Licence to goof

Andrew Gilligan says that the intelligence services have a chronic tendency to make mistakes The government may have fallen out with some of its new friends — the CBI is moaning about taxes, Rupert Murdoch is

unhappy with the European constitution, the military is muttering about cuts — but its love for at least one pillar of the establishment is as strong as ever.

The Prime Minister speaks of intelligence with reverence, and as a major influence on his actions. 'Sit in my seat. Here is the intelligence. Here is the advice. Do you ignore it?' he asked in his famous meanon-culpa speech in Sedgefield earlier this year. He did admit that intelligence 'has limitations' but he went on to say that it would be used `to a greater degree than ever before' in a 'new type of war'.

The intelligence services are the only major group of public-sector employees whose work has never been criticised by any member of the government. Mr Blair has never made any 'scars on my back'-type speeches about them. But the relationship might, frankly, have been better for all concerned if it were a little less doe-eyed.

Every few days comes a new story showing the severe, systemic frailty of intelligence, and the deep inadvisability of leaning on it as firmly as Mr Blair professes to. We already knew, for instance, that much of the US intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction came from Ahmed Chalabi, once the Pentagon's favourite Iraqi dissident but now, along with his WMD claims, badly discredited. This week's scandal, however, is the allegation that Mr Chalabi's dodgy data did not come simply from his own imagination, to serve the interests of his group, but was in fact part of a campaign by Iranian intelligence to manipulate the US into war. The story might seem fantastic, were it not for the fact that some elements of it appear to have been confirmed by the CIA.

Whatever the truth of the Chalabi saga — and Pentagon-CIA rivalry might have something to do with the allegations now being made — one thing seems clear. In intelligence, one should beware of hearing only what one wants to hear. For the last two months, off and on, I have been making a Channel 4 programme on the performance of the spooks, with the rough question: was their catastrophic failure over Iraqi WMD the exception, or the rule?

I and my producer, Richard Sanders, have talked to high-level consumers of intelligence from the MoD and the Foreign Office, and to some of the lowerlevel producers from the Joint Intelligence Committee assessments staff, military intelligence and MI6. Their verdict is uncomfortable. The spies are good at tactical intelligence. They did extremely well in Northern Ireland, almost certainly making the key difference in the struggle with the IRA. But at the grand strategic level, says a former assistant chief of the defence staff, it has now become clear that the intelligence services know little more than the average Sunday newspaper reader.

On the few occasions over the last 20 years when the performance of the agencies can be publicly assessed against events, the results have usually been rather seriously wrong. Days before the invasion of the Falklands, we were told, the spooks described Argentina as `sabre-rattling'; there would be no invasion. So too, in 1990, did they describe Saddam's troop movements around Kuwait. Gorbachev was assessed as a fraud; there would, said the JIC, be no real change in the Communist monolith for the foreseeable future, It wasn't always the people on the ground who erred; it was the expectations of those on the receiving end that guided and shaped often nebulous data from the field.

That data, too, can be highly questionable — but insufficiently questioned. In normal life, the less we know about a source of information, the more sceptical we are about it. The mystique of the intelligence services has managed to invert this rule. The normal questions (Who gave us this information? What were his motives? How much is he in a position to know?) are not easily asked, still less answered. Sir Peter Heap, a former British ambassador, described the MI6 reports leaving his embassy as 'commonly little more than gossip and tittle-tattle, frequently so at variance with known facts that we knew them to have little or no credibility'. Sir Peter once spotted that the MI6 officer in his embassy had simply copied a report almost word for word from the local newspaper, sending it to London dressed up as intelligence from a 'wellplaced source'. The commanders going to the South Atlantic had to be sent off with the main information which MI6 possessed about Argentinian capabilities — photocopied pages from Jane's Fighting Ships.

There are far fewer Pashtu-speaking spies blending seamlessly into Afghan hillsides than the tabloids like to imagine; the vast majority of agents in the field are what they always have been, white Britons operating out of our embassies under diplomatic

cover, Spooks are very like journalists: always under pressure to come up with new stuff. Like journalists, their work is sometimes imperfect. But unlike us, they do not seem to be held to account when they make mistakes. So they keep on making them.

The secret world suffers from the normal failings of any large bureaucracy, but unlike any other part of the public service it has never been subjected to rigorous external performance tests. Some work is now done by the National Audit Office, but the process is not nearly as developed as elsewhere. There have been reforms, but not such extensive reforms as in other parts of government. Politicians, if no longer the press, still regard the spooks as above criticism. In short, the intelligence services are in the position of the royal family in about, say, 1987. Not, as we have learned with the Windsors, a recipe for an entirely successful and well-managed organisation.

But how can a secret service ever be scrutinised without losing its unique attribute, its secrecy? The Americans — and indeed most other countries in Nato — seem to manage it. They regard the British intelligence service rather as we once regarded the Taleban — people whose leaders have a strange aversion to having their pictures taken. Not that greater public openness necessarily guards against error — but it might well bring our spies a much needed boost in public confidence and credibility.

The intelligence services are not dishonest or stupid. They recognise their problems perfectly well. Their reports are not as black and white as Mr Blair sometimes chooses to paint them. If the draft of the Iraq dossier they originally produced had been published as it stood — unsexed-up — it would have been much less wrong.

Intelligence services and political propagandists have, to some extent, always been bedfellows. They need each other. Politics informs the interpretation of intelligence at all levels; and the work of the intelligence services has always been used politically (think of those 'Soviet threat' pamphlets the MoD used to produce during the Cold War). The difference over Iraq was that because of political and diplomatic miscalculations, the intelligence had to take the whole weight of the justification for war — a burden that it could never possibly bear.

Thirty Minutes: Do Our Spies Sex It Up? is on Channel 4 on Saturday 29 May at 6 p.m.