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Andrew Gilligan-INTERNET

From. OTTAWAY, Richard [OTTAWAYRGJ@parliament .uk]-

Sent 01 July 2003 02 01 Plvl
To Andrew Gill igan-INTERNET
Subject : RE Analysis of Campbell

Andrew, thanks -very helpful R

-----Original Message-----
From : Andrew Gilligan-INTERNET [mailto :andrew.gilligan@bbc .co.uk]
Sent: 30 June 2003 21 :04
To: 'ottawayrgl@parliament .uk'
Subject : Analysis of Campbell

Richard,

No huge smoking gun here but cumulatively d is quite damaging to Campbell Inconsistencies,
exaggerations, evasions and direct untruths

Some other material at the end - the BBC is doing an official submission too and t expands on that

Andrew

On the dodgy dossier

The exchanges on the dodgy dossier offer no direct proof about my source's charges,
because they all relate 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 allow 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-Marasht's work in the
February dossier. Mr Campbell admits that it was done "for example, where'hosttle
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 mtnimrse the import of
Downing Street's changes to Dr at-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 tells the Committee that "we have apologised in relation to Dr al-
Marasht ." (Q994, my itats) . This is sort of half-true - the Government has expressed
general regret, if not quite apologised, for not attributing Dr a[-Marashi'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 at-Marashi himself . As we
know, they had not .

At Q964 Mr Campbell is asked whether the Government acknowledged a mistake over

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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 . . . In 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 .

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 the overriding intelligence assessments ." (my itals .) What is the
difference between an intelligence assessment 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)

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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 later. 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 intended as a communication with the public . Mr Campbell
describes 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 Parhament." (Q1001 .)

Some more general questions

Is the BBC's source right?

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

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My source was also right to say that the 45-minute claim'was inserted into the dossie'r
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 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 ."

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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.

These are long-standing, respected reporters in the field . It is not clear whether the
Government 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 dossier 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 BBCsdecision 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 :

a6c JIZlools
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" the Government's admitted embellishment, or sexiing-up, of the February dossi2r;

" 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 were noticeably harder than those in the body text ;
" the virtual disappearance of the "45-minute claim" in the weeks and 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.

Denials

Campbell told you Downing Street had denied the story within an hour of the broadcast
- this is untrue . They denied only allegations which the source never made, such as
that the 45-minute claim was not intelligence material, or that it had been made up .
They didn't deny the substantive allegations for six days .

They still are denying things on the basis of subtly and not so subtly misrepresenting
what our story said - for instance they deny that Campbell made changes to the drafts
when the actual claim was that the changes were made "at his behest" - the spooks did
it, under orders, but they weren't happy about it . Less subtly they keep saying we say
they lied - the source's actual charge was of exaggeration, not lying .

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 Blav also said that he was
"not in a position to say" whether the uranium-from-Africa claim, part of the dossier,
was in fact true . "Until we investigate properly, we are simply not in a position to say
whether that is so," he added . What exactly is the Government's position 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 all 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 ether 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 ether
claim again.

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