David kelly & The Rockingham Cell, The very secret service

David Kelly referred obliquely to Operation Rockingham. What role did
this mysterious cell play in justifying the Iraq war. Was Mai Pederson
and any other Bahais involved in this undercover work
?............Errol

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The very secret service 


Michael Meacher
Friday November 21, 2003
The Guardian 

David Kelly, giving evidence to the prime minister's intelligence and
security committee in closed session on July 16 - the day before his
suicide - made a comment the significance of which has so far been
missed. He said: "Within the defence intelligence services I liaise
with the Rockingham cell." Unfortunately nobody on the committee
followed up this lead, which is a pity because the Rockingham
reference may turn out to be very important indeed.

What is the role of the Rockingham cell? The evidence comes from a
former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, who had been a
US military intelligence officer for eight years and served on the
staff of General Schwarzkopf, the US commander of allied forces in the
first Gulf war. He has described himself as a card-carrying Republican
who voted for Bush, but he distinguished himself in insisting before
the Iraq war, and was almost alone in doing so, that almost all of
Iraq's WMD had been destroyed as a result of inspections, and the rest
either used or destroyed in the first Gulf war. In terms, therefore,
of proven accuracy of judgment and weight of experience of the
workings of western military intelligence, he is a highly reliable
source.

In an interview in the Scottish Sunday Herald in June, Ritter said:
"Operation Rockingham [a unit set up by defence intelligence staff
within the MoD in 1991] cherry-picked intelligence. It received hard
data, but had a preordained outcome in mind. It only put forward a
small percentage of the facts when most were ambiguous or noted no
WMD... It 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 WMD [when] Unscom was showing the
opposite."

Rockingham was, in fact, a clearing house for intelligence, but one
with a predetermined political purpose. According to Ritter, "Britain
and America were involved [in the 1990s and up to 2003] 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 [picking out]
reports that sustained the [WMD] claims. They ignored the vast
majority of the data which mitigated against such claims."

Only one other official reference to Operation Rockingham is on
record, in an aside by Brigadier Richard Holmes when giving evidence
to the defence select committee in 1998. He linked it to Unscom
inspections, but it was clear that the Rockingham staff included
military officers and intelligence services representatives together
with civilian MoD personnel. Within, therefore, the UK intelligence
establishment - MI6, MI5, GCHQ and defence intelligence - Rockingham
clearly had a central, though covert, role in seeking to prove an
active Iraqi WMD programme.

One of its tactics, which Ritter cites, is its leaking of false
information to weapons inspectors, and then, when the search is
fruitless, using that as "proof" of the weapons' existence. He quotes
a case in 1993 when "Rockingham was the source of some very
controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected
ballistic missile site. We ... found nothing. However, our act of
searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed."

A parallel exercise was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US, named the
Office of Special Plans. The purpose of this intelligence agency was
the provision of selective intelligence which met the demands of its
political masters. Similarly, in the case of the UK, Ritter insists
that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders "from the
very highest levels".

Both Ritter and British intelligence sources have said that the
selective intelligence gathered by Operation Rockingham would have
been passed to the joint intelligence committee (JIC), which was
behind the dossiers published by the UK government claiming Iraq had
WMDs.

The significance of this is highlighted by Tony Blair's statement:
"The intelligence that formed the basis of what we put out last
September... came from the JIC assessment." So Rockingham was an
important tributary flowing into the government's rationale for the
war.

This shoehorning of intelligence data to fit pre-fixed political
goals, both in the US and the UK, throws new light on the two most
controversial elements of the government's dossier of September 2002.
One was that Iraq could launch WMD within 45 minutes. Was this "sexed
up" on the orders of No 10 or - derived allegedly from an Iraqi
brigadier via an informant - did Rockingham put a gloss on it to
please its political masters? The other highly contentious item in the
dossier was that Saddam tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Africa.
How did material that the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded
on February 4 was a blatant forgery come to be included in President
Bush's January 28 State of the Union address? And, since the British
were named as the source, why did MI6 not spot this outlandish
forgery? In fact, they alleged that the Niger claim came from another
independent source, which has never been identified. Could this be
because this disinformation served the Rockingham purpose only too
well?

It is not only the massaging of intelligence that seems to have gone
on, but also the suppression of the most reliable assessment of the
facts. David Kelly, we now know, had been advising privately prior to
the war about the likelihood of Iraqi WMD. He told the foreign affairs
select committee: "I have no idea whether there were weapons or not at
that time [of the September 2002 dossier]". And to the intelligence
and security committee the next day he added: "The 30% probability is
what I have been saying all the way through ... I said that to many
people ... it was a statement I would have probably made for the last
six months." Yet this view from the leading expert within government
never saw the light of day. Why not?

If the tabloid headlines the day after the September dossier was
published had read: "Blair says only 30% chance Iraq has WMDs" rather
than "Brits 45 mins from doom" (the Sun), would the Commons vote still
have backed the war? Rarely can the selective use of information have
had such drastic consequences. If there is one conclusion which must
flow from the Hutton revelations, it must surely be the demand for a
full-scale independent inquiry into the operation of the intelligence
services around the top of their command and their interface with the
political system.

· Michael Meacher was environment minister, 1997-2003. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089931,00.html