18 September 2008 : Guardian
Staff college could help prevent repeat of the Iraqi weapons fiasco
By Richard Norton Taylor
Britain needs a "school for spies" to prevent a repeat of such scandals as the Iraqi weapons fiasco, a leading thinktank said today. A "staff college" should also be set up to make sure the spooks keep on their toes.
The suggestion that intelligence officers in the land of James Bond and spy fiction are not up to the mark appears in a survey of world events published yearly by the respected London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Despite promises of reform, little appears to have changed
since the controversy over the Iraqi weapons dossier, it suggests. Serious mistakes were made as a result of a "lack of rigour" in testing claims made by agents of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, according to the IISS latest annual Strategic Survey.
The one agency which did question the claims made in the dossier - the Defence Intelligence Staff - has since been cut by 20%, it notes.
"The problem was not so much one of intelligence analysis as of the inability of the UK's analytical community to put themselves into the minds of those whose behaviour they were analysing," it says. Intelligence staff did not try to imagine what Saddam Hussein and his entourage were up to, how they were trying to hoodwink the rest of the world without realising it was a suicidal course to pursue.
Intelligence officers should have asked more searching questions about why Saddam behaved as he did, and to take into account his concerns about Iran and internal dissent, the study argues.
"At no point did anyone consider the possibility that, to contradict former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, absence of evidence might in fact indicate evidence of absence", says the IISS.
Though it does not explicitly attack Tony Blair for manipulating intelligence, or blame MI6 for succumbing to political
interference, the message is clear. To make British intelligence officers more professional, the IISS concludes, a "unified intelligence academy could be established to provide a basic training course for all new entrants to the intelligence community".
The academy would also serve as a "staff college for members of the intelligence community about to assume senior management positions".
The British public also needs to be educated better about what spies can offer and the dangers of relying on them too much, says the IISS. Britain's intelligence agencies need to be more open if their work is to be trusted - and understood - by politicians and the public alike, it adds.
For a start, the existing parliamentary intelligence and security committee - whose members are handpicked by the prime minister and which only meets in private should be made more accountable, says the IISS. It should become a fully-fledged select committee, questioning witnesses in public, it suggests.
No government or intelligence agency would want a repeat of what it calls their "chaotic exposure" during the dispute over the Iraqi weapons dossier.
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