Examination of Witnesses (Questions 780-799)
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP, SIR MICHAEL
JAY KCMG AND
MR PETER
RICKETTS CMG
24 JUNE 2003
Q780 Mr Maples: Murtaza Khan was
another. I understand he is the news editor of the Downing Street
website and he works as part of the Strategic Communications Unit.
Mr Straw: I do not know him but
I believe so.
Q781 Mr Maples: So he works essentially
for Alastair Campbell as well?
Mr Straw: I think so.
Q782 Mr Maples: John Pratt, who I
understand is a junior official in the Number 10 Strategic Communications
Unit.
Mr Straw: If you say so, I do
not know these people.
Q783 Mr Maples: He presumably works
for Alastair Campbell as well. And a Foreign Office official you
maybe can tell us about called Paul Hamill who at that time was
working for the CIC which was at that time reporting directly
to the Head of the Strategic Communications Unit as well, so all
these four people were one way or another working for Alastair
Campbell?
Mr Straw: One way or another,
yes.
Q784 Mr Maples: Would it be fair
to assume that Mr Campbell knew what they were doing?
Mr Straw: You will have to ask
Mr Campbell that but he was supervising the operation of the CIC
in his office.
Q785 Mr Maples: So he was supervising
the production of this dodgy dossier?
Mr Straw: Mr Maples, there is
a key problem about your question which is that as far as I know
these four people were not involved in the production of the dossier.
Q786 Mr Maples: Then why were their
names published with the original document as authors?
Sir Michael Jay: I do not know
the answer as to why their names appeared on the website when
the document was published. If I could just say a word about how
the document was produced, Mr Maples. A group called the Iraq
Communications Group, which is a group of senior officials which
Mr Campbell chairs, commissioned a briefing paper for use with
the media from the Communications Information Centre, the CIC,
during the course of January. The CIC was charged with putting
that document together and in order to do so sought information
from different parts of the Whitehall machine, and that document
was then put together by the CIC within the CIC.
Q787 Mr Maples: But you told us in
answer to our questions that it reported to the Head of the Strategic
Communications Unit, which is Mr Campbell, is it not?
Sir Michael Jay: The CIC reports
to Mr Campbell.
Q788 Andrew Mackinlay: What does
CIC stand for?
Sir Michael Jay: It stands for
Communications Information Centre.
Q789 Sir John Stanley: Might I help
Mr Maples on this very precise point. I am most surprised, Sir
Michael and indeed Foreign Secretary, that, as I understand it,
you have denied authorship by or the involvement of these four
people. Just for the record may I say I have this morning before
the meeting of this Committee spoken personally to Dr Rangwala
whose memorandum is before the Committee[6]
Mr Straw: I have a copy of it,
yes.
Q790 Sir John Stanley: And he has
informed me that in the few hours before the authors of this document
were erased from the internet the computer names under which this
document was saved, it was saved in the first instance under the
name of Mr Paul Hamill, the Foreign Office official, then by Mr
Pratt, then by Alison Blackshaw and then by Mr Khan, and he has
hard copy evidence of that.
Mr Straw: I have seen that, Sir
John, however in terms of the detailed operation of the CIC but
these are questions you will have to ask Mr Campbell.
Q791 Mr Maples: We will. I just want
to put this to you because I think it is terribly important it
goes to fundamental subjects which I want to raise with you. Mr
Hamill presumably you do know about because he is a Foreign Office
official?
Mr Straw: I do not know Mr Hamill
personally.
Sir Michael Jay: He is a Ministry
of Defence official.
Q792 Mr Maples: He is not a Foreign
Office official?
Sir Michael Jay: I understand
he is a Ministry of Defence official who was working in the CIC.
Q793 Mr Maples: He is described on
the FCO website as the Head of Story Development, which seems
an appropriate title. One is tempted to ask why does the Foreign
Office need a Head of Story Development, or the Ministry of Defence
for that matter?
Sir Michael Jay: I imagine this
was a function that he held within the CIC.
Q794 Mr Maples: The CIC needed a
Head of Story Development?
Sir Michael Jay: The CIC is a
group of officials drawn from a number of government departments.
Q795 Mr Maples: If that was his function
it seems to me they got the right guy to do the job! The reason
I raised these, Foreign Secretary, is when people like me read
this dossier on weapons of mass destruction we believed it. We
thought the Government is putting this out, it is based on JIC
material, and we believed the Government. Even your opponents
believe you when you say things like that. Then when we find the
same Government, or the official closest to the Prime Minister,
is capable of producing what can only be described as an amateurish,
irresponsible and, quite honestly, fraudulent document in the
dodgy dossier, do you understand why it then makes us suspect
every single little difference in wording in these documents?
Mr Straw: Mr Maples, I understand
why you make the claim; I do not accept what you say. I have already
said that the way in which this document was produced was unsatisfactory
and it should not have happened in this way, and it should have
been subject to proper procedures. It is an episode which has
been a very great embarrassment to the Government precisely because
it has enabled those—not you, may I say—those who
opposed military action in any event to seize on the idea that
somehow the other evidence, which was the burden of the case,
was not entirely accurate. But what I just invite you to say is
leaving aside for the second the fact that the provenance of the
document was not made clear, which was one of a number of aspects
of the unsatisfactory nature of its production, can you point
to parts of the second dossier which were and are now factually
inaccurate?
Q796 Mr Maples: Yes, according to
Mr al-Marashi, whose thesis was stolen for most of this document,
on page 40 of his evidence he says there was a clear misunderstanding
of the military security service, and in fact what is being described
in the document as the military security service is something
else. So, yes, I can point you absolutely to something where he,
who is the expert whose evidence was used, says you are wrong.
"Where it says, "Military Security Service", this
section is wrong. The Military Security Service described here
is actually the Iraqi General Security Service". So, yes,
I can point to something that is absolutely wrong.
Mr Straw: That does not sound
to me to be a hanging offence, if I may say so.
Q797 Mr Maples: Can I move on.
Mr Straw: Excuse me.
Q798 Mr Maples: All I wanted to raise
this for is to say why people like me suspect every little difference
in the wording of the main document. I want to come to a couple
of those. In November 1998 the Foreign Office wrote letters to
all Members of Parliament before Desert Fox and attached to it
what was obviously an intelligence assessment and on the last
page of it, paragraph 9, it says: "The Iraqi chemical industry
could produce mustard gas almost immediately and amounts of nerve
agent within months. Saddam almost certainly retains some WMD
equipment." Dame Pauline Neville Jones and an official of
the Australian intelligence agency told us said that that sounded
like the kind of material that JIC produced, it is "could",
"might" "maybe", and it has got ambiguities
in it. When we come to this document that you published at the
end of last year, it says: "We judge that Iraq has continued
to produce chemical and biological agents. Some of these weapons
are deployable within 45 minutes". All those shadings of
doubt and ambiguity have gone. To make the leap from one to the
other there must surely have been some new piece of intelligence
in those four years that led you to go from "could"
and "would" and "might" to "has"
and "does". I want to know if you saw a piece of intelligence
between November 1998 and September last year which led you to
make that, frankly, fairly radical reassessment of the information
that you published.
Mr Straw: I can go into detail
on Friday about the flow of intelligence which I saw over a period.
This document, I think, is very corroborative of the case that
we made on 24 September and subsequently. It was signed by Derek
Fatchett and Doug Henderson, and I understand approved by my predecessor
and consistent with other things my predecessor was saying at
a much later date, including in the early part of—
Q799 Mr Maples: I am not arguing
whether it is true or not, I am just saying the language is completely
different.
Mr Straw: The headline above paragraph
eight says, emphatically—you said this comes from intelligence,
I take your word for this—"Saddam will rebuild his
WMD unless he is stopped".
6 Ninth Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee,
Session 2002-03, The Decision to go to War in Iraq, HC
813-II, Ev 30. Back
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