Secret service boss who came out of the shadows

THE appointment of John Scarlett as the first publicly identified head of MI6 must be a serious blow to the morale of the secret service.

This was the man who, in compiling the dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, compromised one of the most sacred principles of his profession: he confused political loyalty with the integrity of the information he was providing. As chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee during the preparations for war, it was he who allowed Downing Street to interfere with a report on the threat posed to the West by Saddam Hussein; he who accepted suggestions from two of Tony Blair’s most senior advisers, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, which strengthened the wording of that report; he who included a highly dubious and subsequently discredited allegation that Iraq possessed missiles which could be ready to fire within 45 minutes.

This latter claim, based on a single source, was said by Scarlett to have been uncontested. In fact, as we now know from the Hutton Inquiry, it was challenged from within MI6 by senior intelligence officers, and was dismissed by the director of the CIA, George Tenet. Scarlett, however, not only went ahead and included it, he accepted new wording from Downing Street which strengthened its impact. Although he himself was aware that, at best, the warnings referred only to battlefield weapons which were incapable of reaching any regional target, he neither clarified this point to the Prime Minister who included it in his speech to the House of Commons, nor subsequently challenged newspaper headlines which reported it as a 45 minute threat to peace.

Perhaps his single most breathtaking concession to political pressure was to accede to a last-minute request from Powell to alter the whole tenor of the dossier. After the deadline for accepting changes had passed, Powell noticed that one paragraph referred to "defensive" use by Saddam of chemical and biological weapons. Surely, he said, this should be changed. Scarlett agreed, recalled the document, and altered it to read: "Saddam is willing to use chemical and biological weapons, including against his own Shia population."

What Lord Hutton revealed was that Scarlett had grown far closer to Downing Street than any of his predecessors would have allowed. I have spoken to one former JIC chairman, who said he was deeply shocked by the way in which Scarlett not only allowed political advisers to take part in the assessment of the document, but went on to accept alterations that they proposed. In his day, he said, they would have been told to "get lost."

The subsequent disclosures that there were in fact no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, and that the dossier itself was threadbare, have gravely damaged the standing of MI6 itself, and have undermined trust in its independence. For Scarlett himself, the architect of that mistrust, to be promoted into the top job merely adds insult to injury.

Yet perhaps it may be possible to extract some advantage from his appointment, and from his very public interrogation at the Hutton Inquiry. For the first time in its long, and not always distinguished history, the head of SIS (as MI6 is officially known) has not only been named, but filmed, photographed and interviewed. It means that a precedent has been set. The process of accountability, the actual cross-questioning of an intelligence chief, has advanced the notion that intelligence is not, after all, forbidden territory - the one area of government operation permanently protected from public exposure. Unlike other countries, such as the United States, where the head of CIA can be cross-examined by a congressional committee, intelligence officers in Britain may not be openly questioned. The Intelligence and Security Committee may hear evidence, but only in camera, and its findings are reported to the Prime Minister. If one thing is clear from the Iraq fiasco, that is no longer enough to satisfy public trust. Open proceedings, publicly reported, are a minimum requirement.

Scarlett’s appearance in front of Lord Hutton, and the interrogation of the present head of SIS, Sir Richard Dearlove, albeit from a secret location, show that information on intelligence matters may be sought and gained in public without endangering the whole edifice of national security. Yet this notion has been resisted in Britain since 1924 when Austen Chamberlain, as foreign secretary, told the House of Commons: "...if you once begin disclosure it is perfectly obvious to me as to Hon Members opposite that there is no longer any Secret Service and that you must do without it."

For the next 70 years even the existence of SIS was denied. All post-war Prime Ministers up to Margaret Thatcher reiterated the same view. Ironically, however, it was her establishment of the Franks Committee into the origins of the Falklands War that not only allowed the interrogation of intelligence officers for the first time but also strengthened the JIC, giving it a more independent role.

The creation of the Commons’ Intelligence and Security Committee was a further hesitant step in the direction of openness, but more needs to be done. The credibility of the ISC has been weakened by the very fact that it conducts its hearings in private and reports directly to the Prime Minister. However independent it believes itself to be, in the eyes of the public it is a creature of government. At the same time, great damage has been done in recent years to the overall standing of the intelligence services. The mistakes made in Iraq, the failure to prevent some of al-Qaeda’s worst atrocities, the inability to track down and capture Osama bin Laden, all these have undermined public trust. People want better information about the threats facing Britain, they need to be reassured that they are being told the truth, and they want the facts given to them by those who are in a position to know, rather than by politicians whose agenda may be suspect. If the head of MI6 were allowed to speak out more often about terrorist threats, this would serve to correct some of the false and distorted information which can give rise to quite unnecessary public fears.

At the same time, this is a huge area of public spending. The intelligence services cost us some £1.6bn a year. It seems only reasonable for the public, which pays for it, to be given more information about how its money is spent.

MI6 itself is adamantly against any change. It argues that the more light is shed on how it operates, the less effective it will be. Some officers even go so far as to say that a wider public role for the head of MI6 could increase pressure for the organisation to pursue aims that are popular with voters, rather than simply doing what it thinks is right.

But here we come back to Scarlett. By his actions he has undermined the very idea of ‘rightness’ - that MI6 is motivated only by the need to produce the best, most accurate, most up-to-date intelligence on the threats that face our country. With his appointment comes a general and jaundiced view that the intelligence services are there simply to serve up what their political masters require. If that perception is to be met head on and overturned, then Scarlett may need to appear more often at the bar of public opinion and explain his position openly and honestly.