The inquiries set up by US President George W. Bush and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair into the performance of the CIA and MI6 in providing intelligence to justify the war on Iraq could shatter the careers of a number of leading politicians and spymasters. They could also vitally affect the way the intelligence organisations go about their business. Structurally, there cannot be great changes. Espionage falls naturally into two mutually dependent branches: signals intelligence and human intelligence. Signals intelligence, which began with the first telegraph signal, has become a vast industry with the all-pervasive growth of electronics. The listening stations and banks of computers of America's National Security Agency and Britain's Government Communication Headquarters record and sift through millions of electronic communications every day. Signals intelligence has also developed into electronic intelligence which, for example, 'reads' the radar signals emitted by anti-aircraft missile batteries. Photography, too, comes under signals intelligence, with satellites beaming images from space, and unmanned aircraft sending back real-time pictures. Nothing, it would seem, can escape these all-seeing, all-hearing eyes and ears. Human intelligence is, of course, a much older way of gathering information. The Bible provides one of the most ancient and certainly most successful examples. When Moses sent his spies into Canaan to check out the Promised Land, they came back not only with reports of a land flowing with milk and honey but also a branch bearing grapes, pomegranates and figs. There is an imperative need for generals and political leaders to know what is happening 'on the other side of the hill'. Everything provides grist for the intelligence mill, from what the British army calls the 'mark-one eyeball' to embassies with their defence attaches and secret service officers. It would be thought, then, that Iraq would be an open book to the western intelligence agencies. And when Mr Bush and Mr Blair based their declarations of war on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, it was largely accepted that the agencies had provided the fruits to prove Hussein did indeed possess those weapons. Now it would seem that he did not. So what went wrong ? Signals and electronic intelligence showed nothing except the remains of the installations destroyed in 1991. And the human intelligence? Astonishingly, that had also turned up very little. It must be stressed that Hussein's Iraq was a very difficult and dangerous country in which to work. Torture and execution were facts of everyday life. Neighbours spied on neighbours, family members betrayed their kinsmen. Nobody would talk to a foreigner. The secret police were on every street corner. There was no diplomatic backup for American and British 'assets'. It was not an atmosphere conducive to 'mark-one eyeballing'. These difficulties were compounded by the CIA's growing reliance on signals intelligence. Few agents learned Arabic and there was general contempt for 'the ragheads'. It was simply assumed that the US army would have to go into Iraq and take out Hussein whether or not he had weapons of mass destruction. MI6, with fewer assets, followed a similar line. The days when, according to Egyptian secret servicemen, every other beggar in the Middle East was a British spy who spoke perfect Arabic are long gone. So Britain and America came to rely on defectors for much of their human intelligence, and they turned out to be very unreliable. Certainly, they wanted to help overthrow Hussein but they had their own axes to grind. Hussein helped this process by refusing to demonstrate that he no longer had such weapons. Perhaps his regime was crumbling and he was deceived by his scientists, or he simply could not bring himself to admit the truth. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: he was dragged out of a hole in the ground and his enemies are facing inquiries into what made them go to war. What next? Barring stunning revelations, certain operational changes seem certain: human intelligence should be restored to equality with its signals counterpart. Foreign languages should take on importance in CIA training and the 'raghead' mentality rooted out. In MI6, there should be better liaison between officers who analyse the raw information and their more senior colleagues who decide what to do with it. And, whatever the inquiries conclude, it must be re-emphasised that no intelligence officers may ever allow themselves to be swayed by their political masters. Christopher Dobson is a journalist who specialises in terrorism
