spoken to, that Iraq had a WMD programme of some
description, but it was smaller and less of an imminent threat
than that claimed by the Government. That was the view of my source
and the view of several other people's sources in the rest of
the media and indeed other sources I have spoken to, intelligence
and non-intelligence.
Q553 Mr Olner: Given that the 45
minutes is in no doubt because it was in both documents, was your
source really wanting to highlight it to get at the Government
or his immediate boss who was not listening to him?
Mr Gilligan: I just cannot describe
that kind of motive. I just have no evidence to do that, I am
sorry.
Q554 Mr Olner: I cannot understand
where a non-story became a story because the 45 minutes was in
both documents. If you have got one intelligence officer doubting
the data which other intelligence officers have gathered, that
does not seem to me to be something that perhaps should be laid
at the door of Number Ten.
Mr Gilligan: When you say both
documents, you mean the JIC assessment and then the public document
presumably. Without knowing the contents of the JIC assessment,
it is difficult for me to comment on that, but I can say, I think,
that, as I said before, one of the concerns of my source was about
the tone of the whole production, the Blair dossier. It is perfectly
possible for the same evidence, for the same essential 45 minute
intelligence to be presented in different ways. In the JIC dossier,
and I have not seen it, it might have been hedged about with all
sorts of caveats, it might have appeared buried very deep in the
paper somewhere—
Q555 Chairman: And it may not.
Mr Gilligan: Indeed, absolutely,
whereas in the Blair dossier my source's complaint was that its
importance was given undue prominence. It appeared no fewer than
four times in the Blair dossier, let's not forget.
Q556 Mr Pope: Did you approach your
source over the 45 minute claim or did he approach you?
Mr Gilligan: No, I initiated the
meeting, but not specifically over the 45 minute claim. As I said,
I initiated the meeting to discuss Iraq generally.
Q557 Mr Pope: And it was he who raised
the 45 minutes then?
Mr Gilligan: He spoke of his concern
that the dossier had been sexed up, that "it had been made
sexier" were his words, and then I asked for specific examples.
Q558 Mr Chidgey: You did?
Mr Gilligan: Yes.
Q559 Chairman: Can I sum up the position
as this: you approached, on your initiative, a source in the intelligence
services?
Mr Gilligan: Yes.
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