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Mr. Michael Mates (East Hampshire) (Con): Just to put the hon. Gentleman right, may I tell him that we received that letter from the Prime Minister just a few days before our report went to the printers? We put it in as he wrote it, and our answer is in paragraph 79, which states:

"We will take evidence on all these matters."

So the hon. Gentleman must wait until we report, and then he will know.

Mr. Oaten: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He clearly wants to ask the same questions as I do. We hope that there will be a chance to do that, but we could circumvent that process if the Foreign Secretary were able to clarify that matter when he responds to the debate today.

I said earlier that these are difficult matters, and I want to assure the Home Secretary that, where possible, we shall give cross-party support on many of them.
 
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However, it is important that we also probe and test the Home Secretary if we believe that legislation at times crosses into areas that we are trying to protect.

3.13 pm

Alan Howarth (Newport, East) (Lab): The annual report of the Intelligence and Security Committee offers much praise, makes some criticisms, and includes some of our usual painstaking passages of educational material. We are happy to praise MI6 and the Foreign Office in respect of Libya. Alongside that has been the unravelling of the A. Q. Khan network. We praise the establishment of the joint terrorism analysis centre, which is a model of inter-agency and interdepartmental co-ordination and commitment. We were particularly impressed by the speed with which that institution was set up, and by the quality of what it does. The one problem that it has had is that so many people have beaten a path to its door—it has become a popular destination for "spooks' tours" from all over the world—that it has been interrupted in the performance of its duties more often than it might have expected.

Such good co-ordination is a particular strength of the British system. We see it in the Joint Intelligence Committee, where the heads of all the agencies sit with representatives of other Government Departments. The committee centralises the assessment of intelligence material from a whole range of sources. We are pleased that a new system for establishing requirements and priorities has been achieved, and that the ministerial Committee on Intelligence and Security was engaged in that process. That was something for which we had been calling for some considerable time.

SCOPE, the computerised database of intelligence data linking 10 different Departments and agencies that is now in development, represents exactly the right way to go. Of course, there are all the problems of big public sector computer systems, and we have raised some questions about training, security and costs, but we have no doubt that it represents the right way to go.

We make criticisms of the low priority given to counter-espionage. We took a peace dividend after the cold war, but China, Russia and others continue to seek to find out what they usefully can about things that go on in Government and in business in this country that we ought to keep secret. On a visit that the Committee made to the United States of America recently, we were strongly reminded of instances of penetration of the American agencies, and it was impressed on us how important it is to look after our crown jewels, and to keep our secrets secret.

In the report, we chart the fall in the share of Security Service resources going to counter-espionage from some 20 per cent. in 1999–2000. That share is bottoming out at about 10 per cent. today—as the Home Secretary told us—thanks to the promise of a 50 per cent. increase in funding for the Security Service over the next four years, which is extremely welcome. This has been a calculated risk on the part of the Home Secretary and the director general of the Security Service, and we were pleased to understand from our discussion with the Chief Secretary to the Treasury that he understands the nature of the risk that was being taken.

The Committee regrets that not enough resource has hitherto been committed to helping the intelligence agencies play their part in addressing serious organised
 
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crime. We saw some remarkable models of inter-agency co-operation in dealing with drugs crime at Key West and in Jamaica, and some similarly excellent interdepartmental co-operation centred at Vauxhall Cross relating to various other kinds of serious organised crime. However, those good arrangements were undermined by the lack of resource going into them, when so much more could be achieved. It is very important that we should achieve more in that direction, and investment in this area would certainly yield a quick return. There is a spectrum between organised crime in the drugs trade, for example, all the way through to terrorism. We therefore welcome the commitment of extra resources that the Government have now promised, and we look forward to the serious organised crime agency

"building on the intelligence capability already available across law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies".

We draw attention to collection gaps, which are—irritatingly, for right hon. and hon. Members—asterisked in the report, those places that are not named but where we would like to see a stronger intelligence effort. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee this week of today's threat, which he defined as

"a new form of global terrorism combined with repressive, unstable states that proliferate or engage in chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development".

The world is a small place in terms of the capacity of terrorists and proliferators to move quickly from one part of it to another. It is very large, however, when we come to consider how to cover it comprehensively with intelligence, particularly when we bear in mind the length of the lead time to establish an effective intelligence capacity in any particular place.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and we suggest that the east African bombings in 1998 should have been a wake-up call to the world. It appears that not until 11 September 2001 did the world begin to wake up to the nature of the new threat. I was looking last night at a book called "Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey", written by V. S. Naipaul, which I see that I read in 1982. As long ago as that, Naipaul described a journey through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, in which he found Islam in ferment, and more and more people seeking the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism. He wrote:

"This political Islam was rage, anarchy".

For 20 years after that, however, western leaders continued to embrace Saudi Arabian leaders and to ignore Wahhabism. For 20 more years, we were comfortable with the existing concept of threat, our modes of threat analysis, and the ways in which we derived the requirements for the intelligence and security agencies. We took that peace dividend after the end of the cold war, and were guilty of complacency in the 1990s.

The enemy is an Islamic fundamentalism that is uninhibited in its willingness to use violence: sophisticated, implacable enemies, many of them trained individually in particular technical skills in the west, who exploit the values of our liberal society, our concern to preserve such values as privacy, a refusal to
 
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discriminate on grounds of race or religion, and the right to preach. If we are to protect ourselves physically against this kind of threat, we will need huge cultural and institutional adjustments, but if we make those, will it be a victory for us or for terrorism?

We agonise as to how to respond and deal with threats of this nature. What the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) said just now on that subject was helpful. We find it difficult and painful to judge what we are to do about the authorisation of surveillance, the use of intercept material in judicial proceedings, the development of policy on immigration, naturalisation, passports and ID cards, and the difficult question of detainees, to which we drew attention, and which has been referred to in the debate. The Prime Minister's letter in paragraph 78 of our report describes a detainee hooded and shackled during an interview, which was not reported at the time, and refers to other complaints, austere conditions and inappropriate treatment, and concerns passed on to the US authorities. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates) has just said, we will take evidence. But as the Home Secretary has said, Parliament will need to think hard about where we set the boundaries in these matters.

Iraq confronted us with a question: to what lengths are we willing to go when intelligence tells us that there is a threat from WMD? There have been, of course, passionate disagreements within our country and internationally. That issue cannot be ducked, and certainly not by political leaders Our Committee reported on the intelligence and assessments made in relation to Iraq, and the House debated our report, albeit perfunctorily. Others have trawled these waters: Lord Hutton, the Butler committee, and Mr. David Kay, the former head of the Iraq survey group, a real expert in these matters, and a revisionist, who said:

"It turns out that we were all wrong."

Too much may be being read into those words. Kay accepts that Iraq was at an early stage of renewing its nuclear weapons programme, that it had removed the elements most vulnerable to inspection but kept its scientists and technology, and that research continued on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The missile and unmanned aerial vehicle programmes were still moving ahead, and the weapons programmes were designed to allow future production. If Saddam had had the political opportunity, he would assuredly have resumed those programmes.

Kay thinks that we were wrong to take the view that there were stockpiles, but he also says that there was no evidence either way on that. He describes the difficulties. Given the body of intelligence, over 15 years, it was hard not to conclude that Iraq, in his words,

"was a gathering, serious threat to the world".

Saddam lied systematically, the scientists lied, the inspectors caught them lying and in breach of resolution 1441, so the analysts assumed the worse, perhaps wrongly in some respects. But a corrupt, terrorised society was very hard to read, and there was not enough human intelligence to enable us confidently to assess the motives and intentions of the Iraqi leadership at all points.

Were errors made? Possibly; but given what the intelligence community saw and knew, or thought that it knew, it still seems to me that it reached the only
 
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conclusion that it reasonably could. The looting and deliberate destruction of documents and material that took place following the failure of the coalition to achieve physical security in Iraq after 9 April means that the Iraq survey group may never establish the facts as to that period. Perhaps there were no stockpiles, but I do not doubt that the dangers to the region and therefore to the world were very great, that Saddam would have resumed his programmes, and that, already, the risks of proliferation through willing buyers meeting willing sellers in Iraq were very great. If there are questions about the integrity of UK officials and politicians taking decisions in this area, I believe that they are entirely unfounded.

3.26 pm

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