Memoranda submitted by Foreign and Commonwealth
Office[1]
Examination of Witnesses (Questions 729-739)
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP, SIR MICHAEL
JAY KCMG AND
MR PETER
RICKETTS CMG
24 JUNE 2003
Q729 Chairman: Foreign Secretary,
may I welcome you again on behalf of the Committee and with you
Sir Michael Jay, the Permanent Under-Secretary, who we shall be
meeting again in a different inquiry this afternoon, and Mr Peter
Ricketts, the Director General, Political. We have considerable
ground to cover in a short period of two hours and, of course,
on Friday we look forward to seeing you, Foreign Secretary, in
private session with senior officials. Can I appeal to you, Secretary
of State, and to colleagues, that if we are to make progress on
the range of ground that we need to cover we need both questions
and answers to be reasonably concise. Foreign Secretary, hoping
to set a good example can I begin this way, there have been the
two dossiers, the September dossier and the early February dossier,
we are promised by the Prime Minister another dossier, when will
that come?
Mr Straw: You have been promised
another dossier by the Prime Minister? When did he make that particular—?
Q730 Chairman: If I can find the
relevant reference, this was on 1 June: "What I have said
to people is over the coming weeks and months we will assemble
this evidence and then we will give it to people".
Mr Straw: I am quite clear that
the Prime Minister has not made a formal pledge to publish, as
it were, a third dossier. What he has said is precisely what you
have just said in respect of further evidence of the existence
of weapons of mass destruction. He also said that this will be
made available as and when it becomes available. As I think you
know from the evidence which you took last week, in particular
from Dr Samore and Mr Taylor, there are reasons why the Iraq Survey
Group took some time to get going and it will be some time, I
cannot say how long, before there is further evidence to put in
the public domain.
Q731 Chairman: Would you expect that
to come only at the end of the work of the Iraq Survey Group.
Mr Straw: Not necessarily. Again,
I think both those people who gave evidence explained why a running
commentary on the evidence which we hope is going to be collected
may not be feasible or possible because you will be interviewing
one person and you will want to corroborate what they are saying
and to check back against other sources. The more likely probability
is that this will come at the end of the process. As soon as there
is information available which with our coalition partners it
is judged safe to put in the public domain it will be put in the
public domain.
Q732 Chairman: When that is done
in whatever form what lessons will have been learnt about the
use of intelligence-based material?
Mr Straw: I spelt that out effectively
in both statements I previously made in evidence to this Committee
and in some of the questions and answers which I have given. The
process which was followed for the first dossier, which was the
published on 24 September, was the right process and that was
checked and double-checked by senior officials and was not signed
off until the Chairman of the JIC was satisfied with it. We have
spelt that out. Yes, ministers, officials and special advisers
were involved in commenting on it but the veracity and the integrity
of the document was very firmly a matter for the Chairman of the
Joint Intelligence Committee. As you know the arrangements for
the production of the so-called second dossier, which effectively
was a briefing paper for the press, were not satisfactory, even
given the status of the document, and lessons have been clearly
learned in respect of that.
Q733 Chairman: What are those lessons?
Mr Straw: As Sir Michael has already
made clear to the Committee, instructions were given very quickly
after the failure of a proper procedure came to light to ensure
that this sort of thing did not happen again. The lessons are
very straightforward; you have to follow very clear procedures
for any documents of that kind. Let me just explain this, at a
time of huge demand for media, 24 hour media coverage of a kind
that is more intensive now than at any other time, there are all
sorts of background papers being produced at any one time which
necessarily are not going to go near ministers or senior officials
(quite right too) provided all they are doing is replicating what
is already in the public domain. The mistake that was made there
was it was a briefing paper which then included intelligence and
it was not subject to proper procedures nor proper checking. All
that said and notwithstanding the very substantial error that
the sources of the document were not attributed at all and that
there were changes made, for example "opposition groups"
to "terrorist organisations", the accuracy of the document
I do not think is seriously at issue but of course it has been
an embarrassment to the Government and lessons have been learned.
Q734 Chairman: So far as the first
document is concerned, September 24, which went through the proper
processes, have any complaints being made by any senior intelligence
officials about the use made by those documents?
Mr Straw: None whatever to my
knowledge.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q735 Sir John Stanley: Foreign Secretary,
one of the central issues is whether the degree of immediacy of
the threat from Saddam Hussein's regime that was conveyed to Parliament
and to the wider public was justified on the basis of the intelligence
information that was available to the Government. Central to this
was the references in the September dossier to the 45 minute readiness
of WMD to the Iraqi Armed Forces. As you know, Foreign Secretary,
in the evidence the Committee has taken so far it has been alleged
in Mr Andrew Gilligan's evidence, from the sources to which he
referred, that the 45 minute element was a last minute insertion
made for political presentations purposes and he associated that
with the name of Alistair Campbell (who is before the Committee
tomorrow). Would you like to respond to that allegation?
Mr Straw: It is completely untrue,
it is totally untrue. I can go into more detail in the closed
session, and will obviously be going into more detail before the
Intelligence and Security Committee. Chairman, I wonder if I may
be allowed to make this point in response to Sir John, so far
as we can ascertain by word searches and so on, neither the Prime
Minister nor I or anybody acting on our behalf has ever used the
words "immediate or imminent" threat, never used those
words, in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. What
we talked about in the dossier was a current and serious threat,
which is very different. The Prime Minister said on 24 September,
the day this dossier was published in the House: "I cannot
say that this month or next, even this year or next, that Saddam
will use his weapons". What we did say was that Saddam posed
a serious threat to international peace and security. That is
the exact wording from the Prime Minister's introduction to this
document. Interestingly that judgment, not that there was an imminent
or immediate threat but that there was a current and serious threat
is also shared by the Security Council. Essentially what has been
going on here is that some of our critics have tried to put into
our mouths words and criteria we never, ever used. We did not
use the phrase "immediate or imminent". Impending, soon
to happen, as it were, about to happen today or tomorrow, we did
not use that because plainly the evidence did not justify that.
We did say there was a current and serious threat, and I stand
by that judgment completely.
Q736 Sir John Stanley: Foreign Secretary,
the Government did refer to the fact that Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction were available for deployment within 45 minutes of
an order to use them and you made that statement yourself in your
House speech of 21 February. The question I wish to put you is
that the US Government showed no lack of readiness to pick up
British intelligence information which they believed would be
helpful to their particular case of justifying military intervention
in Iraq. As you well know the British information in relation
to uranium supplies to Iraq from Africa actually made it into
President Bush's State of the Union address in January this year,
even though it was subsequently found to be based on forged documentation.
You have told the Committee—and all of the evidence we have
suggests this is wholly correct—that at no time did the
Americans ever touch with a barge pole the 45 minute statement
being made by British ministers. That would seem to suggest that
within the American intelligence and the political community they
thought the intelligence basis for that statement was extremely
unsound.
Mr Straw: Can I first of all say
on the issue of the uranium yellow cake, the information that
was subsequently found to be forged did not come from British
sources. A number of people have suggested that it did, it simply
did not come from British sources, nor was this information available
at all to the British intelligence community at the time when
this first document was put together. Of course the words were
chosen carefully, we did not say that Iraq had obtained quantities
of uranium, what we did say, this is page 6, is that Iraq had
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa despite having
no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.
As I hope to explain in the closed session on Friday, that information
came from quite separate sources. Some background to that was
that it is beyond peradventure that Iraq had at an earlier date
imported 270 tonnes of yellow cake in the past, not at the time,
that was not referring to that. So far as the 45 minutes is concerned
I will check but I think that this intelligence was shared with
the Americans.
Q737 Sir John Stanley: I did not
question whether it was shared. It is striking that in the entire
public statements of President Bush's Government there is not
one single reference to that very, very important statement being
made by the British Government?
Mr Straw: With great respect,
I do not happen to regard the 45 minute statement having the significance
which has been attached to it, neither does anybody else, indeed
nobody round this table, if I say so with respect. It was scarcely
mentioned in any of the very large number of debates that took
place in the House, evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee,
all of the times I was questioned on the radio and television,
scarcely mentioned at all.
Q738 Sir John Stanley: It was highlighted
in the foreword by the Prime Minister.
Mr Straw: Of course but so were
many other things highlighted in the foreword. This is a perfectly
legitimate avenue of enquiry for the Committee but it is quite
important for people to appreciate the 45 minute claim that these
weapons would be ready to deploy, some WMD would be ready to deploy—no
reference to missiles, by the way, as some of your evidence-givers
have suggested, none whatever—was part of the case. To suggest
that was the burden of the case is frankly nonsense. This has
only taken on a life of its own because of the subsequent claims
that this particular section of the dossier was inserted in there
not as a result of the properly acceptable procedures for intelligence
but as a result, as Mr Gilligan claimed, that Alastair Campbell
had put that in there apparently from nowhere. That is totally
and completely untrue. I also wanted to say this, because it is
very important to get this into perspective, the case for seeking
the first resolution for the Security Council, which we eventually
got on 8 November, then seeking to hold Saddam Hussein to the
terms of that resolution and then when he palpably failed to do
so, deciding to take military action stood regardless of whether
this evidence of the 45 minutes was available or not. It is significant
because if you look at all of the statements that were made in
the House and elsewhere, certainly in the lead-up to the war,
the 45 minute section was not mentioned. Why? Because there was
other evidence, overwhelming evidence, open source evidence which
was available which was subject to no dispute.
Q739 Sir John Stanley: Can I ask
one final question in relation to the second dossier, the dodgy
dossier? There are a number of questions I would like to put to
Sir Michael perhaps this afternoon if other colleagues do not
take them up. Foreign Secretary, when you came before the Committee
on 4 March you were asked by Mr Mackinlay: "Who authorised
the dodgy dossier in that parlance?" You replied: "On
the issue of which ministers approved it it was approved by the
Prime Minister". Just for the record, when you gave your
response to the Committee in answer to our questions when you
said: "No ministers were consulted in the preparation of
the document", can you just confirm you meant no Foreign
Office ministers were consulted in the preparation of the document?
Mr Straw: I was drawing a clear
distinction between the Prime Minister and ministers. No minister
in Government was consulted about the document, apart from the
Prime Minister.
1 Ninth Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee,
Session 2002-03, The Decision to go to War in Iraq, HC
813-II, Evs 61, 64 and 70. Back
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