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Oral evidence Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday 18 June 2003 Members present: Donald Anderson, Chairman __________ Witness: Dame Pauline Neville Jones, examined. Q338 Chairman: Dame Pauline, may I welcome you, again, on behalf of the Committee. I apologise for the delay. You probably heard that the Committee were meeting President Musharraf in another part of the building. We are delighted you are with us, particularly because of your own experience in the diplomatic service and again as having chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee from 1993 to 1994 and being political director and Deputy Under Secretary of State at the FCO from 1994 to 1996 you can help us particularly on process and areas of that sort. In their Annual Report for the year 2002-2003 our colleagues in the Intelligence and Security Committee stated: "Ministers confirmed that they were given the JIC papers which their private offices believed they needed to see, and that officials in the departments drew papers to their Ministers' attention and reflected their Ministers' views at JIC meetings. The Ministers also said that they themselves sometime requested sight of specific papers". It went on to say: "The JIC Chairman, in his review of performance 2001-2002, noted need to produce starker papers, which could then aid Ministerial decision-making". From your experience of the Joint Intelligence Committee is it reactive or proactive? Who effectively decides the work programme of the Committee? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: The work programme of the Committee is a rolling work programme. It is something which is, I would say, largely in the hands of the professionals. I say "largely" because at the end of the day all civil servants work for ministers. This is not done in a vacuum. Clearly two things are taken into account, one is what are the strategic priorities of the Government, there both the policies and objectives of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office are absolutely key to the priorities which the JIC ought to reflect. Secondly, obviously it takes into account in its own tasking the shared intelligence relationship with our other main partner, the United States, and there is no point in duplication. What you have there is strategic priorities to reflect in the work you do, then decisions that are taken on how the work is then tasked within the British machine to supply information to and assessment of intelligence which is important to the attainment of those priorities. That is a process in which a lot of people are involved. This is a process that involves the intelligence service themselves, in my day the intelligence co-ordinator. The exact pattern and who holds these jobs has varied slightly from time to time, but whoever it is it is a key figure. Q339 Chairman: From your experience would ministers have a direct input into those priorities? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I would have said that the relationship between the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who in my day was also, because I was also at the same time the Deputy Under-Secretary in charge of Defence and Overseas Secretariat so I saw a good deal of my Prime Minister wearing both those hats. You would know, and I do not think you would need to ask, what the preoccupations were and where the emphasis on the work needed to be put. There would be a formal process in which the work programme would be approved. In my day the Cabinet Secretary was the most senior official who would ultimately take responsibility for what those underneath his charge were doing. Certainly my Cabinet secretary certainly did take an interest in the tasking - that was Robin Butler. Q340 Chairman: Who prepares the assessment? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Let us go on to that? Q341 Chairman: Who prepares the assessment and who has the input at the initial stage and then at the later drafting? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: You can see what I am trying to paint for you, there is a structure there and it is a structure which works within a framework of agreed priorities and an agreed work programme. The work programme that derived from that tasking is something which the Joint Intelligence Committee as a committee has a primary role over. It will decide on the basis of what it knows about the Government's priorities the work it has done in formulating its programme and what at any given moment it ought to be looking at, and there is a rolling programme. A typical meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which meets once a week, certainly in my day, would be composed of probably two kinds of papers, most of them would relate to items of direct topical interest which were alive in foreign policy terms. There might also be however alongside that a longer term piece of work which the intelligence services had been engaged on, which was designed to give you a broader view of some of the longer term trends in a given field, which informs the general scene. The Joint Intelligence Committee takes a paper. It has in front of it when it looks at an assessment and preparing to put an assessment up to ministers it will already have a draft in front of it. That draft which have come from the assessment staff. The assessment staff are drawn from various departments in Whitehall, those departments which have a particular expertise and interest in foreign affairs. It is a mixture of the departments and the agency people themselves. They do the initial drafting. They are the people in that sense who receive, I would hesitate to call it raw material but more basic material from the agencies. Nothing comes out of the agencies, as I understand it, and this is something that the agencies need to be asked, nothing comes of the agency that has not been assessed. They do not put up raw material, blind without themselves having taken a view on how reliable this is, what its provenance is and whether it is something that ought to see the light of day or not. The assessment process is one where taking the evidence that you from covert sources you would then say, "what does this mean?", against the background of what we already know, what we can further know from overt sources and what our common sense tells us about what this situation looks like. You are at all times in the assessment process testing the material that comes from covert sources against what you know from overt sources and against your judgment. Your judgment is obviously informed by your understanding of the situation and knowledge. There is rigorous analysis. The people who are engaged in this game are some of the best that Whitehall can offer. Talent is put there because everyone understands, I think, if you put stupid people in there you will get stupid papers. It is something where I think the quality of the analysis and the quality of the debate is actually high and it does credit to those involved. The same thing takes place at the Joint Intelligence Committee itself. If there is a bias in the system the bias is towards care, which means you are cautious, which means, if anything, you are conservative. You do not venture to put something in and to make what you know will be regarded as an important judgment or indicator unless you have a reasonable degree of confidence, that that is something that is solid ground. Having said that, it is always a matter of judgment. Q342 Chairman: Clare Short told the Committee yesterday that as Secretary of State for International Development she had to ask for JIC assessments. Is that unusual? How does material get to ministers? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: In my day the product of the Joint Intelligence Committee which was put in book form was sent to all members of the Cabinet, that was a regular thing, the Cabinet machinery sent it to the department. It would go the private office. I cannot tell you what the private office would have done with it. The piece that you read out to me is obviously capable of being construed in at least two ways, one is that they thought they should see all of it, though they saw all of it, or they only thought they should see some of it because they did not think they were in a ministry that was particularly interested in this kind of thing, or ministers had higher priorities so they only saw selected items. That is something that I cannot know. It was certainly supplied to them. Q343 Chairman: How are ministers comments conveyed back? Are ministers comments actually asked for? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Ministers comments are not asked for. From time to time ministers, particularly if they are responsible in those portfolios, are obviously more likely to take an interest in and ask for further work. It is perfectly the legitimate for a minister to say, "this is very interesting, can you give me some more on this?", either because they find it very relevant or odd or "how do you reconcile this with this?" That is something that clearly the Committee would want to respond to. What do ministers do with all this knowledge? I do not know whether it operates now, and that is something that you would need to ask somebody whose experience in Government is more recent than mine, but in my day the Cabinet Committee system was very important and the OPD of the day was an absolutely vital piece of the machinery which took the proposition, the particular issue or crisis or set of issues that really needed close ministerial attention among the ministers who were actually in OPD, that tends to be foreign affairs, defence and treasury ministers and these days I am sure overseas development. The Prime Minister chairs that meeting, it is a formal meeting, it is fully minuted. A lot of the information supplied by the JIC is therefore part of the background material against which the members of that committee would then be considering the policy issues. In a sense that is how it affects the decision-taking of government. Q344 Mr Chidgey: Dame Pauline, just on that point, I think I have the right parallel here, in her evidence to us Clare Short said that Cabinet Committee, who I think are defence and foreign policy, had not met for as long as she can remember. I bounce that back off you about the importance of the Cabinet Committee? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I can only say that this Government appears to operate differently. Q345 Mr Chidgey: Thank you. Yes, we have noticed that. In the context of the JIC reports and who sees them, in your day did special advisers of the FCO or in Number Ten see the JIC reports? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I do not know the answer to that question, I cannot absolutely say. In my day it was the case that special advisers on the whole did not sit in private offices. The relationship between a minister and a special adviser I think is between the two of them, and they do operate differently. There was no single, set pattern in my day. As a general proposition it would be true to say that the special adviser would be in a different office and not in the private office, which in my day would have been exclusively civil service staffed. Q346 Mr Chidgey: It is quite likely then. You probably cannot answer my next question, I wanted to know whether in your day did you ever have comments from special advisers on JIC reports other than through their ministers? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: No. Frankly I would not expect special advisers to see this. This is usually top secret, covert stuff. It is actually meant for people who are effectively privy councillors. I think that one could expect this material to be closely guarded in a private office. It should not be stuff that is flung round. Q347 Mr Chidgey: Again in your day was the JIC obliged to take account of ministers comments? In practice to what extent were those comments, if received, acted upon? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Put it this way, JIC would have regarded itself as professional advisers to the government, supplying them to the best of its ability an assessment of the situation as they saw it. If a minister said, "I would very much like to know more about that particular area", or "this would seem to me to mean the following, is that right?" That is the sort of question which would be quite within the purview of the Committee to answer. I think if the minister was to say something rather different, which is, "I do not know why you have not brought this out more", which gets into the questioning the validity of the assessment I think that would raise more problems because at the end of the day people have to stand behind the assessments they have made. You cannot just brush these questions off, I would expect them to examine that and on the whole if they have done their work properly they will stand behind what they have already assessed. I am not saying any work is perfect but what I am saying is that those judgments, certainly in my day, and I do not suppose there is any reason to be different now, were arrived at after very careful consideration. There was a lot of beating of the material and people going over it very carefully. Q348 Mr Chidgey: Was there any formal set procedure for resolving any disagreements that could arise in this process between ministers and JIC? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I did not experience it so I cannot answer what we would have done if a minister had come along and said, "I think what you are producing is absolute rubbish". It just did not happen. The resolution of disagreement inside the committee was going on until we agreed. Usually the case was if you did not agree then on the whole, if I can put it this way, you were inclined to go for the more conservative of the interpretations. As I said to you earlier on the Committee's fall position was, it was conservative. Q349 Mr Chidgey: Did Number Ten play any particular role in the process? Today we have the special advisers at Number Ten. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I do not ever remember anybody from Number Ten in the sense that I think you are using it, ever intervening in the assessments or the Committee's procedures, no. Q350 Mr Chidgey: It is really a question of whether the JIC assessments are essentially neutral, you have more or less said where there was any doubt they would tend to be conservative would it have been the norm for a JIC assessment to propose a particular line, whether it be with a "small c" or not? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: No, I do not think so. It is not JIC's role to propose policy. One thing I ought to say, because what I have described to you in a sense is the peace time method. In the run up to a crisis clearly the machine goes into a higher gear and committees called CIGs meet, they are committees of specialists and drawn from the ministries, who do short-term stuff. If you have a developing crisis you might have an assessment every single day to see where that takes the new material. There you have a much more rolling and running flow of information and that will shoot up the system quite fast. At the end of the day the Joint Intelligence Committee, particularly the Chairman, is responsible for the integrity of that flow of information. Q351 Mr Chidgey: Assuming you are not in the highly critical situation where you are reviewing on a daily basis and it is a steady process of assessment would it be the norm for the assessment of a particular piece of information or intelligence to give several explanations as to why that might have been uncovered, whatever it might be, it could have a military significant, it could have a civilian significance, it could have any number of degrees of significance which the assessors would have to evaluate. I am sure that must happen quite often. Would it be the case that in the assessment there would be possibly several scenarios given to explain what was happening, several options, the best or worst case? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: There are several ways that you can assess material. The way that it was done in my day was when a single assessment came up we did not offer alternative explanations of life, nor do we do something else, which is have what I would describe as competitive assessment. Here I think we do differ from the Americans. We on the whole had a machine which built up the picture on the basis of each stage itself being satisfied, you could say the consensus method. The consensus method has its own penalties and shortcomings but that is the way we do it. Q352 Mr Chidgey: Occasionally you would have contradictory information, would you not, as part of the process? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Yes. Then you have to decide. What I am saying is you do not put up it is either this or this, you do take a position on it, you do decide which of those two things is the one that you follow. What would then happen is that the assessment itself will explain that the indicators are not clear. It will not just say, this is what we think without explaining the basis of that judgment. It will indicate if in fact the situation is fairly fluid and the signals are mixed. That sort of thing would be made absolutely clear so nobody would be in any doubt about the clarity of the background against which these judgments are being made. That is a very, very important part of being absolutely straight with people about the firmness with which they can base themselves on what the assessment material is telling them. What we do not do, this has changed, is say, there is this or this and can choose. What we do not do is have different bodies competing with each other for interpretation or indeed intellectual competition inside the JIC. Those are differences between our method and the Americans.
Q353 Mr Chidgey: The final question from me, again using your own experience, do you feel the FCO has adequate resources within itself to question the assumptions and the analysis of the JIC reports? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: That is a really hard question to answer. The FCO is part of the system. What you would be saying if you put that question is, is a part of the system equipped to challenge it? The answer is yes. With it I think is a different issue. I would say as a general proposition that what comes out of the central machinery of government in this area, and I think it applies to the authority of a lot of the co-ordinating committee of the Cabinet in my day, is not something that the departments on the whole are going to argue with. It is the nature of government, you go into the centre, you come to a position through an OPD paper, whether it is at official or ministerial level, in a sense that is the line. This is an information process, it is not a policy-making process. It is very much underpinning that policy-making process and if you are both part of the information machine that feeds the policy process and you are part of the policy process you have to stand a very long way back indeed to say, "after all that", and I have been part of it, "I do not actually think we are making sense". Q354 Sir John Stanley: First of all, for the record, in response to one of the points you made in reply to Mr Chidgey, you did not say this but it might possibly be implied and misconstrued from the answer you gave on the issue of the security of JIC assessments. Although you are, of course, entirely right in saying some of those assessments are top secret, covert perhaps you would confirm that JIC material has quite a wide range of security classifications -- Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Absolutely. Q355 Sir John Stanley: -- and quite lot of material on a rather wider circulation has a much lower security classification. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Absolutely correct. Q356 Sir John Stanley: The point I would like to put to you is this, it arises out of a press report but given the fact that 10 Downing Street, according to this press report, has confirmed the existence of this document I want to raise it. It appeared in the Independent on 9 June. That is a report to the effect that JIC produced a six page report in March of last hear in which it allegedly reached the conclusion that there was no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991. The press report states that this particular JIC report was suppressed. I do not invite you to comment on whether it was suppressed or not because I have no means of knowing and secondly that is an issue the Committee will be able to pursue at other hearings. What I would like to ask you from your wealth of experience inside the JIC, are you aware of any occasions when you had those responsibilities inside JIC in which a particular JIC assessment was suppressed? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: No. If all depends on what suppression means. Does it mean that JIC produced something and that was found to be inconvenient by somebody else and therefore was quietly put away or does it mean that the Committee itself took a view on a report it had produced and decided that it was not going to put it forward for whatever reason. I do not know what that means. I am trying to think whether in my day we ever decided not to put a piece of work up that we had previously been working on. I cannot confirm to you that we never took a decision not to put something up. Were we to have taken that decision I think it would have been on the grounds that there was something wrong with the work inside it, that is to say we were not satisfied with the conclusions we had reached. This does happen, it happens with some of the longer-term work, by the time it has risen to the top it was already out of date, life had overtaken it. Sometimes you do say people are not going to be interested in this, it is wasting their time and sometimes you do not deal with it or you go away and take the bit that is of real interest, that is the bit that people really need to understand. I cannot confirm that we did not ever say, let us not put this piece of paper up. I can certainly confirm to the best of my recollection so far as I know no piece of paper, no assessment that we put up was subsequently put in a locker and not circulated, I did not experience that. Sir John Stanley: That last question was the one I hoped you would answer and thank you for answering it very clearly. Q357 Mr Maples: Dame Pauline, I wonder if I can go back to something that Mr Chidgey raised, which was that Clare Short told us that OPD, or whatever it is called in this Government, Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, never meets. I do not think she meant literally never, but it never discussed Iraq and when the Cabinet discussed Iraq it would do so in a very casual sense of asking the Foreign Secretary to say what happened in New York last week. It was never discussed with papers which set out options. Although there were security briefings from time to time there was never a discussion in OPD or the Cabinet with papers of this issue. In your experience is that unusual? Does that surprise you? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Not entirely, no. I think it is the case, and of course as Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet I used to go to Cabinet to take the minute on foreign affairs, I did have sight of Cabinet discussion on foreign affairs. It is certainly the case that I think increasingly, if I might put it this way, Cabinet is a meeting into which business is reported but very often not actually discussed in any detail. Q358 Mr Maples: If it was not discussed in Cabinet would you expect it to be discussed in the Cabinet Committee? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Absolutely. That is the distinction. The Cabinet Committee is the place for discussion. The conclusion of that Cabinet Committee are reported, if the system is working properly, into the full Cabinet by the Prime Minister with the lead minister usually coming in behind giving further explanation. It is not usually regarded as a four and four debate, it is certainly an opportunity for discussion or for questions on something which is often legitimate for Government to talk about, which is: "How do we handle this in public? What are the implications in the Parliamentary aspects of it?" It would be regarded as an item of business a, but a deep, in-depth discussion of the policy issues would be elsewhere. Q359 Mr Maples: You would have expected such a discussion with papers to have taken place in a Cabinet Committee? That is the surprise. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Absolutely. I would expect that. Q360 Mr Maples: What Clare Short went on to tell us was that the way that these decisions were made were that OPD did not meet and decisions made, in her words, "by a small, close entourage of the Prime Minister". She named the people in it, only one of whom is a career civil servant, David Manning, and the other three were the Director of Government Information Service, Alistair Campbell, a Baroness Sally Morgan and Jonathan Powell. She said what was happening was that these people were making the decisions and this was being reported directly to Cabinet. If it is normal to do this through OPD then that would be unusual. Do you see any weaknesses in doing it like this and not having a full discussion with papers in OPD or if this is a perfectly sensible way to approach major foreign policy issues. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: It is certainly different from the regime that I knew. I think, I will put it this way, there is the danger that you do not get properly recorded decisions and properly analysed decisions. That is a problem. There is also the question of accountability. Q361 Mr Maples: I want to move on to the process by which the weapons of mass destruction publication was produced by the Government. We have asked the Foreign Secretary and he has given us some answers and I wonder whether this is usual. The questions you have been asked about how JIC normally operates and its output is not usually published and the unusual thing about this is we have a series of intelligence assessments being presumably edited and then published. What the Foreign Secretary told us was the drafting was coordinated by the Cabinet Office assessment staff working with representatives of the Department. The final draft was approved by JIC, who said there were separate drafts, it has a long history of a rolling draft process. Then he said that ministers and special advisers offered comments during the drafting process in the normal way. At the end of the day the whole thing was approved by the JIC. Clearly during this process there is political input into this, because it is going to be published, one understands that, were you ever involved in a case where the output was eventually published in one form or another? Does this strike you as a normal and sensible way of doing it or would it have remained in the hands of the Foreign Secretary and JIC? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: So far as I know this is an unprecedented situation, it certainly did not happen in my time. I was trying to think whether it had any happened previously. We are obviously phased by the new situation and I think it is always right to recall why all this happened. I recall being one of the people, despite my background in the JIC, who said I think we have to have more evidence. Here I speak as a voter. It is not easy to ask people to send their sons and husband into military conflict on the basis of evidence which the Government says, "it is too secret for me to be able tell you what I know", I think that is a very difficult proposition in a democracy. It did seem to me at the time that a way did have to be found for material of which the Government disposed, which had clearly convinced it there was a real threat, could be made available so that the rest of us could understand what that was and why we were being told this was so serious. The issue at the time certainly seemed to me how you did that in a manner compatible with the protection of the sources, which is crucial. That is so far as I know an unprecedented thing to try and do. The process that is being described is one which also in a sense has no precedent. What emerges from that account obviously is that the process went through the professionals, it went to ministers and possibly the political staff, it then came back to the JIC eventually for their - the word I have heard used is "endorsement". One of the issues is how like the version put up was the final version that went out? What we do hear from the professionals is that they were prepared to stand behind that assessment. I can only conclude from what that they believed that assessment as it finally emerged had integrity. How much it was varied, how much there was further argument after the first assessment, how much the judgments that emerged thereafter were different from the ones that went in I simply do not know. This is why I think the work of these committees is very valuable because there are lessons to be learned from this. Let us hope we do not have to do this again but we are now in a world where we have a hidden enemy and the chances of us having to take military action again on the basis primarily of information coming from covert sources certainly cannot be discounted therefore I do think it is very important that the lessons are learned about how to get information out in future. Clearly there is a very fine line between showing the evidence and making a case. It is where showing the evidence turns into making the case where the system has to take a very, very strong grip on itself. Q362 Mr Maples: Can I just take you into another aspect of the same thing, in the Executive Summary of the Report it says: "as a result of the intelligence", which they obviously got from JIC, "we judged that Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological agents". In 1998 in the run up to the Desert Fox operation the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, Minister of State published a paper which went with a covering letter to all Members the Parliament and it was considerably more cautious it said: "Saddam has almost certainly retained some BW production equipment, stocks of agents and weapons. Some CW agents and munitions remain hidden. The Iraq chemical industry mustard gas almost immediately. Iraq could procure the necessary machinery and material", that was about his nuclear programme. That seems to be it still has the capability, it has a few stocks, it has the capability, it has the ingredient there, the precursors but here we are four years later saying: "Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons". Does that seem to you to be a substantive shift of opinion to go from one to the other? Does it seem much less cautious or not? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I would say those two statements are justified but can only be justified by their being a change in the situation. They are different. They are different. Clearly one is saying there is a capability there. The straightforward reading of that statement is it is not particularly active capability but certainly people in that situation could clearly start making it again. Do not forget once you have that capability, particularly biological, it is quite quick to get it going again. Chemical is one that does not degrade, although biological degrades quite quickly chemical does not degrade so quickly. There are some real puzzles about what happened to stocks which the UN inspectors believe were left behind. I think there are some puzzles that are not yet properly uncovered. If you put those two statements together one is a much more active statement than the other and does suggest that there is a different situation. Q363 Mr Maples: If you had been the Chairman of the JIC on both occasions and these were put to you based on what you just said it would seem you could only feel you could justify both statements by saying there had been a change in intelligence in between the two, some new information? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Yes, I think that is exactly what I would have to conclude would justify the difference. Q364 Mr Pope: Dame Pauline, just to go back to Mr Maple's line of questioning about the September dossier, I would be really interested to know what your view is as to whether or not on the one hand it could be argued that the publication of the dossier leads to a very real danger that the security services will end up being politicised, that drags them into a party-political area that they have never been in before, and probably do not want to be in. On the other hand if we have a situation where the intelligence that is being given to the Prime Minister is that Britain really needs to take military action to protect and defend our own interests and yet that military action does not command support for the wider public or critically on the floor of the House of Commons, and it is worth bearing in mind that even if a small number of Labour MPs voted against the Government on March 18 Tony Blair probably would not be Prime Minister now. In those circumstances do think it is justified to have done what they did? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I have already made it clear I think that the publication of evidence was justified, in fact I think necessary. I do not think that it right, as I said to you, that voters should be asked to send the army into battle on the basis of not know why. The issue is was the "why" correct. I think that is a justified process, you need to take certain precautions. This is where we need to learn lessons. I do not think that that process per se carries the danger of the politicisation of the intelligence services. It gives them a degree of exposure to public discussion and debate which I would not want to see happen often. I do not want to see our intelligence services get into the limelight and become political footballs or perform the roles, which does happen in the United States. If we start letting our intelligence services constantly into the limelight I do not see how you erect barriers of the kind that will prevent that happening. I am very comfortable with, and I do think it is much preferable that services of that kind are actually below the line of publicity, I think it safeguards their integrity. Therefore these situations should be exceptions. The business of them producing reports, here was this demand. It was right for the ministers to ask the professionals to put the dossier together, we would have liked it even less if they had done without the help of the professionals. My working assumption when I saw that dossier and read that dossier, which was greeted I seem to remember with considerable scepticism, and I remember going on television and defending it, for two reasons: I assumed that on the basis of my information and of its methods that what was there could be relied on. Secondly, I also assumed that it was a selection, I never expected everything that the Government knew and everything the intelligence services were able to bring up by way of assessed information would be shown to us. We would get an assessment which contained a fair representation of the underlying information but would not itself be the total weight and volume. Q365 Chairman: Has anything you learned since induced you to modify that view? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I am now probably in a situation where I would like to see my assumption tested, yes. I do not assume that it will come out any different but I think there are various issues here, one is clearly what happened to the information after it left the JIC. I also think, and I say this with all due respect to my successors in this craft, that it is so extraordinary not yet to have found any weapons of mass destruction that I do think the question has to say asked, was for reasons, which I am sure have nothing to do with the integrity of the people involved, was the intelligence after so many years when we have not had inspectors in there, and the sort of direct access we have had previously somehow off beam. It cannot be ruled out that over time our sources, which we certainly accepted -- and I believe the Prime Minister when he said this 45 minutes came from a trusted source, that is how it had been assessed. I do wonder whether one does not need to go back not only to the question of how the material was handled when it came to the compiling of evidence for public consumption but also how reliable the base was underneath. That is a more profound question. I think an important one to satisfy oneself on and we need to know and intelligence services need to know their information is not well based. Q366 Mr Pope: This is precisely the area I wanted to investigate with you, were you satisfied when you were the Chairman of JIC about the quality of intelligence that we received about Iraq and how much of our intelligence is derived from the USA and therefore is there not a danger that if somebody makes a mistake with some of the raw data and that is passed on it just becomes treated as gospel. There is a danger there, is there not? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: You have put it yourself, clearly there is a danger. When I was in the JIC it was the time of the imposition of the no-fly zones. From the flow of information we had coming on those issues we had good reason to have reasonable confidence in that information. If you asked me the question, was I at any stage uneasy about the quality of the information I cannot put my hand on heart and say, no. I do think, and I think this is probably for the Committee, it is an issue for people in the intelligence world and what they do to test the reliability of information over time, particularly in situations where your access is through sources on the ground who have the ability to have up-to-date and close information, and that is lessoning. Q367 Mr Pope: Obviously there is a huge amount of intelligence shared between the United Kingdom and the US, what level of credibility and what level of independent checking is there of information that comes from the US? Is it taken as being absolutely right or is there a system of checking it? What level of credibility would you generally give information from an allied power? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: The two system have always maintained their independent assessment. While I was there that rule of we assess independently and we assess information coming from the other side of Atlantic we assess it. So far as I know that was not breached. I think the system answer to your question is there is independent assessment. I think that is important to both sides. It is better for both sides to have each tested it and, of course, those assessments are compared. We do have knowledge of each other's assessment but they stand independently of each other, it is not the other side's lot that goes to your ministers, it is your assessment that goes to your ministers. It is a joint policy, that is the other thing one has to bear in mind, there is a real life background to all of this. The Iraq policy has been a joint UK/US policy for a very long time and one has to fir that whole scenario into that fact. Q368 Mr Hamilton: On 24 September, as we have discussed, the first dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was published and it met with some cynicism and I saw you defend it on television, and you did a good job. What I wanted to ask was, how would you have expected that dossier to have been drawn up? What would the procedures have been when you were in charge of JIC? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I thought about that and I thought to myself I am extraordinarily glad that I did not have to do this. I think clearly the question that you would have had to ask yourself is what is the evidence for what kinds of threat? You would have to identify what it is that you are talking about by way of threat and I would have wanted to go back a long way. What I would not have wanted to do with something as important as this was take recent material and put it together in an essay for public presentation. This is where the pressures of time do become a very real factor in life. What I would have wanted to do was go back a bit. I am not sure I would have gone back as far as I suspect in doing a post-mortem it would probably now be right to do. I would have wanted to go back a bit to see the consistency of the evidence and whether we really had an audit trail of evidence that did not have breaks in it so that you did not somehow suddenly get a period when those previous judgments did not seem to be supported or where there were gaps in the picture, because that would have made me worry. I would have wanted to do a lot of work behind that dossier to be really satisfied what I was putting up and I could point to evidence behind it. I am painting an ideal world, I know, those people were under great pressure and whether they were able to do that I do not know. That is how you would want to do it. That would be one of the lessons that you would try to draw for any future occasions. Q369 Mr Hamilton: Can I ask you if you had come to the conclusion as Chairman of JIC that somebody in the Government was trying to exaggerate elements of the intelligence information to support the case for war with Iraq what would you have done? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I would have done what the Civil Service Code prescribes, I would gone to see my line manager, who would have been the Cabinet Secretary, and I would have put my anxieties to him. That would have been the right thing to do. I would have expected on something as important as that for him to have reflected that to the Prime Minister. The relationship between somebody in that position and the Prime Minister is close enough that I think that any occupant of that position would feel able to go to the Prime Minister and say, "I am worried". There is a procedure and it is certainly in those circumstances one that should be used. Q370 Mr Hamilton: Is there any sense in which it is a function of any of the agencies of Government, especially intelligence agencies, to support a policy of the Government? Has this ever happened? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: No. I think it is the function of agencies the put advice to the Government that is honest and reliable and as timely as they can make it. It is not for the agencies to be part of the policy-making process. Q371 Mr Hamilton: Can I finally refer to something that you said earlier, the fact that it is rather worrying that weapons of mass destruction have not yet been found in Iraq. Could there not be another explanation, most people are saying it is because they are not there. Surely there could be an explanation, I wonder if you accept this or not, that it is not the priority of the occupying forces at the moment to look for those weapons. It would be convenient when they are found but the priority is to get the country up and running again and therefore they are not really spending any time and energy on it. As we know Saddam's regime hide those weapons very carefully in order to make sure that the UMNOVIC inspectors were foxed at every turn. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I ought to be quite on this subject, I used the word "yet" I used it advisedly because I do not draw the conclusion because they have not been found they will not be found or do not exist. I am surprised they have not been found, I am surprised. What I cannot help feeling is if they had been more operational they would have found something by now. I do not exclude there are explanations of the kind that you put forward or others. I do not think you send your soldiers out to exercise in chemical suits if you are trying to pull a fast one. I do think there was a real belief and I do think that there was a real capability. I think the issue is, how active was it? How much of it was it, and what is the explanation for not having yet found any? Q372 Mr Hamilton: Would you accept the fact that because those weapons of mass destruction have not been found yet increases the cynicism of the British public as to the causes of the war? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: It does. That is why it is very important to establish what really went on. I want to say one other thing, none of this, in my view, should be taken as making one conclude that weapons of mass destruction are not a very serious threat, they are. When the Prime Minister lays emphasis on the seriousness of that threat one should not disagree with him, he is absolute right. Q373 Chairman: You said that our soldiers would not have been sent out in chemical kits unless we believed in it. It is also true that there were chemical kit suits found belonging to the Iraqi forces? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Yes, absolutely. These are factors that give you pause and that is you why should not conclude we now know everything we need to know, I do not think we do. Q374 Andrew Mackinlay: Listening to the most recent exchange it did occur to me perhaps even you might have fallen into the chasm of that of a number of my politician colleagues and perhaps even members of the press in making the assumption that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, it did occur to me there is a scenario I want to bounce off you that if evidence had been found as we speak or the survey group is finding it now whilst there is a compelling case and a democracy for the Prime Minister to rush to the House of Commons and say, "got it, here it is", it would not be the most prudent thing if you are trying to find the trail and find the lot, is it not? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: That is a perfectly fair point. I rather interpret some of the things the Prime Minister said in the House the other day that he has evidence of evidence, if you see what I mean. That is why I hesitate to draw hard and fast conclusions that "now" does not mean there will not be. Q375 Andrew Mackinlay: All will be revealed. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: Having said all that I still think there are really important things we need to try to get to the bottom of Q376 Andrew Mackinlay: I almost admit to a degree of jealousy, you mentioned privy councillors and I always thought that was a bit old, a bit humbug. Nevertheless I a persuaded for the purposes of this afternoon there are privy council terms and I also recognise that me as a Member of Parliament is not privy council - I am apparently not good enough to share some of this documentation, I can even life with that - but then I hear these people called special advisers, I think I have a degree more legitimacy than they have, what I can make out it is a fact, you have some concern about this. What the minister decides to share with his special adviser, whether or not the special adviser follows him into a meeting room, your former colleagues cannot say, "who the heck is he?", or "is she seeing that?" It does seem to me there is a major point of not just principle here but security and also ultimately, this is not perhaps a concern for you, respect for Members of Parliament, we are trustworthy. What say you on that? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: There are two related but separate things here, one is the decision-making process where there is formal accountability from civil servants through minister. I think the other is security clearance. Who is part of the decision-making process and who has access are two different things. I would hope, I do not know, I would hope that special advisers who had access to this material had the appropriate clearances. I believe that somebody who was working as closely to the Prime Minister would have been vetted. I would think it surprising there would not have been a vetting process. My working assumption would be they were cleared. Q377 Sir John Stanley: Dame Pauline, I want to carry on a bit further the very important conduct of government issues that have been raised so far in the course of this inquiry and carry a bit further the exchange to which my colleague John Maples referred to earlier. The exchange continued into the role of the Foreign Secretary, which is highly germane to this Committee. Just for convenience can I for the record and both to assist you just give you the transcript of a short exchange which took place on this point yesterday with Clare Short. "Mr Maples: And decisions were being taken by a very small group of people close to the Prime Minister, none of whom, apart from him, are elected? Clare Short: Yes. Mr Maples: So there were no ministers involved in that part of it? Clare Short: That is right. Chairman: Did you know about the role of the Foreign Secretary at this time? Clare Short: The Foreign Secretary would have a close relationship with the Prime Minister and the entourage, but I think the decisions were being made by the Prime Minister and the entourage and the Foreign Secretary was helpful. He went along with those decisions, but I think the decision-making was sucked out of the Foreign Office which I think is a great pity because there is enormous expertise about the Middle East in the Foreign Office and certainly the Foreign Office has the expertise to understand what is necessary to achieve the second Resolution. Chairman: You are saying that the Foreign Secretary was helpful. Are you suggesting that he was ancillary and the decision was elsewhere? Clare Short: I am suggesting that he was extremely loyal to the Prime Minister and his decisions." The key question I would like to ask you, Dame Pauline, from your time when you, of course, were serving in Foreign Office prior to the start of the last Gulf War, what is your view of the position of the Foreign Secretary of this country in circumstances where the Defence and Overseas Policy sub-committee of the Cabinet was not meeting and where, as is claimed hereby the former secretary of state for international affairs the key decision making is being taken by the Prime Minister and his immediate entourage at Number Ten? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: That is a really difficult question. Clearly the theory answer is that the Foreign Secretary was part of OPD, and OPD decisions would decide the policy and it would then fall to the various departments to implement bits of that policy relevant to them. Therefore were the Foreign Office conducting diplomacy towards the Middle East it would be in the lead in getting the resolution through the UN. If you do not have a formal structure making those decisions you are then dependent on the relationship, as Clare Short indicated, between the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, do they talk to each other on the 'phone? You are also dependent on communication between officials, which I imagine is what happened, officials like David Manning, whoever it may be, would make sure that the private secretary or the Foreign Secretary himself knew what had gone on so that he was well informed. There are two separate things, what is the input into the decision-making? It is not to be excluded after all there can input from the Foreign Office in a more informal way than through OPD, even in the system that is being described. The expertise in putting the UN resolution through is something that the Foreign Office does not need help on. Where the decision-makers at the centre would need help would be the Foreign Office's assessment and the chances of getting that resolution through and how to do it and therefore their decision-making should be influenced by that information and by that assessment. One of the questions would be how the Foreign Office's professional judgments on the sustainability of the policy would be pursued or how the targets that have been identified could be best reached, and so on. All of that would be an important part of the likely success of the policy, because the policy has to be the right policy and we also have to implement it in a way that gets you there. If you do not have a committee operating it certainly means the way in which that advice is put into the centre and the way in which the decision coming out of the centre is implemented is clearly, to put it mildly, less easy to track. Q378 Sir John Stanley: Like you I am wholly familiar with the system which you described to the Committee and one has had a lot of experience of Cabinet sub-committee meetings, I would like to ask you whether or not you agree that in a system where these key policy decisions are effectively being carried out by the Prime Minister and his immediate entourage, as claimed by the former Secretary of State for International Development, in such a system where there is a great deal of dependence on what is happening verbally and a great deal of dependence on the personal relationship between the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister do you consider that that might be a form of decision taking that at least has a higher risk of going wrong than one through the structure of Cabinet sub-committee meetings, the presentation of paper and genuine discussion and debate on policy options between ministers? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I think the caveat has just been mentioned, I do not know this to be the case so I am operating on this hypothesis. It does not necessarily lead to a worse discussion, the discussion will depend on the quality of the people in the room, to be really brutal about it, so it does not mean that worse policy is made. It does mean that that policy is less imbedded in the government as a whole because a whole series of other participants are not there and therefore bounded by it, one. Two, I suppose it is, as I say, less easy to track, we do not know whether there were records made of these meetings, in that sense they would not be an official document. A written record is very helpful to people and the written record can go across the road as well. The third thing that you are pointing to is ultimate accountability. These are obviously issues for the functioning of Government. I do not think by itself it means there was worse policy there. Q379 Mr Maples: I wanted to ask you a few things about the dodgy dossier, which was published in January 2003, the preamble to that dossier says: "This report draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material", when the Prime Minister spoke to it on 3 February in the House of Commons he said: "We issued further intelligence over the weekend about the infrastructure of concealment". It seems clear it was based in part on intelligence material yet we are told by the Foreign Secretary the document was not cleared by the JIC. Would you like to comment on that? These are all on the record. These are facts. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: This is supposition on my part, I imagine what happened is this was a document that was largely put together at Number Ten, if not wholly put together at Number Ten. Number Ten at this stage after all of the proceedings, and we are now late into a long process of information stream and policy formulation in this area, would itself have access to work already done by the intelligence community. I think a straightforward reading of what is being said is that elements of that material were incorporated in a piece of work which was largely composed of material from other sources. It is certainly true to say that it contains intelligence material. The Government has subsequently made it clear that was not the bulk of what was there, that came from an open source, quite an interesting open source, it was quite an interesting dossier. I think it is probably fair to say that one was led to understand that the source of that material was rather closer to Government than it turned out to be at the time. Q380 Mr Maples: If one is going to use intelligence material it seemed that the Government has now agreed that it has got into some trouble with this dossier because it came off the internet. We have a rather interesting paper from Dr Glen Rangwala at Newham College, Cambridge, he said that it comes from three sources off the internet, he tracked them, punctuation mistakes occur in both versions, he says pages six to sixteen are just a straight script. The Government seems to have acknowledge this has got them into difficulties and of course the lack of credibility that document contains reflected on the other ones and if had not been for that people would have been more inclined to take the Government's word on the other one. Do you think that any document which in future is published and draws on intelligence material should be run passed JIC to see what they think about it? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I would be reluctant to see JIC getting into the game of endorsing and acting as an imprimatur to information that the Government is putting out. I do think this kind of thing I hope will be an exception. I think it loses its value if it becomes run-of-the-mill and it has a series of other undesirable consequences . My answer to is you is no. What I do think is that if a mixed document is put out in the future, and one can see circumstances where that would be a perfectly sensible thing to do, it is made absolutely clear what comes from where. That seems to me to be the key thing, you have to own up about your sources. Q381 Mr Maples: We asked the Foreign Secretary some questions about this and he said that the document was prepared or started off by a thing call the communications and information centre which reported to the Prime Minister's director of communications involved through a number of stages. No ministers were consulted in the preparation of the document, no FCO ministers or FCO special advisers were consulted on the document, which seems to bare out what you were saying. Number Ten officials, including special advisers, asked for some editorial changes. Interestingly, according to Dr Rangwala when this document was first put up on the internet the names of you authors were in the file as well but within half an hour they were taken off. He got the names of the authors and they turn out to be a Foreign Official called Paul Hamill, I do not know who he is but presumably he works for David Manning in Number Ten and three people, all of whom work for Alistair Campbell, one of whom is his secretary, another of whom is the news editor of the Number Ten website, and somebody called John Pratt, who is a junior official from the Prime Minister's strategic communications unit. Do you share my amazement that the second document in this chain, the first one is a very serious piece of work, whether it turns out to be right or not is a very serious piece of work based on intelligence through JIC, with input from ministers and will go through a long evolution that we then have the second installment in this series put out by effectively the Downing Street communications unit with no input from the Foreign Office at all, the intelligence is not cleared with JIC and it is put into the public domain as though it is as serious a document as the first one. Do you think the Government is corrupting its own process? -- Dame Pauline Neville Jones: It is a serious mistake. I agree with what you said that it discredits the earlier material, it is a mistake. I think you should not do cut and paste jobs. Q382 Andrew Mackinlay: Can you throw some light on this, from your experience being in the Cabinet Office, a senior position, your relationship with the security intelligence community, is there an equivalent of lobby term whereby folk of your level, that echelon, or people who link up the security intelligence services do talk to journalists. Journalists have said to me, they might be bragging, "Funny, Mackinlay, you cannot talk to them, we talk to them all of the time", even allowing for a bit of exaggeration and then we have had this man who is going to appear before us, Gilligan, and also you people do meet. What were the ground rules? What was the convention? Does lobby system exist? Who is allowed or permitted to so talk? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: As far as I know there are no ground rules. The head of the services would speak for those service. I think Eliza Manningham-Buller does, I think on the whole it is customary not to have a high profile in MI6. Basically and fundamentally these are not people who talk to the public and personally I do not think they should or to journalists. There clearly was turbulence inside the machine and some people have been talking, I do not know who, and I do not know they are representative. Personally I do not draw any conclusions from that because I simply do not know. I would not draw general conclusions about attitudes inside the services on the basis of conversations that appear to have taken place between some journalists and some individuals. It is dangerous to draw that conclusion because you do not know what they represent, what their motive is and whether to put any weight on it. I think, I really do think there are ways of finding out through this process of getting to the bottom of it. I am not happy about that, I think it stirs the pot and it creates heat. I do not think it gives us light. Q383 Andrew Mackinlay: As a general rule you do not think it happens. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I do not think it happens, this is a loyal and professional culture and very important it stays like that. Q384 Chairman: Because the BBC intelligence correspondent presumably would have certain sources but in your time these would not have been officials with the lobby terms that Mr Mackinlay talks about. Dame Pauline Neville Jones: We are a democracy and people do communicate. This is not the way, this kind of information should be filtered out because it ends up with precisely what we now have, no real information which damages reputation and destroys trust. I do not think it is helpful. I do not think this represents anything very general. Q385 Chairman: This Committee will have to make recommendations at the end of the inquiry, you drew the clear distinction between showing the evidence and making the case. What lessons should there be learned? What recommendations would you commend to this Committee? Dame Pauline Neville Jones: I certainly would not say that this exercise of putting evidence in front of public in circumstances that were necessary should never be repeated, I would not draw that conclusion. What I would draw is that safeguards need to be put in place about how that is done, which includes the integrity of the system in which it is produced, I am not saying that it was not, I do not know, that is what you are trying to find out, so if this is work done by the intelligence community it would be clear that this is work done by the intelligence community and no one else. I think the second thing is, I go back to what I said earlier on, I think that if the intelligence community is going to be called upon to do this, and I think it is a tough thing for them to be asked to do they themselves need then to conduct the kind audit of their material to be absolutely confident that what they are saying is really very well based. This is not a point that relates to future exercise so much as in this instance that I do think that the information base about Iraq policy is both sufficiently controverted and there is sufficient doubt among those who are themselves professionals and take a close interest in government but I think one has to the take the audit trail back further into the material itself. That is I think what the other Committee will be doing. I think there are things which are peculiar to this situation which they need to do and then there are certain recommendations for any future occasions which perhaps the Committee will want to consider Chairman: Dame Pauline, thank you very much. |