How Labour has subverted British Intelligence

It is not just the reputation of ministers and their bagmen that is taking a bashing at the Hutton inquiry. So is the reputation of Britain’s intelligence services. British Intelligence has been subverted. The nation’s front line of defence has been catastrophically damaged by New Labour’s spin machine. The tawdry ethics of Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror newsroom have infiltrated the secure Cabinet Office rooms occupied by the Joint Intelligence Committee.

The merest suspicion that an intelligence agency has succumbed to spin undermines its credibility and authority. But there is more than mere suspicion here. Recent events highlight a process of politicisation that has been going on since Tony Blair arrived in Downing Street in 1997. The government has used the JIC for purely political purposes. It has proceeded as though it is the job of the committee to prepare documents for public consumption and to endorse the information contained in propaganda pamphlets (or ‘dossiers’). For the first time, Secret Intelligence Service personnel have been called in to brief ministers personally, instead of relying on the JIC to undertake that task. The whole approach is, to put it mildly, grotesque.

It is quite normal, of course, for the JIC to clear information in its reports for public dissemination. But that is not what has happened since 9/11. No effort was made at any stage in the preparation of the notorious ‘dodgy dossier’ of February 2003 to consult the JIC about what information could be downgraded and released. The fundamental, life-saving principle of security is that only an originating agency can authorise the declassification of its own intelligence. This is mere common sense, because someone unfamiliar with the actual source of a particular snippet may, by releasing it, jeopardise a multimillion-pound investment in, say, a satellite programme, or put someone’s life at risk.