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Mr. Michael Mates (East Hampshire) (Con): It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth) and the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), beside whom I sit in the Committee Room, and have done for the past seven years—I think that I can say that without asterisks—while we get on with our work. As it was referred to from the Front Bench, it is worth emphasising that in the 10 years since this Committee was formed—I have had the honour of serving on it for all that time—it has been a zone entirely free of party politics. It does not enter into our work at all, and I am grateful that it does not. Indeed, on one visit that we made abroad, after we had been having discussions with some opposite numbers for seven or eight hours, the question of partisanship came up. We asked them to guess which parties we all came from, and they got every single one of us wrong—to the chagrin of some of us. There we are.
In the report there is a short essay about the limitations of intelligence, which I commend to everyone in the House and outside it. For far too long, people have wrestled with a faint impression that intelligence can tell us everything, and that if we put enough resources into it, and do enough things correctly, we will know what we need to know. That is not the case, and I will not surprise anyone or breach any confidence when I say that in a report that will be published next week, that subject is likely to be raised again. It is important that all of us get it across to the outside world that intelligence really does have limitations, particularly now, since the end of the cold war and the break-up of the two great blocs who aimed almost all their intelligence and security resources against each other. The threats to us today do not come, as they used to, from just one bloc; they come from a disparate group of rogue states, terrorist organisations and countries who are secretly engaged in trying to build up stocks of weapons for illegal and improper use, be they chemical, biological or nuclear or the missiles necessary to deliver them.
There is not one target for the agencies today but many. Assessing the relative importance of those targets and directing to them resources that are inevitably limited is much more difficult than ever before.
One difficulty with the agencies' work, which I know is experienced by many hon. Members, is that because all their activities are conducted within a ring of secrecy,
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scrutiny must of necessity take place within that ring of secrecy as well. As a result we in the Committee must trust the agencies and those who work for them not to abuse their powers, and to be honest with us about what they have done. In the House, we must place a certain amount of trust in Ministers to conduct themselves honourably and not to misuse the agencies or the intelligence they provide for partisan or other purposes. Trust is at the heart of intelligence work.
Some Members do not place their trust fully in our Committee, because it is not a Select Committee. Those who feel like that should look at the record of our work throughout the last decade. I do not believe that we can be criticised for having been unwilling to ask awkward questions of both agencies and Ministers. We have always taken a robust approach, and the fact that we have not always said what some people want to hear does not mean that we have not investigated issues fully.
It is the misuse of intelligence that undermines trust in the agencies and reduces the authority of their statements. That trust must be maintained, even if the price is that Ministers—and, indeed, we in the Committee—cannot always make public the intelligence on which decisions have been based.
I want to raise two small points, or at least points that figure in the report in a relatively small way. The first, which has already been mentioned, relates to the risk that has been taken with regard to counter-intelligence. It has been acknowledged by Ministers, and I think we are right to remain concerned about it. Some years ago, a former head of the CIA said, "There is only one thing worse than finding a spy in your organisation, and that is not finding a spy in your organisation." The risks have been taken because of the reduction in funding suffered in the 1990s, as has been acknowledged, but it is important to point out for future reference that there is no such thing as a quick fix. It is no good suddenly providing more money and expecting everything to be back where it was before, the following morning. It takes months, indeed years, to build up the necessary experience, the necessary organisation, and the right way of conducting counter-intelligence activities before they are up and running properly again, and it will be some years before the agencies are back to where they were before they reduced their staff.
Postal screening has also been mentioned in passing. Our report expresses concern, and I must say that I have found the Government's response a touch complacent. If I could specify the concerns and the risks I would have the entire House and, I suspect, the entire country behind me, but I cannot do that: if I described the risks, those who wish us ill could use the routes available to them to avoid the risk of being caught out. What I can say is that it is a question of more co-ordination, and of waking up to a problem that is very real before we see another major incident. I am thinking of the occasion on which 100 or so weapons were sent through the post from Florida to Northern Ireland. Quite by chance, an operative in a postal screening depot saw what was happening and stopped it. That is public knowledge because there was a trial and people went to jail, but I must tell the Government that the situation does not just need looking at and—what is the word?—reviewing; it requires action.
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I hope that the House will think that the report is balanced and does not skate over problems. I commend it, because I know that all of us in the Committee have done a lot of work on it.
3.33 pm
Dr. Gavin Strang (Edinburgh, East and Musselburgh) (Lab): I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Mr. Mates), who makes such a big contribution to the Committee's work. As he said, party politics does not enter into our work.
In last year's annual report, the Committee said that according to the Joint Intelligence Committee al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest threat to western interests. As the House will know, al-Qaeda has existed for many years, having evolved from those who travelled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to join resistance to the Soviet Union. It is thought that attacks on the interests of the United States and its allies by groups linked to al-Qaeda can be traced as far back as 1992. The subsequent decade saw several attacks linked to al-Qaeda, including the bombing of US embassies in east Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, the atrocities of September 2001 of course, and the Bali bombing of October 2002. It would be a mistake to see al-Qaeda as a fixed organisation run according to the direct orders of Osama bin Laden. It is an open question as to how—if at all—the activities of the various groups are co-ordinated, and whether anyone in bin Laden's inner circle is influencing the planning of attacks. But the phenomenon can exist without a disciplined root-and-branch organisation.
The National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has concluded that al-Qaeda has fundamentally changed since it lost Afghanistan after 11 September. It is far more decentralised, with operational commanders and cell leaders now making command decisions previously made by bin Laden himself. Instead, bin Laden is the inspiration for the movement, which is a collection of groups with differing characteristics, and agendas that vary according to the politics of each region.
I want briefly to consider the impact of the war in Iraq on international terrorism. Al-Qaeda was responsible for more than a decade of terror prior to the launching of military action by the US and the UK against Iraq in March 2003. When this House—and, indeed, most of the world—was debating whether it was justified to take that military action, one consideration was the impact that it would have on international terrorism. It was reasonable to assume that launching a war in Iraq against the will of the international community would be detrimental to the international coalition that had formed against terrorism. It was also a reasonable hypothesis that the war in Iraq would cause an increasing number of individuals to identify with al-Qaeda's aims and methods, which in turn would mean more attacks.
Last September, the ISC report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction stated that the Joint Intelligence Committee had itself assessed that the threat from al-Qaeda and associated groups would
"be heightened by military action against Iraq".
The judgment was whether that was a risk worth taking. The ISC discussed the threat with the Prime Minister, who recognised the danger that attacking Iraq would provoke what he called
"the very thing you were trying to avoid".
However, his judgment was that the threat posed by the potential combination of terrorism and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could not be ignored. He told us that concern that military action might bring about an increased threat from al-Qaeda must not lead us to allow
"a nexus to develop between terrorism and WMD in an event".
It is still too soon to gauge the medium or long-term effect of the war in Iraq on international terrorism. In the shorter term, in Iraq itself we have seen a terrible series of acts of violence. As the Foreign Affairs Committee noted in its report entitled "Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism", which was published at the beginning of the year,
"a dangerous alliance of foreign fighters with terrorist allegiances and elements of the former Iraqi regime has been forming inside Iraq".
According to the US State Department's revised global terrorism report of 2003, there had been a slight rise in terrorist attacks in 2003 compared with the previous year, and the number of attacks and casualties in the middle east had doubled. Closer to home, the Foreign Affairs Committee concluded that the war in Iraq could indeed have made terrorist attacks against British nationals and British interests more likely in the short term.
But what is the risk to the UK from al-Qaeda? The al-Qaeda threat is certainly at a higher level now, and we should assume that terrorists intend to carry out an attack in the UK. We have been spared, so far, the horror that was visited upon New York, Bali and Madrid, to name just three. It is not clear why that is so. For example, it is not clear to what extent that is due to effective action by the various agencies. The House will remember the widely publicised arrests following the discovery of half a tonne of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in a west London warehouse in March. No one present believes that the ammonium nitrate was intended for agricultural purposes.
There is the related question of accessibility. Did the terrorists attack Madrid, rather than London, because Madrid was perceived as a softer target, or because they happened to have the capability on the ground to mount the attack in Madrid? Do the terrorists not have the resources here—yet—to bring a planned attack on the UK to its conclusion? The fact that there has been no attack in the UK to date provides little comfort. The director general of the Security Service told the ISC that
"the absence of an attack on the UK may lead some to conclude that the threat has been reduced or been confined to parts of the world that have little impact on the UK. This is not so."
The House will be aware that the Security Service stated publicly that
"al-Qaeda cells and supporters of affiliated groups are known to be active in the UK",
"a terrorist threat to the UK may also come from overseas."
We know about the long lead-in time for planning an attack. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States concluded that the idea of launching the 11 September attacks was first put to Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that an initial list of targets was drawn up as long ago as spring 1999.
As I said, although we cannot be sure why there has not been an attack on the UK to date, we can certainly be confident that al-Qaeda-linked groups would like to carry out such an attack. It is imperative that our counter-terrorism efforts are comprehensive and robust and that we take all practical steps to ensure that we can deal with an attack. On that latter point, the Civil Contingencies Bill is designed to strengthen the Government's emergency powers and update the framework for civil protection work. Significant additional funds have been made available for counter-terrorism.
In discussing that issue, there is an understandable tendency to focus on secret intelligence, but much of the information used in counter-terrorism is in the public domain—in the broadcast and printed media. BBC Monitoring is the organisation that scrutinises such open-source information. It is part of the BBC World Service and it tracks more than 3,000 sources in 100 languages covering about 150 countries. BBC Monitoring receives, translates, analyses and conveys the information to counter-terrorist staff. Such open-source information provides a context within which secret intelligence data can be placed. Among the customers of BBC Monitoring are defence intelligence staff, the assessment staff, intelligence agencies and the National Criminal Intelligence Service.
The ISC found that BBC Monitoring provides a valuable service both to Government Departments and to the agencies, and that it adapted well to the need to report on the growing number of terrorist-related media sources. However, the funding from its stakeholders declined over the last decade, most steeply in 1996, and has been frozen since 2002, despite the extra demands upon it.
The ISC also learned that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was reviewing its allocation to BBC Monitoring with a view to making significant cuts. The Committee made representations to the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister and I was fortunate to secure an Adjournment debate on the matter earlier this year. Subsequent to our interventions, the Government have agreed to maintain funding for BBC Monitoring at its current level until the end of 2005–06, during which time a strategic review is to be carried out. The ISC welcomes the decision not to cut the funding provided to BBC Monitoring, as we believe that it would be a great mistake to reduce the money available to that valuable resource.
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