The Hindu Business Line : Intelligence fraud

BOTH THE US President, Mr George W. Bush, and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, are in serious trouble for their suspected manipulation of intelligence in order to justify their attack on Iraq. Mr Bush is further accused of including in his State of the Union message to the US Congress in January 2003 a false assertion that Iraq had acquired material from Niger for its nuclear weapons programme. The British intelligence which had originated the report had subsequently discarded it as untenable, but the war-mongers in the White House still went ahead and made their boss spin out the yarn on what was a solemn occasion.

Likewise, Mr Blair stands discredited before public opinion for the dossier on Iraq which, among other preposterous claims, averred that the President of Iraq, Mr Saddam Hussein, was in a position to hurl his weapons of mass destruction in less than 45 minutes — a charge which was known to the intelligence community to be absurd even at the time it was made. In the UK, the "sexing up" of intelligence by the Government has ended up in the tragic suicide of the Defence Department analyst, Dr David Kelly.

The issue in both cases is not the misuse of intelligence by the political class in those countries. For some inexplicable reason, Mr Bush behaved like a person possessed as regards Iraq and Mr Hussein, and was hell-bent on war, and Mr Blair too was determined to dragoon Britain into it, to the extent of cooking up the grounds. This was only to be expected in the neurotic frame of mind in which they were at the time. The real issue is about the intelligence community knowingly allowing itself to become the stooge of politicians, belying the stringent standards of professional integrity with which it is associated in the public mind. At the very least, the question is why functionaries in the CIA or the MI6 readily became party to gossipy stuff finding its way into official dossiers and declarations.

What is most disturbing in this context is the revelation by a former British diplomat, Sir Peter Heap, that MI6 agents routinely embellish their reports and even pass off matter lifted from newspaper articles as having been received from "a well-placed source". He says in the columns of The Guardian that it is common for British intelligence officials to dress up "gossip and tittle-tattle" as intelligence coming from authoritative sources!

What about India? A high-power committee (of which I was the Member-Secretary) set up in 1977 to go into the misuse of IB and CBI during the Emergency had recommended safeguards against these setups fabricating reports to suit political vagaries. Presumably the National Security Advisory Board also has addressed the issue. But the people continue to be in the dark about the action taken.

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