The Private Transcripts MI6 - SIS2 Part 1 - Abdul Qadeer Khan ...seller of nuclear secrets to "axis of evil" countries

 

We dont know what SIS2 looks like but here's a completely random image
of a member of the general public who probably looks nothing like him

The evidence session of SIS2 starts with Sir John Chilcot asking him by way of introduction: “One further question I would just like to put at this stage is simply about your designation. How do you now describe yourself and your past career for public purposes in the work that you are now undertaking?”

The answer is redacted.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: That's very helpful. That's the factual position.

This reminded me very much of the opening forward of the House at Pooh Corner where, when the narrator asks Pooh  what  the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The  what of a what?”, but luckily  Owl  kept  his  head  and  told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction.  One wonders what the point is of transcribing a question but not the answer.  Particularly when it can be deduced from further un-redacted evidence. 

Never mind …let’s plod on  to the question of when SIS2 realised the level of US interest in Iraq ...to which the evasive answer is he’s not sure but some time in summer of 2002.  We then go over the run up to war all over again …

SIR MARTIN GILBERT: What was your understanding of the different factions within the United States administration
towards the United Nations route that was determined by the President in September 2002?

SIS2: Well, there was always a faction within the Bush administration that was fairly viscerally disinclined to involve the United Nations in anything at all, and the people who espoused that route were well documented, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other members [redacted].  But I think -- sorry, I didn't fully answer your question. I think the message coming out of the White House in respect of this was that there was recognition of the case made by the United Kingdom to pursue a second resolution, and I think probably the best way to put this was that the White House registered a nil obstat*.

* "nothing stands in the way" for those of you without an Oxbridge degree in Latin

…but don’t really learn anything the non-private witnesses haven’t already told us before slipping back into redacted territory.  Indeed several full pages of redaction only broken by…

SIS2: Well, that obviously comes into two categories. The first was to ramp up intelligence collection on the Iraqi WMD programme. Obviously SIS had been to some degree collecting on that programme, but as I think the Butler Inquiry makes abundantly clear, for a long period of time during the 1990s there was little that SIS could do, given the pervasive UN inspector presence in Iraq.  The other area where SIS began to make plans was in terms of operational intelligence support in the event that it did come to a military conflict involving British troops.

…which is also pretty meaningless out of context.  The conversation seems to be covering the spring/summer of 2002 … another snippet emerges from the blacked out lines about who actually received intelligence and about Tony Blair’s increasing interest in MI6…

SIR MARTIN GILBERT: Finally from me, who in our system was aware of the SIS activities?

SIS2: Well, the Foreign Secretary would certainly have been, and I imagine to some degree, but not necessarily the same degree, the Defence Secretary. At that point, I think, most of the activity that was being undertaken was probably of the kind that would not naturally come to his attention.  I think the Prime Minister was taking a very keen interest at that point already in what SIS (a) might be doing and (b) could do to assist HMG to manage the
situation.

After some more redaction we finally bump into some interesting testimony about a board that SIS2 was on …

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes. I think it might be helpful at this stage -- maybe we should have done this earlier -- if you could just give us a broad description of how the board functioned. It's a fairly small board. [redacted]  To what extent would the board have regularly discussed and been briefed on, given that you all had different areas of operation, the way that the Iraq picture was unfolding?

SIS2: Well, the Board met at regular intervals. I think we were a weekly board, and certainly we would have a fixed  agenda, a lot of which would be about either strategic management or housekeeping issues. But an issue like this obviously was on the agenda. There was discussion about it from a fairly early stage. But I'm not sure that we ever really looked at this from an appropriate risk management perspective. I don't think we ever really got out our risk register and said, okay, this is an area where we as an organisation are actually at risk. This is a reputational issue for us and we need to think through very carefully how we handle ourselves in this regard. That's something I would refer to.
But there's no question that the board was regularly briefed on Iraq. [redacted] but at the same time one has to bear in mind that on the political arena, so to speak, things began to move very quickly indeed, and I think it's true to say that there were a number of occasions where we as a board effectively found ourselves facing a fait accompli in terms of some decisions that were made, rather than having the opportunity fully to debate them before they were made.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Fait accompli in terms of what sort of decision? Decisions that you would have normally made yourselves or were made elsewhere and presented to the board, or were they made by somebody on the board and
presented but not for debate?

SIS2: I'm talking predominantly about conversations that the then chief of the service had with the Prime Minister and others in Number 10, which obviously could not have been the subject of pre-arranged deliberation that the chief had to make, as it were, there and then. I'm not bringing this as a criticism because, as I said, the reality is that things were moving very fast, and we didn't, I don't think, have the luxury of an opportunity to manage every aspect of this by committee. But it did mean that occasionally we would find ourselves being told, well, I have spoken to the Prime Minister and this has happened or that has happened, we are going to do this, we are going to do that.

They go on to talk about Libya and the slightly scarey sounding “nuclear black market”

Sir Lawrence Freedman asks where would Iraq have featured from, say, the middle of 2002 onwards?

SIS2: It went up the scale dramatically. I think in WMD terms, Iraq had been relatively low down the scale of preoccupations. The main focus of concern at that point was, firstly, the Iranian nuclear programme, which was a matter of top priority; the AQ Khan* nuclear black market, and the realisation that after years of dabbling ineffectually in an indigenous nuclear programme, Libya had opted for an engagement with the AQ Khan* nuclear supply network that made a Libyan programme more of a preoccupation than it otherwise would have done. So there there were three major WMD preoccupations on which we had to focus.  I think, as I said, Iraq was in one sense a legacy issue. The collection effort around Iraq was focused more, I think, on making sure that we understood where Iraqi capabilities rested at the time of sanctions, so that once the programmes began to resume, we would have a very clear idea of what the baseline was from which that resumption would take place.  In political terms, I think relatively little focus was devoted to collection on Iraq prior to that point. This was a function of considerations –

Sir Lawrence Freedman then asks if anyone in SIS questioned the volume of resources Iraq was obviously eating up.  SIS2 replies no because “SIS is very much a task-driven organisation that responds to requirements, and is a relatively, and by design, process-light organisation.  So when the requirement to deal with a much increased Iraqi requirement came into effect, I think we just swallowed hard and diverted the resources that we judged necessary. I don't think we -- as far as I'm aware, we never formally registered a concern about the resource implications of this".

*Abdul Qadeer Khan pictured above with some of his dangerous toys was a senior nuclear weapons expert who sold Pakistan's nuclear secrets to "axis of evil" countries.  This made MI6 and the CIA quite cross and after pressure was brought to bear on the Pakistan government they put an end to his activities in early 2004.  The Government of Pakistan reported that Khan had signed a confession indicating that he had provided Iran, Libya, and North Korea with designs and centrifuge technology to aid in nuclear weapons programs, and said that the government had not been complicit in the proliferation activities.

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Informally?

SIS2: The honest truth is I don't know, but I should have been surprised at that point.

There is then a highly redacted conversation about some information that was, as Sir Roderic Lynd puts it “neither withheld nor, as it were, volunteered”.  SIS2 appears to try and brush this aside…

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: So do you think that clear evidence that Iraq did not have WMD would have made a difference to the Americans.

SIS2:[redacted].

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: [redacted]?

SIS2: I think the US Government had a very clear and explicit agenda of regime change in Iraq. There were two new areas of information that were seen as bearing on that.  One was WMD. The other was allegation of a relationship between the Saddam Hussein regime and Al Qaeda.  Now, we knew absolutely that there was no such relationship, although there were those in the American administration who sought very energetically to argue [redacted] that this was in fact the case.  So, you know, if there are two areas which might have impacted on the American decision, the way in which they handled one of them, the relationship with Al Qaeda is, I think, indicative of what their real intentions were.

The next 4-5 pages are fully redacted before we move onto the more interesting area of that dossier ...actually I'm not sure which dossier as it's hard to figure that out because of all the redactions.  But I think they're talking about the 2002 dossier.  Oh I cant be bothered.  Here's a picture:

SIS2 admits the service were not generally keen on the whole dossier idea.  Mainly because it risked putting a lot of secret material into the public domain and they wished to protect their sources.  There seems to have been a feeling that some kind of breech of trust was involved in putting so much secret material into the public domain.