From the archives: A covert project, set up by the UK government, 'cherry-picked' intelligence to fit the hidden agenda of justifying war with Iraq

(The Sunday Herald) "It was in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf war and Britain knew even then that Saddam Hussein would one day have to be deposed. Allied forces had stopped short of ousting the Iraq dictator, but the British government was convinced it would one day have to finish the job.
The problem was how to convince the world that even a defeated Iraq still posed a serious threat. The answer came in 1991, with the setting up of a secret military intelligence operation whose existence has only now been uncovered by the Sunday Herald in the wake of damaging claims that Tony Blair and George Bush exaggerated intelligence reports to justify their invasion of Iraq this year.
The covert project was called Operation Rockingham and it was designed specifically to 'cherry-pick' information which pointed towards Saddam having a WMD stockpile that he could use imminently. Right up until the outbreak of war, the staff of Operation Rockingham, which was set up by the defence intelligence staff within the Ministry of Defence, deliberately overlooked 'mountains' of reports and intelligence documents which pointed towards Saddam destroying his arsenal and instead used 'selective intelligence' from just a tiny pool of data to create a false and misleading picture that the Iraqi ruler was a direct threat to the West.
Proof of Operation Rockingham came to light in a Sunday Herald investigation and its existence was backed up in a series of astonishingly frank interviews with Scott Ritter, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq who served on the staff of General Norman Schwarzkopf -- who led the allied forces in the first Gulf war -- before joining the UN weapons inspections team, Unscom. Ritter was also a US military intelligence officer for eight years. His claims about Rockingham are supported by UK parliamentary documents and briefings with other British intelligence sources.
'As inspections developed throughout the 1990s it became clear that Unscom were accomplishing a great deal,' said Ritter. 'This became a liability for the UK and the US. Because of the level of Iraqi disarmament, France, China and Russia began talking about lifting sanctions. This wasn't what Britain and America wanted to hear -- they wanted sanctions and regime change.
'Operation Rockingham became part of an effort to maintain a public mindset that Iraq was not in compliance with the inspections. They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even though Unscom was showing the opposite.'
Operation Rockingham began to liaise with Unscom -- ostensibly it was there to share intelligence with the weapons inspectors from within the United Kingdom spying community, but it soon became clear that this covert operation had a hidden agenda: deliberately creating a fake picture that Saddam was armed to the teeth.
Ritter added: 'Operation Rockingham cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard data but had a pre-ordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no WMD.' Staff once connected to Rockingham are now thought to be involved in the new Iraqi Survey Group which has been sent to Iraq in a bid to find WMDs.
To back up claims that Operation Rockingham was deliberately 'cherry-picking' intelligence and producing misleading reports, Ritter described how its staff blatantly ignored proof of Saddam's compliance. 'Britain and America were involved in a programme of joint exploitation of intelligence from Iraqi defectors. There were mountains of information coming from these defectors, and Rockingham staff were receiving it and then selectively culling reports that sustained the claims that weapons of mass destruction were in existence. They ignored the vast majority of the data which mitigated against such claims.
'In theory, Rockingham wasn't dangerous,' Ritter said, 'in theory, it was a clearing house for intelligence. But what is dangerous is the policy behind Rockingham. When I was an intelligence officer, I didn't tell my commander what he wanted to hear, I told him what the facts were. In combat, we have an old saying -- if you lie, you die.
'Operations like Rockingham become a danger to democracy if they lose their integrity. They are behind the scenes, in the shadows and away from public scrutiny. When a government is corrupt by way of such a policy, the public has a hard time holding the government accountable. We were all subject to a programme of mass deception, but now the lie has been exposed. In practice, Rockingham was dangerous.'
Ritter insists that the intelligence officers involved in cherry-picking selective intelligence were acting directly on political orders. 'In terms of using selective intelligence,' Ritter said, 'this policy was coming from the very highest levels.'
The only written reference to Operation Rockingham is found in a 1998 British parliamentary report. In it, Brigadier Richard Holmes, who was giving evidence to the defence committee, refers, in an off-the-cuff aside, to Operation Rockingham and linked it to Unscom inspections in Iraq.
Some of the Rockingham staff were military officers, others came from the intelligence services, such as MI6, and others were civilian ministry of defence personnel. From 1991 to 1998 it had three chiefs, one man and two women. Anyone who headed up Rockingham was guaranteed a very senior intelligence job after their stint on the operation.

Its tactics, according to Ritter, included leaking false information to the weapons inspectors, and then using the resulting inspectors' search as 'proof' of the weapons' existence. 'Rockingham was the source, in 1993, of some very controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected ballistic missile site,' said Ritter. 'We went to search for the missiles but found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed.'
He said the Rockingham team 'played (the inspectors) like fiddles', adding: 'Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasising reports that showed non-compliance and quashing those which showed compliance.'
The rebel Labour MP and father of the house, Tam Dalyell, is to raise the Sunday Herald's investigation into Operation Rockingham in the Commons on Thursday during a defence debate and demand an explanation from the government about the use of selective intelligence. Ritter has offered to give evidence to the British parliament.
Both the MoD and Downing Street refused to comment on Ritter's allegations about Operation Rockingham, saying they didn't make statements on intelligence matters. However, a number of British intelligence sources have spoken to the Sunday Herald about the operation. One said: 'I'd like to know if troops were sacrificed because we kept hyping up weapons of mass destruction.'
MI6, according to both intelligence sources and Ritter, were also involved in 'selective intelligence gathering'. However, referring to Operation Rockingham, Ritter said: 'MI6 were more honest ... However, they did have a bevy of human intelligence sources who were handpicked to sustain the concept of WMD. Other sources who contradicted evidence about WMD were ignored. Only data which sustained the myth was used.'
Ritter's revelations come at the worst of times for the US and UK. In America, the Senate and House of Representatives are preparing for a series of hearings into alleged manipulation of intelligence which deceived the US public into backing war, and in the UK, Blair is under fire following sustained claims by the intelligence sources that his government 'spun' intelligence to persuade parliament and people to support war.

A pre-war report by America's defence intelligence agency has also come to light which concludes there was 'no reliable information' that Iraq had chemical weapons. It dates from September 2002 when US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was publicly claiming Saddam had huge WMD stockpiles. It says there is no proof 'on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or whether Iraq has -- or will -- establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities'. President Bush has vowed that America will find WMD in Iraq. Rumsfeld said on Thursday that he's confident his pre-war claims will be proved -- even though he claimed the previous week that Saddam might have destroyed all his WMD before the war.
The current UN chief weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, has also added to the woes of Bush and Blair by saying that the allies 'jumped to conclusions' that Iraq posed a security threat. At an appearance before the UN security council on Thursday, he added: 'It is not justified to (conclude) that something exists because it is unaccounted for.' Blix said there was no evidence that Saddam continued with his banned weapons programme after the 1991 Gulf war.
Blix later attacked the credibility of US-UK intelligence saying: 'We went to a great many sites that were given to us by intelligence, and only in three cases did we find anything -- and they did not relate to weapons of mass destruction. That shook me a bit ... I thought 'My God, if this is the best intelligence they had and we find nothing, what about the rest?''
Both Ritter and British intelligence sources said the selective intelligence gathered by Operation Rockingham would have been passed to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which was behind the dossiers published by Tony Blair and his government, claiming Iraq had WMDs. The most contentious parts of the government's case for war was that Iraq could launch WMDs in just 45 minutes and that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger. Intelligence sources say the 45 minutes claim was inserted at Downing Street's behest to make the document 'sexier' and the International Atomic Energy Agency has said the uranium claim was based on forged documents.
British intelligence sources have equated the JIC with the Office of Special Plans (OSP), an intelligence agency set up inside the Pentagon by Rumsfeld. It has been accused of gathering selective intelligence at the request of its political masters to build a misleading case for war. Ritter says Operation Rockingham was supplying the JIC with intelligence reports, together with MI6. One British intelligence source said: 'The JIC is, in my view, the mirror organisation of the OSP. They both did the same thing. The JIC was receiving information from all the intelligence agencies.'
Blair said during Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons on Wednesday that the intelligence dossier published in September was 'based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee'. He also said the claim that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger was 'judged by the (JIC) at the time to be correct'. Intelligence sources say the Niger claim emanated from Italian Intelligence. The Italians had apparently been asked to help the US and UK make the case for war and passed the document to the British. 'I don't know whether the Italians were involved in the forgery, or if they purchased the forgery, but everyone knew it was nonsense,' an intelligence source claimed.
In the Commons, Blair added that there was 'no attempt by any official or minister ... to override the intelligence judgements of the (JIC), including the so-called 45 minutes, a judgement made by the [JIC] and by them alone'. Intelligence sources say the 45 minute claim was linked to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the controversial Iraqi opposition-in-exile organisation. If any connection to the INC was proved, it would completely discredit the 45 minute claim as no intelligence agency could withstand allegations that the INC would have exaggerated, and possibly distorted, information in order to secure the fall of Saddam. A UK intelligence source described the 45 minute claim as 'bollocks' and Ritter said the vast majority of information stemming from the INC was 'fabricated'.
As part of the inquiry into the nature of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, Blair has promised to give parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee 'all JIC assessments' and allow MP committee members to interview those 'who drew up the JIC report'. The Prime Minister has continually passed responsibility for the nature of intelligence to the JIC saying: 'The intelligence that formed the basis of what we put out last September, that intelligence came from JIC assessment.'
Blair, however, has refused to grant an open, independent judicial inquiry. One British intelligence source added: 'The JIC briefed the PM. I think it will be the spooks who take the fall for this.' The JIC is composed of senior members of all the UK's intelligence services. 'They were charged to get specific intelligence on WMD and to make a case for war,' a source said. 'But they were doing that on the say-so of politicians.'
Ritter insisted that Unscom destroyed most of Iraq's WMDs and doubts Saddam could have rebuilt his stocks. He says 90 to 95% of Iraq's WMD were destroyed by inspections and believes the remainder were either used or destroyed during the first Gulf war. Despite describing himself as a card-carrying Republican who voted for Bush, he has called the president a 'liar' over Iraq. This is his summation of the allied case for war: 'Not one single piece of information was proved,' said Ritter. 'We went to war based on garbage.' "