Andrew Gilligan-INTERNET

From : Andrew Gllligan-INTERNET

Sent : 30 June 2003 04 03 PM -
To : 'maplesj@parllament .uk'
Subject: FW analysis of campbell's evidence - main part (1 more to come)

John,

As promised here is my analysis of the Campbell evidence I've added some further notes at the bottom

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From : Andrew Gilligan-INTERNET
Sent : 30 June 2003 13' 14
To : Andrew Gilligan-INTERNET, Mark Damazer, Kevin Marsh ; Richard Sambrook and PA
Subject : analysis of campbell's evidence - main part (1 more to come)

On the dodgy dossier

The exchanges on the dodgy dossier offer no direct proof about my source's charges, because they all
retate to the September dossier. But since much of Mr Campbell's evidence on the dodgy dossier can be
compared with other information in the public domain, it does atlow us to test his use of language and
his general. truthfulness .

At Q946, Sir John Stanley asks him about the "sexing up" of Dr al-Marashi's work in the February
dossier . Mr Campbell admits that it was done "for example, where 'hostile groups' became 'terrorist
organisations' . "

Actually, Dr al-Marashi's original words in his thesis were about "opposition groups in hostile regimes",
not hostile groups . Mr Campbell is trying to minimise the import of Downing Street's changes to Dr al-
Marashi by misrepresenting what he wrote in the first place . "Opposition groups" are not very close to
terrorists . "Hostile groups" are much closer .

*On its own this does not amount to much . It could easily be a slip . But it starts to build up . Mr Campbell
also telts the Committee that "we have apologised in relation to Dr al-Marashl ." (Q994, my itaLs) . This is
sort of half-true - the Government has expressed general regret, if not quite apologised, for not
attributing Dr al-Marashl's work. But it clearly gave members of the Committee - certainly Sir John
Stanley, see Q1152 - the impression that the Government had actually said sorry to Dr al-Marashi
himself. As we know, they had not.

At Q964 Mr Campbell Is asked whether the Government acknowledged a mistake over the dodgy dossier
at the time the plagiarism was exposed . He replies : 'The PM's spokesman in the very next briefing said,
'Something has gone wrong here, it should not have happened, mistakes have been made and we will
have to look at it . "'

As the morning lobby briefing note of 7 February (on the Downing Street website) makes clear, the PM's
official spokesman did not in fact say anything like this. He said : "Some (sic) of the second section was
based on (sic) Dr al-Marashi's work which, in retrospect, we should have acknowledged . . .ln our view,
there was nothing for which we had to apologise. . .The document was solid and accurate and we stand
by it . . .We reject completely the comment that the Government [In the PM's statement on 3 Feb] misled
Parliament . "

This continued to be the Government's position until the Foreign Secretary's evidence to you last week .

1 G P, Cf lZ I cCCJ
 Alastair Campbell's changes to the September dossier - " .
Mr Campbell says in his memo that "he made drafting suggestions as the document evolved" and admits
in his evidence that the chairman of the JIC accepted some of the changes (Q975) . But the exact nature
of the changes he is prepared to admit responsibility for increases over the course of his evidence.

First he says the changes he made were only presentational changes (Q974) .

Then he is asked (Q1018) :

"Q: Can you try to visualise for us how different the September dossier would have been if it had not
been for your discussions on presentational issues?
A: Other than literally drafting points I cannot recall any substantial changes being made to the
executive summary ."
This seems to imply that he did make substantial drafting changes to the executive summary. He also
fails to answer about the rest of the dossier.

Then he says (Q1092) that "the changes we made in relation to it [the dossier] had nothing to do with
he overriding intelligence assessments . " (my itals.) What is the difference between an intelligence
lissessment and an overriding intelligence assessment? Does that statement imply that No 10 could have
made changes which went against the detail of the intelligence assessments - the very point at issue?

Mr Campbell is also (Q1008) asked about another of my source's charges, which is that unreliable
information was given "undue prominence" in the dossier at his behest. He replies by misrepresenting
what 1 said to the committee about this and by attacking the BBC and nobody notices that he has failed
to answer the question .

Towards the end of his evidence Mr Campbell again refuses to deny, even half-confirms this charge when
he says : "I suppose what you are saying is, were there discussions about how prominently to deploy [the
uranium-to-Africa claim] . To be honest with you, I cannot remember the nature of those discussions . I
think it was an important point ." (Q1138)

When the 45-minute claim was added

Mr Campbell told the Committee that the 45-minute claim "existed in the very first draft" of the dossier
(Q987) . This is untrue . As the Foreign Secretary has told the Committee, the 45-minute claim was added
Oater. The relevant exchange is as follows:

Richard Ottaway: So it was added later?

Jack Straw: Well- that's what I'm trying to tell you .

Peter Ricketts, FCO director-general, political, confirmed to you that in fact "there were drafts
discussed in March" - consistent with media reports at the time that the dossier would be issued that
month . But as we now know, or always have known if you believed my source, the 45 minute claim only
arrived in the dossier in September, days before it was printed .

Later the Foreign Secretary said he had been passed a note by Alastair Campbell : "Alastair Campbell
makes it clear in his letter to the Committee that the 45-minute claim was in the first draft which had
been presented to him."

An important distinction, but a close reading of Mr Campbell's own evidence suggests - although not
conclusively - that this statement is not true either . Mr Campbell says (Q922) that the dossier was "the
product of months and months of detailed work with the intelligence agencies" (my italics . )

From a purely common-sense point of view, it would also seem implausible that the Government's
director of communications only became involved at the last minute with a draft document explicitly

13 BC-1 12 ~~~
 intended as a communication with the public . Mr Campbell descnbes the dossier as "one of the most
important pieces of work developed during the entire build-up-to the Conflict" (Q916) . Are we really to
believe that he had no involvement at all with it, never even read it, in its five-to-six-month existence
before September?

The quote in Q922 above from Mr Campbell also corroborates other evidence that the document did
exist as a single "product" (albeit going through multiple drafts .)

All this must cast doubt on Mr Campbell's claim to the Committee that "the very first substantial draft
that was put forward by the JIC was very largely the basis of what was duly published and presented to
Parliament ." (Q1001 .)

So me more qeneral questions

Is the BBC's source right?

Some of the claims made by my informant were right. His allegation that the "45-minute" claim was
Oom a single, uncorroborated source was right and had not been publicly known before .

My source was also right to say that the 45-minute claim was inserted into the dossier at a late stage.

My source's general claims about friction between Downing Street and the intelligence services over the
dossier, and their unhappiness with it, are supported by one of your other witnesses in a position to
know. Dame Pauline, in her evidence to you, said that "there clearly was turbulence in the machine and
some people have been talking," (Q382) though she was not sure if they were representative .

My source's general claims, and some of his specific ones, particularly those about Mr Campbell, have
also been backed by a wide body of independently-sourced reports in many newspapers after the BBC's
story . The BBC is only one of many news organisations to have reported such claims . The following are
some examples :

Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian 30 May: "British intelligence sources expressed fury at Downing Street's
behaviour. They were reluctant to allow Downing Street to use their intelligence assessment because
they feared it would be manipulated for political ends. . . . Caveats . . . were swept aside by Mr Blair, egged
*on by Mr Campbell, well-placed sources said ."

Daniel McGrory, Times 30 May: "Senior sources say they received a barrage of phone calls from staff at
No 10 demanding more evidence. Intelligence chiefs insist that the dossier was written by someone
inside No 10 and not by British Intelligence . . .agents were wary that frightened defectors who wanted
asylum would say what the British and Americans wanted to hear . . .there was debate amongst
intelligence analysts whether the [45-minute source's] claims should have been passed to No 10, as
senior figures doubted whether it was true, but were under pressure to deliver 'compelling evidence. "'

Glenn Frankell, Washington Post 30 May: "One official acknowledged that there had been what he
described as 'pressured and superheated debates at the time' between Downing Street and intelligence
officials over the contents of the dossier."

Francis Elliott, Colin Brown, Sunday Telegraph 1 June, quoted a "senior minister" as saying : "It was Blair
gilding the lily as usual. It [the 45-min claim] was an extrapolation ."

Peter Beaumont, Gaby Hinsliff, Observer 1 June: "What we are seeing is something very new, and very
strange. MI6 is sticking its head over the parapet as much as it ever will. . .Ml6 feels totally discredited
and used ." ("source")
"MI6 feels that it has been pushed rather unwillingly into the limelight by the Government . It is a shot
~C f (z /ccc ~
 across the bows." (a second "source")

Nick Fielding, Sunday Times 1 June, reported that the dossier was the result of a "deal after months of
bitter disagreements between intelligence chiefs and Blair's aides. Campbell had attempted to persuade
the agencies to include hard-hitting conclusions . They were reluctant to agree because they said the
case was not proven ."

One of these reporters, Peter Beaumont, foreign editor of the Observer, has since written that I
reported what was being "widely briefed to journalists - including myself - by MI6 officers and the
Foreign Office that Number 10, Campbell in particular, had gone out of its way to overstate the threat
posed by Iraq to make the case for war." Mr Beaumont adds: "What [the spooks] were saying [in their
own rounds of the media] pre-war was that Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the UK, contrary to
the September dossier's most alarming headline . . .the same case [was] made by one of MI6's most senior
officers in meetings with editors and senior Labour figures, including Robin Cook and Clare Short ."
(Beaumont, "The BBC reported what we were all told - and it was right," Observer, 29 June 2003 .) It is
fair to say that Beaumont does believe I got some of the details wrong .

hese are long-standing, respected reporters in the field . It is not clear whether the Government
0
accuses all these people and their newspapers of being liars as well .

The other specific claims are disputed - including the claim that that insertion was made under pressure
from Downing Street officials ; that the dossier was sexed up at Alastair Campbell's behest; that the
Government knew the 45-minute point was probably wrong before it put it in, and his claim that the
point was inserted "against our wishes ."

The assertions of the Government witnesses, however vehement, that our source's claims are untrue are
no substitute for evidence that they are untrue . No such evidence has, to my knowledge, yet been
produced to the Committee. Curously, evidence does exist which would allow the Committee to make a
better judgment on some of the disputed claims (the drafts of the dossier, access to intelligence
officials.) But it is being withheld by the Government .

Do remember what my source never claimed . Contrary to almost continual Government

misrepresentation of our story, he never claimed that anybody lied, only that they exaggerated their
~information and suppressed doubts about its accuracy . He never claimed that any of the claims in the
'ldossier were made up by the Government, Alastair Campbell or anyone else. He always made clear that
they were based on real, but unreliable, intelligence information .

The BBC's decision to run the story

They are sending you a memo about this but basically it boils down to :

The BBC's defence of its reporting is exactly the same as the Prime Minister's defence of the 45-minute
claim . We both believe our information to be credible, even though it comes from a single source .

However, there are also many important differences between us . Unlike the source for the 45-minute
claim, my source's claims were made more credible by a large body of contextual evidence already in
the public domain. This included :

" the Government's admitted embellishment, or sexing-up, of the February dossier ;

" the failure of the September dossier's claims to be borne out by evidence in Iraq ;
" the disquiet already expressed by intelligence sources to many journalists, including myself, about
the Government's use of intelligence material on Iraq (see above) ;
" the fact that, as the Committee has noted, the claims made in the executive summary of the dossier
BBG l21 ax~1 4-
 were noticeably harder than those in the body text;
" the virtual disappearance of the "45-minute claim" in the weeks arid months after the dossier's
publication, despite the Government's urgent need to make a case for action against Iraq (see
below) ;
" the fact that the dossier did not read like a JIC report ; and
" the track record of Alastair Campbell .

All these played a part in the BBC's decision to publish the story . If there is a similar body of contextual
evidence which can support the Government's decision to publish the 45-minute claim, it has yet to be
presented or described to the Committee by the Government .

Other things

- On June 4th the Prime Minister told Parliament : "I stand entirely by the dossier and the intelligence
contained in it." Yet in the same debate Mr Blair also said that he was "not in a position to say" whether
the uranium-from-Africa claim, part of the dossier, was m fact true . "Until we investigate property, we
are simply not in a position to say whether that is so," he added. What exactly is the Government's
9osition on this claim?

- The 45-minute and uranium claims were the most newsworthy aspects of the Government's case on 24
September . Both received saturation coverage in alt the next day's newspapers . However, after that
week, ministers almost never mentioned them again. In the nearly six months between October 15t 2002
and the outbreak of war, we can trace no further mentions at all by ministers of the uranium claim and
only two further mentions of the 45-minute claim. There was no mention of either claim by any minister
in the several House of Commons debates on Iraq over this period - even though they had a lot of
persuading to do . The Prime Minister never mentioned either claim again .