Examination of Witnesses (Questions 820-839)
RT HON
JACK STRAW
MP, SIR MICHAEL
JAY KCMG AND
MR PETER
RICKETTS CMG
24 JUNE 2003
Q820 Andrew Mackinlay: How?
Mr Straw: It happened because
it happened.
Andrew Mackinlay: I want to know who
did it, why, who commissioned it and to whom did it go?
Q821 Chairman: A simple question.
Mr Straw: Mr Campbell commissioned
it, I understand. The request went into the system and then it
went back to him.
Q822 Andrew Mackinlay: Did it go
to the Prime Minister? Do we know that?
Mr Straw: He will have to tell
you. It was authorised by the Prime Minister. The other important
thing to bear in mind about this, and in a sense this is the foundation
of the error, is that it started its life as a briefing paper,
as a background briefing paper, and, frankly, if what had happened
to it was that in addition to parts one and three, whose provenance
was clear, they said "Here, by the way, off the Internet
is a PhD thesis from this fellow, we think it is correct but for
a wider audience, here it is", end of story. At the time
it got remarkably little coverage. It was touched on by the newspapers
but, as far as I know, not covered at all by the broadcast media.
Q823 Andrew Mackinlay: I think, Foreign
Secretary, you miss a narrow but important point and it really
goes back to Sir John's question. Let us assume for the purpose
of our discussion for the next minute or two that the broad thrust
of it was correct, but it is the status it was given, the trailer
he gave it in Parliament. Sir John said either the Prime Minister
misled Parliament or he was misled, and you said it was neither
and went on to say that broadly the contents were correct, so
I want to put that aside. What was the Prime Minister told? Did
he sign it off?
Mr Straw: I was not present. As
you know, this did not come to Foreign Office ministers so I was
not present when it was "signed off".
Andrew Mackinlay: Was Sir Michael?
Q824 Chairman: Who was it?
Mr Straw: Neither was Sir Michael.
Q825 Andrew Mackinlay: He might know.
Presumably somebody asked.
Mr Straw: You can ask Mr Campbell
tomorrow.
Q826 Andrew Mackinlay: Foreign Secretary,
you must have said to the Prime Minister—I can imagine it—because
you meet him regularly, "We have a problem on the `dodgy
dossier'", he would have put his hands behind his back, gone
back in his chair, as he does, because I have seen his body language,
and he would have said, "But, Jack, I made the assumption
that it came up through the normal channels". Am I right?
Mr Straw: I cannot recall that
conversation with him.
Q827 Andrew Mackinlay: Precisely.
Mr Straw: I cannot recall that
conversation but I think it was an entirely reasonable assumption
by him if he made that assumption that it had come through the
normal channels. He, after all, is the Prime Minister. Just as
I made that assumption. You must wait to see Mr Campbell's statement
which I hope to be with you later on today, and his evidence.
Q828 Andrew Mackinlay: What does
Sir Michael want to say?
Mr Straw: As I say, it was a series
of innocent errors, nothing venal at all.
Q829 Andrew Mackinlay: That was really
good but let us hear from you, please, Sir Michael.
Sir Michael Jay: I do not have
a great deal to add to what the Foreign Secretary has just said.
Mr Straw: You are a good man.
Sir Michael Jay: I am sure that
Mr Campbell will be able to give you more detail tomorrow on exactly
what the mechanism was on which the document was produced. What
I would just like to stress is that it was commissioned as a briefing
note, a briefing paper to be used with journalists, and it was
prepared on that basis. The Foreign Secretary has said, even prepared
on that basis, clearly when it was put together in the CIC, as
it was put together in the CIC, then sources should have been
attributed to it and the fact that the sources were not attributed
to it was a mistake. As I understand it, it was then used by Mr
Campbell on a flight to Washington in order to brief journalists.
Q830 Andrew Mackinlay: Okay.
Sir Michael Jay: I think that
was exactly what happened. They are questions really to ask him.
Q831 Andrew Mackinlay: I do not want
to labour this point, Foreign Secretary, but you referred to part
one and part three of that dossier, Mr al-Marashi when he gave
his evidence said: "If I could estimate I would say that
90% of this intelligence dossier was taken from the three articles,
by myself published in MERIA and the two articles in Jane's
Intelligence Review, virtually unchanged". It seemed
to me he was quite emphatic. He looked at two other contributors.
Mr Straw: I am sorry, I have not
done contextual comparisons but I just make this point: much of
what is in here also reflected information that was publicly available
in other sources. This was corroborative and what we knew publicly
from documentary sources but also from Saddam's behaviour.
Q832 Andrew Mackinlay: Can I come
to yellow cake. It is now agreed ground that the Niger document's
were falsified, we do not know by who, but Dr El-Baradei has said
publicly that he repeatedly asked the United States and the United
Kingdom intelligence services to give him any evidence about development
of atomic weapons. There has been an inference, I think either
by yourself or the Prime Minister or both, that notwithstanding
the fact that that Niger thing was totally falsified, we have
been fooled here, not only that but there was some other intelligence
which does support the fact that Saddam was seeking materials
to develop nuclear weapons. My question is not coming to that,
because we might go into that on Friday, but was El-Baradei given
this information by the United Kingdom?
Mr Straw: The documents?
Q833 Andrew Mackinlay: Not the Niger
stuff, which we now know is falsified, but what other information
was he given? I understand that yourself and the Prime Minister,
and it may well be right, think notwithstanding that we had some
evidence that we cannot reveal.
Mr Straw: First of all, just to
repeat, and it is very important that we should repeat, the documents
which turned out to be forged did not come from the United Kingdom
and in any event they were not available to us in here, and neither
did we supply those to the IAEA. That is point one. Point two:
there was other evidence, which was available, which was the background
to the claims made in this document of 24 September. As to sharing
this information with Dr El-Baradei, I will give you a specific
answer on Friday about that, having checked. What I should also
say, Mr Mackinlay, is that we did share intelligence with both
UNMOVIC and the IAEA. I think you will find that both heads were
complimentary about the co-operation they received from us. I
also make this point, which I think was underlined by Mr Taylor
in his evidence, that we shared it as quickly as we could. We
had to be satisfied about the security arrangements by IAEA and
in particular by UNMOVIC and, as Mr Taylor explained, United Nations'
agencies are not sovereign states and their ability to keep secure
information is inherently more challenging, more difficult, than
that of a sovereign state like the United Kingdom.
Q834 Andrew Mackinlay: Okay. Can
I ask you about talking to the press, the security and intelligence
services. I had a parliamentary reply from the Prime Minister.
I asked him if he would make a statement on the system within
the security services for maintaining contact with the press.
He said: "In line with ministerial responsibilities, media
inquiries about the secret and intelligence services are handled
by the FCO press office, media inquiries about the security service
are handled by the Home Office press office, GCHQ has its own
dedicated press office which works closely with the Foreign and
Commonwealth press office."
Mr Straw: True.
Q835 Andrew Mackinlay: A few moments
ago you indicated, I thought, to the Committee that there were
special, I think you used the word, "authorised" people
who speak. These are different animals, are they not, from the
press office? There are some blighters—There is some reluctance
to concede that there are people who talk to journalists. There
are journalists in this room who have told me that they speak
to these people all the time. We had emphatic evidence from Gilligan
that he has their phone numbers and they have his. Why do we have
the secrecy that there is not a culture and a convention that
people do talk?
Mr Straw: We do handle routine
press inquiries for SIS, GCHQ has it its own, the Home Office
has its own. We handled the security services. It is also correct,
and I will go into more detail when I see the Committee in private
session on Friday, as I said to Mr Illsley, that the agencies
make arrangements for them to have somebody available who briefs
particular journalists. That is something which is authorised.
I do not see a problem about that at all.
Andrew Mackinlay: There is a problem,
it is a constitutional point. These men and women can speak to
journalists but they cannot speak to Members of Parliament. That
is not a matter for secret session, it is fundamental.
Chairman: Final question, Mr Mackinlay.
Q836 Andrew Mackinlay: I want to
hear the answer to that, it is important.
Mr Straw: These people, and neither
do press officers, do not routinely come and give evidence to
Select Committees because ministers are responsible for them,
but the heads of the agencies who authorise this level of press
briefing do give evidence to the intelligence and security community
on a routine basis. Although, Mr Mackinlay, you prefer that to
be a Select Committee, and as you know I have a great deal of
sympathy with that opinion, it is nonetheless a committee of parliamentarians,
senior parliamentarians, who are very independent minded and who
do in practice report to Parliament.
Chairman: Foreign Secretary, we welcomed
Mr Ottaway to this Committee for the first time just before the
public session. I now call upon you to break his duck.
Q837 Richard Ottaway: Foreign Secretary,
I act as sweeper on this occasion. With hindsight, listening to
your evidence today and you describing the January dodgy dossier
as an operation that was akin to "Horlicks", do you
think on balance it would have been better not to have published
it in the first place?
Mr Straw: Yes, given what happened—Certainly
it would have been better not to have published it in that form
or if it was going to be published to have ensured that it went
through the same rigorous procedures as the dossier that was published
in September.
Q838 Richard Ottaway: I agree. You
said earlier on that it was to the "sexed up" but you
did admit that there were some changes made. Have you any idea
why the changes were made?
Mr Straw: No, we have been trying
to find out how and why these changes were made. As I say, the
key change that was made, which was changing "opposition
groups" to "terrorist organisations" and I think
as a statement it was entirely justified for reasons I have explained
because it is a matter of public knowledge that the Saddam regime
was actively supporting MEK, this very unpleasant terrorist organisation
targeting Iran, and Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, paying
the families of suicide bombers and so on. However, it should
not have been changed in that context, which of course led to
the difficulties it has led to. A better way of doing it would
have been to quote directly from the PhD thesis and then say,
"Our judgment is they are not only supporting opposition
groups they are also supporting terrorist organisations",
but made it a clear where we were quoting and where we were using
our own judgment.
Q839 Richard Ottaway: Yet at the
same time, if I can go back to Sir John Stanley's question on
3 February, when the Prime Minister said: "I hope that people
have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They
are not publishing this, or giving us this information and making
it up. It is the intelligence that they are receiving and we are
passing it on to people." Would you agree that that is now
a shade inaccurate as a statement?
Mr Straw: I do not accept that
because the first and third sections were the ones that were based
on intelligence. I do not think there has been any challenge to
those at all, apart from this slightly risible suggestion that
there was an error between "Iraqi Security Service"
and "General Security Service" which, as I say, is hardly
a hanging offence. The middle part of it is a description of Saddam's
security apparatus and when I read it through, bluntly, I thought,
"Well, it is useful to know about this", but not suggesting
that it was necessarily going to have this kind of architecture,
it might be slightly different, but any regime like that was bound
to have this kind of security apparatus.
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