1 Boring Old Man

I’ve been obviously obsessed with the UK Chilcot Inquiry and how it informs our understanding of the Iraq War. I think I’ve come to the end of the period because what’s coming is about what happened after the war started – which is of less compelling interest to me. In these last five posts, I’ve tried to put closure for myself on this dark piece of our history – not closure on the war, but on how we came to be in it. There is one more thing I wanted to add – the heros along the way. Earlier, I’d mentioned two – Richard Clarke, the US counterterrorism czar who did his level best to warn the Bush Administration of the coming al Qaeda attack and Joseph Wilson [and his wife Valerie Plame] who said the truth – that the Iraq prewar intelligence had been distorted to force us into war. As a result, both Richard Clarke and Valerie Plame had their careers prematurely interrupted. I was reminded by D.C. of another, Dr. David Kelly, who had also said the intelligence was "sexed-up" in the UK, and ultimately lost his life [suicide on the record, more likely murder]. Their stories  have been duly noted in these pages.

I’d like to add two more women from England to the list – Katherine Gun and Elizabeth Wilmshurst. The latter has been on our radar since her testimony at the Chilcot Inquiry last week. Ms. Wilmshurst was a lawyer in the British Foreign Office who gave up an almost thirty year long career to resign over the Attorney General’s decision that the Iraq War was legal.

There is another, actually the first one to go public. Katherine Gun was a translator who worked for Government Communications Headquarters [GCHQ], a British intelligence agency. On January 31, 2003, she received this email that we [the US] were bugging the offices of UN Security Council members to find out how they were going to vote:

Katherine leaked the Memo to The Guardian. Here’s their expose`:

Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war
^{Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members}
the Observer
by Martin Bright and Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont
2 March 2003

^{The United States is conducting a secret ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq. Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.}

^{The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency – the US body which intercepts communications around the world – and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input. The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations ‘particularly directed at… UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)’ to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.}

^{The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York – the so-called ‘Middle Six’ delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia. The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is ‘mounting a surge’ aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also ‘policies’, ‘negotiating positions’, ‘alliances’ and ‘dependencies’ – the ‘whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises’…}

^{Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also ‘pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations’. Koza also addresses himself to the foreign agency, saying: ‘We’d appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines [ie, intelligence sources].’ Koza makes clear it is an informal request at this juncture, but adds: ‘I suspect that you’ll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels.’ Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council. It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US…}

^{The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations…}

^{Blix’s March 7 report stated "Iraq, with a highly developed administrative system, should be able to provide more documentary evidence about its proscribed weapons programmes. Only a few new such documents have come to light so far and been handed over since we began inspections." At this point, the US Administration asserted that Iraq remained in material breach of the UN Resolutions, and that, under 1441, this meant the Security Council had to convene immediately "in order to consider the situation and the need for full compliance with all of the relevant Council resolutions in order to secure international peace and security".}

^{Before the meeting took place, French president Jacques Chirac declared on March 10 that France would veto any resolution which would automatically lead to war. This caused open displays of dismay by the U.S. and British governments. The drive by Britain for unanimity and a "second resolution" was effectively abandoned at that point. In the leadup to the meeting, it became apparent that a majority of UNSC members would oppose any resolution leading to war. As a result, no such resolution was put to the Council.}

^{At the Azores conference of March 16, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and Spanish prime minister José María Aznar announced the imminent deadline of March 17 for complete Iraqi compliance, with statements such as "Tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world". On the 17th, speeches by Bush and UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw explicitly declared the period of diplomacy to be over, as declared by Resolution 1441’s prohibition on giving Iraq new opportunities for compliance, and that no further authorization from the UN would be sought before an invasion of Iraq.}

the unlikely heros