Examination of Witness (Questions 1140-1159)
MR ALASTAIR
CAMPBELL
25 JUNE 2003
Q1140 Mr Hamilton: I accept it is
not for you to do that but I think for this Committee that information
would be quite important because if the claims that different
parts of different documents were based on dodgy intelligence
are disproved, that greatly strengthens the case that we, Parliament
and the public and the media, were being told some pretty correct
bits of information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and
their threat to the region and to the rest of the world. It would
back up the Government very strongly, I would have thought.
Mr Campbell: I am aware of the
public dispute there has been about that. I think it is probably
better that I go back and ask the JIC whether there is any more
they can or should say about that.
Q1141 Mr Hamilton: That would be
very helpful. Thank you very much. Can I briefly move on to a
few questions about your role in Intelligence and foreign policy
making. I know you have been through this quite a lot and you
have had a fairly long session with us today, and I am grateful
for that, but I want to clarify one or two points in my own mind.
Are you responsible as Communications Manager for the terms on
which members of the intelligence agencies talk to the press?
Mr Campbell: No.
Q1142 Mr Hamilton: Who has that responsibility?
Mr Campbell: I presume the agencies
themselves.
Q1143 Mr Hamilton: You do not have
any input into that at all?
Mr Campbell: I know the people
who do that but how they operate is entirely a matter for them.
Q1144 Mr Hamilton: I appreciate you
may not be able to answer this but why is it that certain members
of the intelligence agencies are authorised to talk to the press
but not to Members of Parliament, apart from those on the Intelligence
and Security Committee?
Mr Campbell: It is very rare for
officials like me to talk to Members of Parliament. Ministers
are accountable to Parliament. The fact is—and I do not
know how long this has gone on—the intelligence agencies
are more in the open than they were in the past and they do have,
if you like, a media profile. What they do is try to have people
who journalists with an interest in some of the areas that the
intelligence agencies are involved with can at least have a dialogue
with, but I do not think it is as it were any stronger than that.
Q1145 Mr Hamilton: Do you see all
JIC papers that come to Downing Street?
Mr Campbell: Not necessarily because
a lot of the time they will be assessing things which will not
necessarily be of interest, of relevance to the kind of issues
I might be involved in at any given time. I can go days and weeks
without seeing intelligence if my focus professionally is something
to do with public services for a few weeks. Obviously during something
like the Iraq conflict or post-11 September there was a lot of
intelligence relevant to what I was doing. I think one of the
interesting developments there has been in relation to the intelligence
agencies is actually their very sophisticated understanding of
how within all these conflict situations in particular—and
this is something which evolved through Kosovo, Afghanistan and
then Iraq—how the realities of the modern media have changed
the terms of conflict. We may not like that but it is a fact.
So, for example, part of our strategy in those three conflicts
was actually to deal with the communications strategies of a dictatorship,
under Milosevic, of the Taliban and of Saddam, and therefore it
was helpful to have as much information as possible about what
their communications plans were. I have to say they relied in
very, very heavy part upon the free speech of the United Kingdom
and they exploited it pretty ruthlessly.
Chairman: Some colleagues have further
questions.
Q1146 Sir John Stanley: Mr Campbell,
as you have made very clear to the Committee, you have been the
subject of extremely serious personal allegations which have been
made against you, most particularly the charge that you were responsible
for sexing up the JIC-approved dossier of September 2002. The
Committee will want to reach a conclusion on that based on the
maximum evidential basis it can obtain and I would like to repeat
what my colleagues, Mr Mackinlay and Mr Chidgey, said: I think
it would be most helpful if you could put in writing to this Committee
a list of the drafting amendments you proposed as that document
evolved and those that were accepted by the chairman of the JIC
and those that were not. If we can have that as fast as possible,
that would be very helpful to us.
Mr Campbell: I hope somebody has
been taking note of the various requests you have made. On several
of them I have no doubt there will have to be discussions in the
intelligence community as to what can and cannot be divulged.
Chairman: I can assure you that the Clerk
has been taking a list of the requests being made by this Committee.
Of course, we understand if some are oral discussions during the
course of the meetings you mentioned. It would help this Committee
enormously, one, if we could have any written alterations which
you have made. We are under a time constraint in that we hope
to produce our report by 7 July so ideally we would like them
by Friday morning when we meet the Foreign Secretary.
Q1147 Andrew Mackinlay: Just as a
point of order, Chairman, that is not quite what I asked for.
The narrow issue I asked for was if you would ring-fence that
which was the intelligence information which was in the so-called
dodgy dossier, bearing in mind it had been signed off and, yes,
I want to see what Sir John has asked for. I cannot see there
would be any difficulty because the guy said, "Here, Campbell,
you can have this, this is in the public domain." All I want
is a ring-fence.
Mr Campbell: Yes, but he might
have said, "By the way, Campbell, there are bits in here
which we do not necessarily want to be identified as intelligence."
Andrew Mackinlay: Okay, I hear what you
say.
Q1148 Chairman: We can provide you
with a list this evening of those further discussions and questions
we would like to be clarified by you.
Mr Campbell: Okay. Some of them
will have to go through the Joint Intelligence Committee and that
may not be able to be done very quickly.
Chairman: As speedily as you can.
Q1149 Sir John Stanley: Mr Campbell,
I phrased my request specifically in terms of the drafting amendments
which you had proposed to what was a non-classified document which
is going to be made public. I did it in those terms because I
believe that cannot raise any intelligence issues. In terms of
those amendments which were rejected, we are not looking for reasons
why they were rejected, which might raise some intelligence issues,
but what you proposed and the list of what was accepted and rejected.
I do not believe it can raise any intelligence issues and I hope
we can have that.
Mr Campbell: It might if within
the responses there were intelligence issues giving explanations
as to why something was or was not possible.
Q1150 Sir John Stanley: I am not
looking for that at all. I am looking entirely at your requests
and whether they were met or not, full-stop.
Mr Campbell: Fine.
Q1151 Sir John Stanley: Mr Campbell,
you have made a very strong pitch on a personal basis for why
you require an apology to yourself from the BBC.
Mr Campbell: It went beyond myself.
Q1152 Sir John Stanley: I would like
to turn to another apology which I think is very seriously outstanding
and on which you may wish to correct your evidence. If I heard
you correctly you suggested the Government had made an apology
to Mr al-Marashi. Mr al-Marashi's work was lifted off the internet
without attribution; it was used in a highly political context
to help make the Government's policy case for going to war against
Iraq which was a matter which concerned him very greatly. His
thesis or his article in the Middle East Review in certainly
one crucial respect was substantially changed to suggest terrorist
linkage between the Saddam Hussein intelligence agency and al-Qaeda
which was not what he said in his Review article, and members
of his family were endangered. I questioned him on the issue as
to whether he had had an apology, "Has the Government made
any expression of regret or apology to you for the plagiarisation
of your thesis? Mr al-Marashi: I have never been contacted directly,
either by phone call nor in writing, since February 2003 up to
the present. Me: Do you think you might be owed an apology. Mr
al-Marashi: I think the least they can do is owe me an apology."
I do not believe he has received an apology, I think Mr Campbell
you said earlier he had, I hope he will receive a personal apology
from you.
Mr Campbell: As I say, I take
responsibility for that paper. I have explained why the mistake
was made. I am happy to send an apology to Mr al-Marashi on behalf
of the entire communications team at No 10 and the CIC, I am happy
to do that. As I said earlier, the moment this mistake was exposed
by Channel 4 and subsequently by Mr al-Marashi himself on Newsnight,
that next morning the Prime Minister's spokesman has never attempted
to avoid it, hands up, it should not have happened, we are going
to look at how it happened, we are going to put procedures in
place and that has been done. I have no desire here at all to
do anything other than deliver that apology and do that sincerely.
If it would help to do that in writing to Mr al-Marashi, I am
perfectly happy to do that.
Q1153 Sir John Stanley: I am sure
he would appreciate that.
Mr Campbell: Fine. I noticed,
when I read Mr al-Marashi's evidence, that one of the Committee
members—I think it was Mr Pope—said he would be recommending
that we did apologise, that the Committee would be seeking to
recommend that we did apologise to Mr al-Marashi. I am happy to
do that. If I can pray you in similar aid in relation to Mr Gilligan's
story in the BBC, I would be very grateful.
Q1154 Sir John Stanley: Can I turn
to what I think is a fundamental aspect of your evidence and your
position. Do you recognise that the launching by you of the so-called
dodgy dossier has done very, very serious damage to the wider
perception of the veracity of the Government's case for prosecuting
the war against Iraq?
Mr Campbell: I accept that is
stated and I accept there may well be people who believe that.
That is why I think it is important, as I have tried to do, to
separate out the two documents, underline the significance of
the first one, underline the responsibleness and thoroughness
with which we in the intelligence agencies approached that, explain
the difference in relation to the second one and its intended
purposes and intended use. As I say again, we are involved in
an awful lot of pieces of communication, as I have said several
times, and when we make a mistake we hear about it for quite a
long time. I actually do not think we have made that many mistakes.
This was a mistake, this one we have acknowledged many, many times,
it is one which the person responsible for making that mistake
feels wretched about, and I know that because I work with the
guy. Mistakes do get made. I just ask the Committee, as I have
said in my note, to understand the wider context of the amount
of communications work we are involved in in trying to deal on
a really difficult complicated issue like this with different
audiences around the world. We had strategies for the UK, for
the Moslem community in the UK, for Europe, for Asia, for the
United States, for the Middle East. I know people talk about,
and John Maples has alluded to, the whole issue of this so-called
explosion of special advisers in Downing Street, I have a pretty
small team and, yes, I can call in some circumstances on resources
across government, but in Downing Street I have a pretty small
team. We do a lot of work and occasionally mistakes get made.
Q1155 Sir John Stanley: Can we continue
on my particular line of questioning. It is a matter of concern
to me that you still do not appreciate the fundamental issue which
is—
Mr Campbell: I do.
Q1156 Sir John Stanley: I am sorry,
I do not believe you do, which is the relationship between the
communications part of Government and intelligence. As you know,
I was a ministerial recipient of intelligence for many years and
there is one particular sentence I read in your memorandum which
filled me with very considerable concern and it is the sentence
which reads, in relation to the September 2002 dossier, "I
had several discussions with the Chairman of the JIC on presentational
issues arising from the dossier and, in common with other officials,
made drafting suggestions as the document evolved." The most
crucial aspect of the interface between intelligence and policy—and
you, Mr Campbell, sit right down in the middle—is that intelligence
helps to formulate policy and that policy never, never helps to
formulate intelligence. The position which you have now made clear
to the Committee, and I believe this is the first time this has
come into the public domain, that you are in the business of making
and drafting suggestions to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, that in my judgment, unfair as this may be to you,
is seriously going to compromise the integrity of such documents
in the future, as indeed they have been compromised in the case
of the two Iraq dossiers. You are a very, very skilled communicator,
you are known universally as the Government's spin doctor, your
business is to put the best possible presentation on the Government's
policy, a perfectly bona fide role, everybody understands
that, but I have to put it to you—and I do not put this
to you in an offensive or personal way but in all seriousness
because I share one thing in common with you, you said you were
concerned to safeguard the integrity of the intelligence services
and that is absolutely my position as well—as long as that
policy in your paper is known, that you are in the business of
making drafting suggestions to the chairman of the JIC, that Alastair
Campbell's fingerprints are going to be on JIC source documents,
I have to say I do not believe that is conducive to the integrity
of the intelligence services.
Mr Campbell: I suspect that is
because you may be not persuaded by my integrity in relation to
the work that I do. That, if true, is obviously from my perspective
regrettable. All I can say is that the memorandum that I submitted
to you was seen by and cleared by the chairman of the JIC who
had discussed it with the agencies. Like you, I think the intelligence
agencies do an extraordinary job for the country, and the reason
why I felt that the briefing paper mistake was so serious was
because it did obviously lead to the controversy about which we
are still talking. The reason why I moved so quickly to speak
to the leadership of the intelligence community and to agree the
new procedures now in place was because I do value that hugely.
Provided the intelligence services and the leadership are satisfied
with the role I play on behalf of the Prime Minister at his instruction,
I think that is a perfectly proper thing to do.
Q1157 Sir John Stanley: My colleague,
Mr Ottaway, yesterday asked the Foreign Secretary, "Do you
think on balance it would be better not to have published it in
the first place . . .", referring to the dodgy dossier, and
the Foreign Secretary replied, "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." Do you agree with the Foreign Secretary it
would have been far better in hindsight for the Government if
the second dossier, the dodgy dossier, had not been published?
Mr Campbell: Clearly.
Sir John Stanley: Thank you.
Chairman: Mr Ottaway, if you could be
brief.
Q1158 Richard Ottaway: I will. During
the interval I have been musing that a question I put to you may
only have been partially answered. I would just like to put exactly
the same question to you again. Did the Government ever receive
any information from intelligence services that Iraq was not an
immediate threat?
Mr Campbell: Not that I saw.
Q1159 Richard Ottaway: That was not
the question I asked though.
Mr Campbell: I cannot answer for
what the Government may have received if I was not aware of it.
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