![]() The benefits of the liquidation of Saddam Hussein’s brutal Baathist regime were outweighed by the catastrophic consequences of the invasion for the people of Iraq and many of their neighbours. Even worse, they were heavily influenced, and arguably, dictated, by political leaders – namely Tony Blair and George W Bush – who always thought they knew better than the intelligence and military officials advising them. The decisions around the plan of retaliation against al-Qaeda were not made by sober military and intelligence assessments. Lamb, Kerbaj says, reported to Blair at Chequers that “every official he had met during his US visit had been ‘emotionally compromised’ by the terrorist attacks” and observed that people “don’t make good decisions” in such a state. They included Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, head of Britain’s special forces. He provides a fascinating account of the disquiet among senior British envoys who were flown to Washington the day after 9/11. Kerbaj sympathises with the challenges faced by intelligence professionals. The intelligence did not fit the case being made by President George W Bush in Washington and Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. But when a National Intelligence Estimate was prepared, “it did not cite Murray’s report”. Kerbaj writes that Naji, then the Iraqi foreign minister, let the CIA’s Bill Murray know that Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, “chemical, biological and nuclear”. After 9/11 there was the clarity of having a new enemy, but Kerbaj reminds us how intelligence was shaped to justify a war not authorised by a definitive UN Security Council resolution. ![]() The Five Eyes had lost part of their raison d’être when the USSR collapsed. The real passion in Kerbaj’s book comes with his account of the US war on terror, starting with the fevered time between the 9/11 attacks and the huge intelligence failures that marked the invasion of Iraq 18 months later. He was the model for the Soviet mole Bill Haydon in Le Carré’s classic spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Philby did not feel it necessary to defect until 1963. They gave Philby the benefit of the doubt, despite other pointers, including the kidnap and presumed execution of a would-be Soviet defector whose case he was investigating. After Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two members of the spy ring recruited by the NKVD at Cambridge University in the 1930s, fled to Moscow in 1951, the British deflected American suspicions that they had been tipped off by Kim Philby. Five Eyes lays out the complacency displayed by the British in the face of evidence that the Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service had been breached. The story is well known, but still beggars belief. Kerbaj reminds us how far the Soviets penetrated Britain’s spy agency, MI6.
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