[A-List] UK secret state: unhappy with US-led "joint intelligence"

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The trouble with joint intelligence

Any Iranian plot to dupe the CIA will affect Britain for the worse

Crispin Black
Wednesday May 26, 2004
The Guardian

The allegation that the United States was duped by Iranian intelligence,
operating through the Pentagon's client Ahmad Chalabi, into removing Saddam
Hussein, is an intriguing one. The CIA apparently has "hard evidence" that
Chalabi's intelligence chief Aras Karim Habib was an Iranian double agent.

At first sight it seems rather a tall story. Seducing the Americans into
invading Iraq to get rid of your old (but much weakened) enemy, Saddam
Hussein, might make the Iranians appear fiendishly clever. But with US
forces already in Afghanistan it also completed the American strategic
encirclement of Iran - an extraordinarily risky strategy for a theocratic
regime that is deeply unpopular. And the mullahs could never be sure that,
once Iraq was secured, President Bush might decide to apply direct military
pressure on them. But assuming the other guy thinks in the same way that you
do - "transferring judgment" - is one of the cardinal sins of intelligence
analysis, so the scenario is at least possible. Maybe the Iranian
intelligence puppet-masters are that astute.

The conspiracy theory also has another weakness. It assumes that
intelligence was the crucial driver in President Bush's decision to invade
Iraq. I doubt it was that instrumental. The president made a wide-ranging
case for an invasion of Iraq of which intelligence was just a part. That is
why the non-appearance of weapons of mass destruction has been much less
embarrassing in Washington than in London.

And there are other factors we need to take into account to read and
understand this latest intelligence brouhaha.

Given the timing, it may be that this is more about events inside the
Beltway than in Baghdad. Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the tight
group of advisers who planned and so brilliantly executed the lightning
invasion of Iraq (a major military achievement, whatever you think about
their post-war planning) made one big mistake before embarking on their
Middle East adventure - alienating both the CIA and the state department.
You can do one or the other, not both.

The state department, rightly as it has turned out, wanted more
international involvement in the war and the deployment of "soft power" to
ensure a stable Iraq in the future. The CIA was simply furious that the
Pentagon had butted in on the business of intelligence assessment, which is
their bailiwick - particularly when it comes to gaining the ear of the
president.

In Washington as in Baghdad, the old adage "My enemy's enemy is my friend"
truly applies. But the time was not ripe for cutting the Pentagon down to
size. The CIA, in particular, was nervous that the 9/11 inquiry might point
the finger squarely at them.

Recently, as a result of continuing difficulties in Iraq and the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, the Pentagon hawks have been demoted in the food chain and
find themselves now the prey. The delicious irony is completed by fact that
the CIA has asked another old rival, the FBI, to investigate Chalabi's
contacts in the Pentagon. The move also reflects the waning star of their
patron, Vice-President Cheney. Secretary of defence in the first Gulf war,
he is well-known in Washington as an avid consumer of intelligence. He
usually receives his own intelligence brief just after dawn - some hours
before the president gets his in the situation room beneath the White House.
Cheney's prestige and influence were crucial in allowing the Pentagon's way
of doing things in Iraq to prevail.

These events have, as always, implications for the UK's intelligence
community, and leave me feeling uneasy. The close intelligence relationship
between London and Washington is usually presented as a great feather in our
cap. I am beginning to have my doubts.

The US intelligence community is influential in London. Indeed the CIA's
most senior representative in London often attends meetings of the UK's
Joint Intelligence Committee. Most of the time the UK's intelligence
position on any matter, including the celebrated "dossiers", is likely to be
at least partly built on the American point of view. In the end it does not
matter whether Washington has been duped by the Iranians or whether the US
intelligence community is having one of its periodic bureaucratic turf
wars - either way the spillover will have affected the UK's intelligence
machinery for the worse.

It's time, once again, that we had a fully British intelligence process -
British intelligence collected by British means and put together by British
analysts to produce a British judgment. I think our American allies would
find it useful.

· Crispin Black is a former government intelligence analyst; he is a
director of Janusian Security Risk Management