Torture, war and how MI6 keeps on betraying Britain

MOST of what the British intelligence services does is secret. The world rarely learns about the bomb that does not go off. The plot that is foiled. Or the lives that are saved. By the same token, it is normally mistakes that are made public. The traitor who defects. The terrorist who gets through. The lapse in security.

I do not question for a moment that the vast majority of intelligence officers are honourable men and women with many unsung achievements to their credit. But here I will argue that something has gone badly wrong with MI6, the service which spies for Britain overseas.

The first problem concerns the Iraq war. There is a massive body of evidence — all of which has been seen by the Chilcot Inquiry, whose report will be published on July 6 — that MI6 lost its bearings as the invasion of Iraq approached in the early spring of 2003.

We can see in retrospect that MI6 did not have a clue what was going on.

The quality of its intelligence was so poor that one of its key claims — namely that Saddam Hussein was ready to attack British bases with his supposed weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes — was such complete rubbish it subsequently needed to be officially withdrawn.

To be fair, MI6 did not fabricate evidence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, as some have claimed.

However, it allowed Tony Blair to get away with making a series of confident statements about their existence, which bore little or no relation to the underlying intelligence.

MI6, therefore, allowed itself to become part of the propaganda arm of the Blair war machine. This was and remains deeply shocking, all the more so since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was Britain’s greatest foreign policy mistake at least since the infamous Munich agreement that was struck with Hitler in 1938.

It has turned out to be a global calamity and — as President Obama recently noted — helped spawn Islamic State, today the most notorious terror group in the world. MI6 ought to have warned about the dangers, not acted as a cheerleader for war.

Which brings us to the Syrian civil war, where our intelligence service has been almost as incompetent as over Iraq. The calibre of advice they have given to the Government has been wretched from the start.

THEY misjudged the strength of the Assad regime and suggested the Syrian dictator would soon be toppled. In doing so, they underestimated the endurance of his army. Most culpably of all, they failed to anticipate how quickly the moderate Syrian opposition would be taken over by the aggressive forces of the Al-Qaeda fighting machine.

So, in Syria and earlier in Iraq, the incompetence of MI6 can hardly be exaggerated.

With a long record of entanglement in the Middle East, Britain traditionally held a special knowledge and understanding of the region. That hard-won expertise has clearly been lost.

The third recent failure of MI6, which forced its way onto the news agenda once more this week, concerns British complicity in torture during the early years of the War on Terror. There is now a mountain of evidence (invariably extracted after a series of furious official denials) that MI6 was routinely involved in what is euphemistically called ‘extraordinary rendition’ — the kidnap of terror suspects and their forcible transportation to foreign jails to be abused and tortured.

Dozens of these cases have come to light, but the best documented concerns Abdul Belhadj, for years a member of the Libyan opposition to Colonel Gaddafi.

Mr Belhadj and his wife Fatima were abducted by Americans in Thailand, from where they were planning to come to Britain and seek political asylum.

They were then flown, most likely via the British base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, to the Libyan capital of Tripoli. There, as Mr Belhadj described in a harrowing interview in yesterday’s Mail, he was held and tortured for more than six years.

So what was Britain’s role? Discovered in the bombed- out offices of Gaddafi’s intelligence chief after the 2011 revolution was a letter from a senior MI6 official called Mark Allan. This letter congratulated the Libyan government on the ‘safe arrival’ of the ‘air cargo’ — in others words, Mr Belhadj — adding that ‘it was the least we could do for you and for Libya’.

Sir Mark Allan ( he has since received a knighthood) has not challenged the authenticity of the letter.

There is no question that the abduction of Mr Belhadj and his wife was against the law. The 1988 Criminal Justice Act states that carrying out or abetting torture, whether in Britain or abroad, is punishable by jail, and the maximum sentence is life imprisonment.

This meant that the Metropolitan police were obliged to mount an investigation. They have taken their duties seriously, but I have heard they have found it very hard to get co-operation from witnesses. This week, Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions, announced that charges would not be pressed.

What the Crown Prosecution Service did say, however, was that British politicians were aware of the ‘rendition’ flights that were being carried out by America’s CIA.

This is the latest of a series of investigations into British involvement in torture, and each has gone nowhere. The first was carried out by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), the parliamentary body which monitors the intelligence services.

BACK in 2007, the ISC concluded that claims Britain had been involved in torture were entirely false. In due course, however, it very shockingly emerged that the intelligence services had misled the committee, and that 42 key documents had been withheld from the MPs.

David Cameron promised an investigation into torture when he became prime minister in 2010, setting up an inquiry under senior judge Sir Peter Gibson. This made little progress, however, and was soon kicked into the long grass.

The contrast with the U.S. is shaming. There, the Feinstein Committee carried out an investigation into CIA involvement in torture, and did not hold back from publishing many of the most gruesome details. In Britain, we are clearly in such thrall to our intelligence services that we are incapable of holding them to account — however grave their failings.

This means we are sending out a terrible message across the world. It cannot be reiterated too often that Britain stands for a set of values — above all, decency, tolerance and humanity — which used to make us different and, I have always believed, better than many other countries.

Ultimately, it is these values that give us the right to have a voice in world affairs and to intervene across the globe.

By failing to act on the very serious evidence of British involvement in the disgusting crime of torture, we risk giving a propaganda gift of incalculable value to our opponents in terror organisations like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. They now have the ammunition to claim that Britain is as brutal and barbaric as any other regime.

The great spy writer John le Carre once wrote that ‘ the only real measure of a nation’s political health is the state of its intelligence services’. If he is right, and I suspect he is, something has gone wrong with 21st-century Britain.

It is less than a month now until the publication of the Chilcot report into the Iraq invasion. It is essential that Sir John Chilcot holds MI6 — let off the hook over torture — to account over Iraq.

If he does not do so, we can only conclude that the British state has lost the ability to sit in judgment on its own failings — and the moral basis on which Britain has been governed for the past hundred years will be shattered once and for all.