Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1600-1619)
AIR VICE
MARSHAL MIKE
HEATH AND
WING COMMANDER
IAN CHALMERS
16 DECEMBER 2003
Q1600 Mr Viggers: At what level was the
information campaign owned? How far down was authority delegated?
I suppose I could turn that round by saying what ease of access
did you have to the highest levels of authority?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: I felt
I had complete access to ministers and, if it was necessary, to
the Prime Minister. The way it was exercised, and the truth is
there were no difficulties that arose that should have been taken
or needed to be taken to the Prime Minister, I felt that working
in Whitehall I had free and full access. In terms of the theatre,
we do not just produce, for instance, in the psyops campaign leaflets
and allow young majors to start distributing those around the
streets or giving them drops by the Americans. Those messages
are approved at Ministry of Defence level, and by the Ministry
of Defence I mean the Secretary of State, so initially we were
maintaining and insisting on oversight on all of these messages
until we were comfortable that the theatre and the young operators,
particularly in the psyops arena, understood what the requirement
was. Similarly we insisted on oversight of American messages and
themes, so if we nationally disagreed with them we had the power
of veto over the Americans.
Q1601 Mr Cran: I wonder if we could move
to the international context of the information campaign because,
of course, all of your activities are not taking place within
a vacuum. How would you respond if I said to you that at least
it is my view, and I think it is many other people's view, that
in fact when the war began we were dealing with a very negative
international context, were we not? I am interested, and the Committee
would be interested, to know how you dealt with that, because
I presume it was at least in part your responsibility.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: The truth
is I suppose that the weakest area of our performance was our
ability to counter either the negative press or the negative messages
that in fact were coming out of Baghdad. There was no doubt that
Saddam Hussein is a seasoned practitioner of Information Operations.
Q1602 Chairman: Was.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: Indeed,
and actually we came second most of the time. Okay, we managed
to make the Minister of Information a comedy or a parody character
but in the very first stages he was quite coherent and issuing
messages that were doing us harm, and the weakness in our performance
which we are now addressing is we were not very good at responding
in a timely fashion to the criticism being issued around the world.
One of the dangers of Information Operations, of course, is that
sometimes you do not have the vehicle to release your reply or
your response into the international communities. Media operations
will tell you—I trust have told you—that you can craft
the message but if the media do not want to run with the story
or the riposte or reply, then you have no other vehicle of getting
it into a democratic media community. The BBC were at pains to
tell me that they were not an instrument of government and they
were independent, and therefore no matter how much we would like
a story to be carried, a riposte to be carried into the public
domain, if they were not interested because that was not the sexy
story this year, week or day, then you would find it nigh impossible
to counter some of the messages being used against you. It is
an area of weakness, and it is a critically important area that
we have to address in the coming months.
Q1603 Mr Cran: You have said to the Committee
that the Iraqis were really rather sophisticated in what they
had to say in influencing international opinion but apart from
what you have already said, if you had your time again, what would
you do differently to capture the high ground, given that you
had pretty negative press at the time?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: First
of all, if I may just slightly correct you, I do not think I said
they were sophisticated; I just said they were very good at it.
Q1604 Mr Cran: Do not let's worry about
the words; just better.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: It is
a lower scale but sheer volume and sheer arrogance and, of course,
the ability to lie, because that is not something that we allow
ourselves to do, and neither do I think that we should ever lie—I
think that the truth can be very compelling. You can say the same
message twenty ways and still be telling the truth and say the
same thing with slightly different nuances but the truth is compelling
in that sense, so we will always be at a disadvantage against
an adversary who is willing to lie. There is no answer to that
unless you can demonstrate that he is lying by proof. It often
is inadequate to go into the public domain and say, "He is
not telling the truth". A sceptical audience will say, "Well,
you are the one who is lying", or "You would say that,
wouldn't you", and I think those are not compelling answers.
What would I do differently if I started again? You have to start
early, is the answer. We should have started an information campaign
a couple of years before we did against Iraq, in my personal opinion.
Q1605 Mr Cran: And that is a practical
proposition?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: I believe
so, yes. You have to persuade in this particular instance the
Foreign Office that defence diplomacy needs to take on a more
aggressive style, and I am not sure that I or the Ministry of
Defence can deliver that but I think you have to be compelling
in your argument to say it is necessary and appropriate. So the
key to Information Operations is start early. If you genuinely
believe that the Ministry of Defence can deliver avoidance of
war fighting, then you have to give it time to run through, otherwise
what you find yourself doing is preparing the battle space, and
I feel that is woefully short of the remit placed upon me to deliver.
Q1606 Mr Cran: I know the Chairman wants
to intervene but I have one more point: again, just so that the
Committee can understand what you are all about, how limiting
was the explicit lack really of UN authority? Of course, the Attorney
General made it very clear that in international law the action
was legal, but there was not that explicit UN approval for the
action itself. How limiting was that for you, and also the divisions
within the Security Council? Were these massive minuses for you?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: Ultimately
not very limiting at all. You just have to recraft your messages
to see what legitimacy is placed in front of you. In this particular
instance the emphasis shifted to what Lord Goldsmith had gone
on record and said rather than where the UN had given us legitimacy,
so you just recraft your messages to convey a different government
policy. It would have been nice to have had buy-in at the UN level
at that stage because it would have allowed us to address some
of the international concerns, but in the end if you cannot deliver
that then you have to focus on what you have got, and I do not
think it was a major debilitating factor.
Q1607 Mr Cran: I understand the word
"recraft" as you use it, but give me an example, because
without an example I really do not know what you are saying.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: Well,
if I want to tell the Iraqi people that I believe what I am offering
them is a better form of life and a better future, then they need
to understand why I am prepared at the extreme end to invade their
country. It would be easier to tell them that the international
community through the auspices of the United Nations believes
that is appropriate. If you cannot do that, then you have to come
down to more specific instances and say that the United States
and the United Kingdom believe that there is a justification that
their leader is not just an outrageous man but is a man who presents
a threat to both the region and world stability. So now you focus
on Saddam Hussein rather than the international community. In
both cases you would have ended up at Saddam Hussein; in the second
case you just get there quicker.
Q1608 Chairman: You touched upon the
skills that the Iraqis had in countering our efforts. The popular
image of their effort is comical Ali who is seen as a buffoon.
Who was directing their psyops and Information Operations? Was
it a member of Saddam's cabinet, or mainly this guy who attracted
such amusement and bemusement, particularly towards the end of
the campaign?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: I will
need to be cautious here so that I do not stray into classified
information but I will endeavour to give you the best answer I
can. There is no doubt that the Minister of Information, and his
directorate, were part and parcel of the process. There is no
doubt that their intelligence service was conveying that, but
I think this frankly came from the top. We have indications that,
prior to Kosovo, Milosevic sent a considerable number of people
to Baghdad and there is no doubt in my mind that the main reason
they went to Baghdad was to understand Information Operations.
Milosevic effectively was better at using this tool against us
in the initial stages of Kosovo fundamentally because he was able
to lie again, but also because he understood the need and how
important this was. My directorate came as a direct result of
coming second to Milosevic, not Saddam Hussein, but there was
a recognition after Kosovo that we needed to be better over this.
Q1609 Chairman: You have explained our
success rate in influencing Iraq. Were you responsible for trying
to influence thinking amongst allies who were, putting it mildly,
less than enthusiastic—ie France and Germany? I would not
quite include Russia yet as an ally, but was that part of your
remit or somebody else's? Following on from that, who was responsible
for trying to persuade domestic opinion, particularly domestic
media, of our message? Did that come under the Ministry of Defence,
the Foreign Office, or whoever?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: The reason
I smiled when you asked the question is that my opposite number
in Washington owns the Office of Strategic Influence, and when
he fell foul of—well, I will not say the name but when he
fell foul of the State Department, of course, his directorate
was dissolved within twelve hours because it was seen that he
was using deception to persuade allies, including the United Kingdom,
to make sure that we were joined up to the campaign. These key
things, if you bear in mind this document I showed you was produced
not for the Ministry of Defence but for the cross-government piece,
start with home. I do not own that—that is very much media
operations, the Campbell group, the Foreign Office and the Home
Office, if it was necessary. I had an input to all three of the
next three groups in here, the regional, international and Iraq
piece. In terms of allies, frankly I do not think we saw it as
an information campaign. This was an issue for ministers and senior
military personnel to persuade around the conference table, rather
than to use messages and themes, our close allies that they needed
to understand why it was important we worked together on this
campaign.
Q1610 Mr Cran: Again, so that the Committee
can be absolutely clear, I wonder if you would set out again,
and I know you have touched on this, what you feel the key priorities
of the Information Operations campaign was. Was it to keep the
Iraqi army at home? That seemed to be the case in 1991, very successfully
as I recall. Was it to turn the leadership against Saddam Hussein?
Was it to keep the population quiescent? What was it? Or was it
a mixture?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: It was
a mixture of all of those and priorities changed quite dramatically
through the coercion phase of the conflict and through the reconstruction.
I would break down the three key elements of the regime during
the dissuasion phase as follows: this was their last chance to
understand that we were intent on a successful conclusion, and
if that meant conflict we were willing to take that step, so this
was their last chance to turn around. The Iraqi people were—I
will not say secondary at that stage but peripheral to the main
aim and the main thrust. Once we started to move towards the inevitability
of the conflict then we needed to persuade the Iraqi people that
we would do whatever we could to make sure they were safe and
that we minimised damage to both their country and they as individuals,
and therefore they became a very predominant group in the next
phase. They, of course, are the entire focus of the reconstitution
and reconstruction phase. Across all of that the military needed
to do whatever we could to make sure that those who perhaps were
not committed to the Ba'athist ideal would be willing to throw
their hands up when the war started. So throughout the entire
theme up until the end of the conflict the military army and the
Republican Guard were a focused audience as well. I am very sorry
but there is no simple answer to your question. The priority shifted
but, if I was going to break out three groups, those are the three
I would focus on.
Q1611 Mr Cran: Just so I can understand
this, how successful did you feel you were in those three phases,
because at times it seemed as if you were battling against events.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: We come
back to measures of effectiveness here.
Q1612 Mr Cran: Indeed.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: If, in
years to come I am sitting here again and we had just avoided
a war, I suspect the last thing people would say is what a brilliant
information campaign. They will say, "Well, wasn't that good
that the opposition spotted early enough that they did not want
to go into conflict?" So without a demonstrator of how capable
you are it is very difficult to say how well you do at Information
Operations. What I do believe compellingly is that you have to
try at all stages. The truthful answer to the conflict phase is
we met soldiers and interviewed soldiers who never saw the leaflet,
never heard a radio broadcast, and had no idea that we were making
overtures to them that if they formed up in certain patterns or
procedures they would be safe. On the other side, we have seen
generals who did capitulate and did form up in correct surrender
positions, and that could have only come through the information
piece. In the reconstitution piece, the audience is different.
We walk on the streets, we talk to the people: it might be worth
at this stage telling you that we sponsored putting a free democratic
newspaper into Iraq within hours of the war ending. It was being
produced in Kuwait; we got General Brims' soldiers on the ground
as a priority to deliver newspapers. That is not what they thought
they would be doing when the day before they had been shooting
people, but those newspapers were compelling. It was the first
free democratic press in Iraq and people were fighting in the
streets to get the newspapers. This was something that was worth
doing, and the benefit to us is that we were able to carry messages
in that newspaper. Some of it was just trivial in the sense of
what do I want to do and influence. It was telling youngsters
to stop picking up disposed ordnance in the streets and telling
them what it looked like. Some of it, unashamedly, was how to
influence people to understand that they needed to stay calm,
that the electricity did not work, but we were doing whatever
we could to rebuild and reconstitute.
Q1613 Mr Cran: Operations Security, as
I understand it, and I am reading these words, "is designed
to deny the enemy access to information of use about one's own
forces and seeks to reduce the amount of information available
to the enemy . . .". Did it remain good once the coalition
forces had entered Iraq, or did it break down?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: No, it
did not. It was good throughout. I think we have one recorded
incidence of a journalist overstepping the mark and he was dealt
with, and the rest of the community were left in no doubt that
that was the first and last breach. In terms of military security
within the military, it was absolute; we had no breaches. In terms
of managing the media and the information piece, we were finely
tuned from the very beginning to the need to make sure that messages
were controlled. This was one of the reasons why this document
was Secret and one of the reasons why we wanted to be closely
engaged with the Campbell group. It is high risk, particularly
when you have journalists in the field, but those are risks that
you have to take and those are elements of trust that you have
to demonstrate. If you do not demonstrate trust and the willingness
to take risk, then you will have journalists making things up
or compromising you purely because they are not in dialogue with
you.
Mr Cran: They do it the whole time in
this place, so there we are!
The Committee suspended from 3.52 pm to 4.02
pm for a division in the House of Commons.
Q1614 Mr Blunt: You have laid significant
emphasis on the importance of not lying and it is fundamental
to the credibility of your information campaign. How much do you
think you were handicapped by the fact that, whatever Members
of the House of Commons believed when the Prime Minister spoke
to us in September 2002 and March 2003, the majority were not
inclined to take him at his word? It has now been shown that there
were exaggerations within the documentation the government were
putting forward and it would appear on the face of it that the
exercise that was going on in that whole period was one of the
government seeking evidence that supported its thesis rather than
looking at the whole of the evidence across the piece and coming
to a conclusion. That would explain two million people on the
streets, a very widespread concern now on the basis of the exaggeration
of the threat and all the rest. How much do you think you were
undermined in the course of the campaign by that? How much do
you think your future credibility has been put at stake by the
manner in which the case for the campaign was presented at the
political level?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: The truth
is that information operations has to role with the punches and
has to be a living art that you reflect on a day to day basis.
What is the information that is in the public domain? What is
the reaction of the target audiences? Although I am not suggesting
that I own the domestic audience, we are very closely tied to
media operations in this sense. The impact on me was that it would
be so much easier if you had total, national buy-in to the concept
and the government's position. If you do not have that, you have
to look for messages and evidence that would support the legitimacy
of what you are doing. That, by and large, was not my gift. I
am not ducking out from under the question because I do think
it is very important. This fell very much more into the media
operations piece in terms of what does the domestic audience need
to be told now that will calm them down or allow them to understand
why the United Kingdom is still proceeding down this path. I do
not feel that I am very qualified to say much more than that.
I am very sorry that that is not a complete answer. The answer
to your question in terms of my information operations is it did
not have much effect because for me that was not the predominance
of the audience at that stage. I was very focused in the Middle
East, on the wider regional players and Iraq in particular.
Q1615 Mr Blunt: You gave an example.
We came second to Milosevic in terms of information operations.
Again, you put emphasis on telling the truth and we saw the Serbian
army at the end of 78 days' bombing largely leave Kosovo astonishingly
in tact. It would therefore appear that the Serbians were telling
rather more of the truth about what was happening than we were.
It would seem that we perhaps reinforced our reputation for not
being entirely complete with the truth.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: I will
not say Kosovo was a failure. Kosovo was a weakness. When we went
into the Kosovo crisis, I was director of targeting. Information
operations were two embryonic words that we were beginning to
understand. There was no UK information campaign during the Kosovo
crisis. When we came out of it and we had firmly come second,
we realised that this was something we needed to do pretty quickly.
I happened to be the right person on the block at the time, so
we build a directorate around Mike Heath and we moved forward
in terms of understanding a new and burgeoning art. In terms of
Kosovo itself, I do not think I entirely agree with what you have
said. I believe that we represented it as honestly as we saw it
and as honestly as we were able to interpret from the intelligence
that was coming in to us, whether that was reconnaissance or human
intelligence. We were subjected to limited inputs. What we were
able to ascertain led us to where we were. When we moved into
Iraq, our ability to obtain reconnaissance and human intelligence
was better and was also frankly deemed far more important. Therefore,
we were able to ascertain what effect we were having much more
clearly than we did during the Kosovo crisis. The difficulty with
people like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein is that they have no difficulty
in using apparent outrage to their advantage. A lot of the people
that we would deem as military targets in Iraq were wearing traditional
Arab clothes. They instantly become civilians rather than legitimate
military targets. We have no rebuttal process against that. The
story that the media would far rather run with is "Coalition
creates outrage and kills 37 innocent civilians." We know
that those were 37 military personnel on active duty but, without—a
dreadful phrase—that awful smoking gun, just saying it is
not enough. It is not persuasive in terms of telling the population
they are lying and we are telling the truth. They were not civilians;
they were military. Playing that sort of catch up game is always
immensely difficult. I am not remotely suggesting that mistakes
do not happen and that there are not unfortunate consequences
of military action, of course. More often than not, we were always
on the receiving end of bad news and finding it very difficult
to counter.
Q1616 Mr Blunt: If one looks at one's
images of the first Gulf war, one would think about a bombed bunker
and all the people killed in the bunker. One thinks of the operation
against Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was the pill factory that was
mistakenly bombed. One thinks of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade,
if one thinks of the Kosovo conflict, or one thinks of the refugee
convoy in Kosovo that was mistakenly bombed. Is there any way
that you are going to be able to change that ability of the media
to present things in the most negative context so that, for people
who want to create images of conflicts that we have been involved
in, those are always the most major ones that leap to mind first?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: The best
you can do is anticipate the worst. I was very keen before we
moved into the conflict that we established a rebuttal cell in
anticipation of the worst. I will not say it was a foregone conclusion
but there had to be a chance that eventually there would be unfortunate
civilian casualties throughout whatever context. Those things
need addressing. There would be mistakes. There could possibly
be blue on blue incidents. You do not need, if you have the right
team crafted together to work on it, to know exactly what the
specific detail is. What you need to do is anticipate what you
are going to say when you turn on the television and Sky is reporting
22 civilians were killed. The best you can hope to do is to be
quick in your rebuttal, still working on the principle of honesty,
and, if there is releasable information that would support and
demonstrate why you believe you are right, you have to use it.
If I could give you an example during Kosovo—I choose my
words with caution here—a certain respected broadsheet journalist
carried an outrageous story on the editorial page of one of the
broadsheets which was entirely false. We could have written to
that particular newspaper and had a letter printed that said,
"This is rubbish", but we chose not to. We chose to
compromise intelligence, call the journalist into the MoD and,
over a cup of tea, asked him to understand that everything he
had written was a fabrication. He was talking about a monastery
that had been destroyed, a 15th century bridge that had been destroyed,
both of which were still standing some two weeks after his story.
At the end of the conversation when he accepted that his story
was untrue, he said, "Do you want me to publish a retraction?"
We said, "No, because it will be lost on page 27 in the obituaries.
It will be in small type and meaningless. We would like you to
just be a more responsible journalist in the future." The
same journalist for the same newspaper ran a very similar story
during Iraq, so he did not learn. Perhaps we should have learned
that he was not to be trusted, but there you go.
Q1617 Mr Blunt: On 11 January, the Americans
began an e-mail campaign e-mailing political figures using telephone
messages as well and text messages about providing information
on weapons of mass destruction and the rest. There appears to
have been a huge effort placed on the existence of weapons of
mass destruction and around dissuading their willingness to use
them; yet it now appears that there were not any. Therefore, why
do you think the regime were prepared to have this attack happen
if they simply did not have any of these weapons? Why did we fail
to dissuade them, which was our primary objective?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: I hope
I am allowed to express my personal opinion. I do not personally
believe that currently lack of evidence is a demonstrator that
there were no weapons of mass destruction. I believe that the
jury is still out. On the job I am currently employed in, I believe
that there is a possibility that there will be demonstrators at
least of intent. I would be willing to go into closed session
to discuss that further but I would not like to do that in open
forum at the moment. Beyond that, this was a regime that was immensely
difficult to get inside. This man created an environment of distrust
at all levels, even with his own sons. Nobody talked to anybody
else because the chances were they would be dead in the morning.
No one trusted anyone else and he had over the years replaced,
murdered, cajoled, threatened, held people to ransom so that they
understood they belonged totally to him. The biggest problem that
we had to overcome—and I think this is an admission of failure—is
that we could not break through that inevitable wall of silence.
People might have been influenced, but they were not going to
pass that message on. They had experienced over the last 20 years
similar messages that purported to come from people against Saddam
Hussein but had actually come from Saddam Hussein. Once they had
either failed to report the message, failed to react to it or
indeed had reacted to it, they were dead in the morning. This
was a culture where no one trusted anyone else. It was very difficult
to break through that.
Q1618 Chairman: $25 million appears to
be the answer.
Air Vice Marshal Heath: Absolutely.
I wish it was mine.
Q1619 Mr Blunt: As far as the information
operations themselves, when would you identify coalition information
operations as commencing and when did British information operations
commence?
Air Vice Marshal Heath: The preparation
started back in October. When did we first press the button and
when did start actively operating? The answer is both a date and
a statement. The date is on the first day of military action when
the conflict started. The second answer is too late. We should
have been doing a large element of this activity beforehand, but
the preparation phase led us through virtually up to the conflict.
We were doing some lower level stuff in terms of the theming and
messaging that was going on. The work through such bodies as the
Campbell Group was happening. We were providing information. We
were looking at how we should deliver messages. We were contributing
to the American message delivery but the national message delivery
did not start until the first day of the conflict.
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