Two examples of what

turbo-charged power

is all about

George Robertson

What with the publication of the National Security Strategy and then the Strategic Security and Defence Review, the Iraq inquiry and 7/7 inquest, combined with the first-ever televised speech by the chief (‘C’) of the Secret Intelligence Service, nobody can say that the issue of secret intelligence and how policy makers use it is not highly topical.
     Indeed after the Hutton Report into Dr David Kelly's death, the Butler review of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, at least two weighty parliamentary reports on the Iraq war and the splurge of material from Wikileaks one might say that intelligence has never before been more intensively discussed than in these days. In all of these reports are contained information, judgements, background and sensitive documentation given quite unprecedented exposure – but too much of it quickly ignored and overlooked as the reports are merely skimmed and then superseded by the next news event.
     The problem is that more and more information is being published to satisfy a thirst for knowledge and to dampen concern, yet a lot of that knowledge and most of that concern remains unconvinced since the concerned seekers after the information only want material to justify their own view. The more you publish and exposé, the more they think is being hidden.
     And here lies a crucial dilemma for the policy-makers. What do you tell and why do you tell it?
     I want to use just two first-hand examples of being a policy/decision-maker while I was in government. Operation Desert Fox – the attack on Iraqi WMD command and control in late 1998, and the attack on Serb military targets in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999. Both involved military action, and both were fundamentally driven by secret intelligence.
     But first let me make a more general point about secret intelligence. It is owned by the government of the day. Until John Major set up the intelligence and security oversight committee in 1994, made up of members of both houses of parliament and reporting to the prime minister, there was no forum for sharing secret intelligence with non-government lawmakers. There had been no tradition, as there is in the US and other countries, of considering national security to be a broad responsibility for the country and not just the province of the government alone.
     In my 18 years in opposition, all of them on the front-bench and 11 of them specialising in foreign affairs, I was only once briefed on secret intelligence and indeed only on a couple of occasions saw any paper classified at, and never above, 'Confidential'.
     It was a zero-sum game. Yet after that 18-year-long secret intelligence desert I became, literally overnight, Her Britannic Majesty's principal secretary of state for defence and, as a consequence, an inhabitant of that exclusive club of prime minister, foreign secretary, chancellor and defence secretary who see all intelligence and are the main customers of the intelligence agencies. Some training!
     The experience was to be a revelation but not one that I can fully share with you since I am still bound by the Official Secrets Act. But to go from zero visibility to total immersion is a remarkable experience but not one which, in a democracy and a parliamentary one at that, makes great sense. One might reflect that it could just be because of that 'winner takes all' approach that communicating the judgemental outcomes from intelligence is so difficult to sell. It was also during my time at the MoD that we went from 'if only you knew what I know, you would understand' to detailed dossiers showing 'what I know and why I am doing what I'm doing' with not much time in between. All it took was that challenge from Sadaam in 1998.
     There is naturally something about secret intelligence which carries an aura of mystique. The words 'Top Secret – UK Eyes only' or the blizzard of code words – some of which are secret themselves, have a cachet of their own. There are some decision-makers in the world – even in the UK – who only believe something if it's in the intelligence briefing. One president told me that he never read the newspapers – 'I get all I need in my briefings'. Since it is said that the time gap in some countries between the intel briefing and it being in the papers was 24 hours, maybe he was right and just slightly ahead of the rest of us.
     In his weighty and perceptive new book, 'Securing the State', Sir David Omand, once Britain's national intelligence coordinator (and incidentally also in his time director of GCHQ, both Home Office and Cabinet Office permanent secretary, and MoD policy director) makes the point: 'If all knowledge is power, secret intelligence is turbo-charged power'.
     Sadly that is what it is considered to be and it is in that opaque, shadowy world of turbo-charged power that life and death judgements and decisions have to be made.

Take Operation Desert Fox in late 1998. Sadaam Hussein was in a defiant mood – especially with the UN weapons inspectors (UNSCOM – United Nations Special Commission) who were conducting inquiries in Iraq. His obstruction with the post-Gulf war UN Security Council resolutions was a continuing issue as was his refusal to pay regard to 12 subsequent resolutions and his challenging of the no-fly zones. When the frustration of the inspectors got to a critical stage in 1998, the intervention of UN secretary general Kofi Annan had produced no solution and the UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn, it was clear that some form of robust action was necessary.
     Why was that? The reason came from the secret intelligence of the day and the judgements on it which had to be made by the decision-making politicians of the time.
     Let it be recalled that those considering the secret intelligence and its import were not George W Bush, Dick Cheyney nor Donald Rumsfeld but Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright and William Cohen. In London Robin Cook and myself aided Tony Blair in assessing and judging on the intelligence. The fact that much of the intelligence was the same as that used in 2002/3 seems to have been lost in history, unaffected by the illuminated hindsight given to later events.
     In Lord Butler's report concerning that period he publishes the top secret joint intelligence committee assessments which we alone at the time were privy to. On these, we politicians, a mere 18 months into government, had to make a judgement and decide on whether or not to take momentous military action.
     Before I quote what we were told at the time let me give David Omand's definition of an 'assessment'. 'A strategic intelligence assessment is a justified set of judgements about a course of events, informed by having reached the best possible explanation of the underlying motives and circumstances of the individuals and organisations being observed, informed by the real understanding of their past behaviour.'
     Given that clear definition, when the joint intelligence committee says, as it did on 24 September 1998: 'We cannot rule out the possibility that Saddam retains a handful of missiles…these could be available for use within a matter of weeks or perhaps even days', what are decision-makers to make of that?
     On biological weapons capability the JIC said on 24 September 1998: 'Some biological warfare (BW) production equipment, stocks of agents and even weapons are probably retained by Iraq'. On the same day in September, the joint intelligence committee said this on chemical weapons: '…some CW agents, munitions precursor chemicals and production equipment remain hidden'.
     Butler also made the important point in relation to intelligence about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons at that time: 'The intelligence community will also have in mind that Iraq had used its chemical weapons in the past, and was engaged in a sustained programme to try to deceive United Nations inspectors and to conceal from them evidence of prohibited programmes'.
     In 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, his lethal intentions were underestimated. In 1998 was this new generation of politicians likely to risk doing the same?
     Sir John Sawers, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, in his ground-breaking speech recently said this: 'We try to see into the minds of our adversaries and predict their behaviour'. That is indeed a proper and valuable purpose of the intelligence agencies and on the basis of what I have quoted and much more in Butler, we had to make the grave decision and to attack Saddam's Iraq.
     After a month of toing and froing involving the return of inspectors, as well as a certain Monica Lewinski, a movie called 'Wag the Dog' and an impeachment hearing in the US Congress called for the day after the date recommended by the military for attacking, the decision to go was taken. The cabinet was fully behind it. As Tony Blair's autobiography 'My Journey' says: 'The inspectors went back in, but it was clear Saddam was just messing about. Finally when their report came in mid-December, it was damning again. This time Bill decided we had to act, and we did so with four days of aerial strikes in Operation Desert Fox. It was a nerve-racking time, and the operation was a limited success'.
     It was at this time, and partly due to the suspicion alive in the US that the attack was motivated, 'Wag the Dog' style, as a diversion from the impending impeachment, that the decision was taken to release some of the secret intelligence we had, as mentioned above, to ensure that people knew what we were doing and why. Robin and I took to the TV screens with bags of sugar to illustrate the nature of chemical and biological attacks and Bill Cohen and Madeline Albright did the same and also bravely did a 'town hall' at Ohio Sate University – not an experiment in communications which they would want to follow again.
    Four hundred Cruise missiles, 800 fast jet sorties – all directed on what secret intelligence had told two governments was likely to be the infrastructure of chemical, biological and missile capabilities. Tony, Robin and I had no doubts at all that it had to be done.

It was only a few months later that the same characters in the new government were to be faced by another 'nerve-racking' dilemma – Slobodan Milosovic's objective of cleansing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority population. I do not intend to rehearse the full history of the months leading up to the commencement of hostilities against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on 23 March 1999, nor am I able to give you extracts of the intelligence reports of the time. Kosovo was a success, so there were no post-mortems and no endless cries for political blood and blame. There was precious little credit either – except in Kosovo and all but one of its neighbours.
     However the fact that 19 NATO nations took military action against a sovereign nation state without a UN Security Council resolution required no little soul-searching in each capital and a lot of secret intelligence about what was happening on the ground and in the decision-makers' heads in Belgrade.
     As Sir John Sawers said: 'Secret intelligence is important information that others wish you not to know; it's information that deepens our understanding of a foreign country or grouping, or reveals their true intentions. It's information that gives us new opportunities for action'. And, I may add, it's information which places a very heavy burden of responsibility on the decision-makers about how to act on it.
     The demands placed on Milosovic by Security Council resolution 1,199 of 23 September 1998 were severe. The resolution highlighted the impending human catastrophe in Kosovo and demanded a cease-fire and the start of a real political dialogue. But it did not say 'or else'. Indeed the Russians and Chinese made it clear that any threat of action would be vetoed. However the next day NATO defence ministers met in Villamura in Portugal and at that meeting I proposed that NATO should say, and mean, 'or else' and this became NATO, but not UN, policy.
     Interestingly given the legal anxieties of acting without a specific UN Security Council resolution, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general of the time made these delphic comments in New York: 'To those for whom the greatest threat to international order is the use of force in the absence of a Security Council mandate, one might ask – not in the context of Kosovo – but in the context of Rwanda: If in those dark days and hours leading up to the genocide, a coalition of states had been prepared to act in defence of the Tutsi population, but did not receive prompt authorisation, should such a coalition have stood aside and allowed the horror to unfold?'.
     All the time pictures of internal refugees freezing and wet and starving were nightly on TV and secret intelligence was telling us that although Milosovic was pretending to negotiate, he was planning a full-scale and murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Serbs were saying 'a village a day keeps NATO away' and the German intelligence service was discovering that Milosovic's plan was called 'Operation Horse-shoe'.
     As I said in my report 'Kosovo: An account of the crisis' (MoD 10/99), 'The plan had been drawn up months before and showed that while Milosovic pretended to negotiate, his forces had been preparing to annihilate. Had we not been prepared to launch the air strikes and continue them for as long as was necessary, the atrocities could still be continuing'.
     Let nobody underestimate the seriousness of the dilemma facing NATO ministers at that time. In the major European countries we were all pretty new and raw. In the UK both Robin Cook and I had been veterans of the anti-Vietnam war generation at university. In France Alain Richard, defence minister and Hubert Vedrine, foreign minister, were of the same background and had only just won a surprise election victory. In Germany only Rudolf Scharping, the defence minister, had seniority having been candidate for chancellor but his foreign minister colleague Joschka Fischer had only recently been a stone-throwing street rioter.
     Some urged caution on us: 'You cannot bomb Milosovic back to the negotiating table', we were told. Others predicted a long inconclusive campaign against a well-armed and motivated Serb military, with major casualties. I still have some letters from distinguished people giving dire warnings. The now first minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, called the mission to stop the slaughter and expulsions 'unpardonable folly'.
     The key dilemma was in the timing of the action. Not everyone was privy to the secret intelligence which we, as ministers, had received. The sickeningly violent nature of Operation Horse-shoe was masked by the 'village a day' tactics. And yet we had the information and we had to make a decision. Much later on one European minster told me that we should have postponed the bombing until the cattle trucks of expellees had entered neighbouring Macedonia at Easter – 10 days later. If we had, he said, we would have had public opinion behind us to carpet-bomb Belgrade.
     We knew what was going on, knew what Milosovic could do (indeed had done) and the decision was taken to launch the attacks on 23 March. Each NATO nation had to find its own legal mandate and explain to its own people. Until the trains of refugees crossed the Macedonian border we had the tricky task of explaining why, and when, we had to take action. We had to do it to allay that concern I have mentioned, yet simultaneously protect sources of intelligence whose own lives could have been on the line.
     Sir John Sawers heavily underlines in his speech the need to protect the sources used and the agents who supply the secret human intelligence. It is in establishing the balance between that responsibility and yet being as open as possible on why you are acting that the anxious decision-maker has to make a judgement. It is not easy.
     After Easter with graphic pictures of the human tide being expelled from Kosovo we had no particular need to convince the public of the justice of the attacks – except that Milosovic made the case that the ethnic cleansing had been precipitated by the NATO bombing. Against this thin, dishonest propaganda we had to keep up a relentless campaign of information, some of it from secret intelligence from inside Kosovo and Serbia, and some of it plain, persuasive facts. We did that daily for the 78 days of the campaign and it did much, with the relentlessness of the bombing, to persuade Milosovic and his henchmen that they could not win.
     Sir David Omand, a man of stunning intelligence and good sense and with monumental experience, tells us this in his book: 'Senior policy customers, like the general public, are in general not good at understanding risk and relative probabilities, important skills in assessing intelligence'. Maybe, Sir David, but these customers still have to make the decisions. They have to weigh up the assessments, measure the caveats, discount the wordsmithing, think of the 'general public', its safety and security and come to a judgement. Do something or do nothing.
     Get it right and you are briefly a hero. Get it wrong and the caveats will string you out to dry. That's what turbo-charged power is all about.

This was the text of a lecture given recently at
Aberystwyth University

George Robertson (Lord Robertson of Port Ellen) is former secretary-general of NATO and former secretary of state for defence.