Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Dearlove had spoken to George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Each had a high regard for the other; they were professionals at the top of the increasingly murky world intelligence gathering had become in the run-up to the war with Iraq. It was a world where, in the memorable words of Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, “no one could surprise like a friend.”

Deeply embattled over the coming war with Iraq, Tony Blair had secretly agreed for Aznar, a man he called a “trusted friend,” to be spied upon. Britain and America—Blair and Bush—wanted to be absolutely certain that their Spanish ally in the imminent conflict remained as steadfast in his commitment behind the scenes as Aznar did in public. Over 95 percent of Spaniards either opposed going to war or were lukewarm about the idea. “There was an air of crisis, verging on panic in both Downing Street and the White House,” recalled George Galloway, a maverick Labour MP—and later founder of the Respect Party—and regarded by Blair as a leader of the antiwar movement growing in Britain. “For Aznar to crack under pressure would be a disaster.”

The first man Dearlove spoke to on that February day was John Scarlett. Tall, ramrod straight, with a domed head, the former MI6 spy was the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee—the invisible footbridge over which crossed all MI6 intelligence for Downing Street. Scarlett’s position as the overall monitor of Britain’s intelligence services gave him a seat in Blair’s Cabinet (later he would replace Dearlove as MI6 chief, a job Scarlett had long coveted). But as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, his main task was to know what was happening in Iraq, to know what could be known about Saddam Hussein, and to predict what would happen as war drew closer. That included knowing, from January 2003, the real intentions of allies like Aznar.

In the previous two months, MI6, the CIA, and NSA had also been involved in bugging UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector. Those operations finally surfaced when Clare Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, claimed in February 2004 in Parliament that she knew “secret transcripts had been made of Annan’s conversations by MI6 over the looming war with Iraq.” In the aftermath of Clare Short’s revelations that Kofi Annan had been spied upon, Inocencio Arias, Spain’s ambassador to the UN, said: “Everybody spies on everybody. And when there’s a big crisis, big countries spy a lot. If your mission is not bugged, then you’re really worth nothing.” Details of how and why Aznar was bugged had remained secret until now revealed in this book.

In the weeks before the war, Blair had described Aznar as one of his “most frequent and trusted telephone callers,” Alastair Campbell, the strategy director in Downing Street, would recall. Aznar knew and accepted that his regular calls to Blair were listened into and a shorthand note taken. But he would never have expected—not for a moment—that his private briefings to his own aides were about to be spied upon on the orders of the prime minister.

Campbell, an astute judge of character, was among those in Downing Street genuinely puzzled at Blair’s close relationship to the Spanish prime minister. “Aznar was a man on the European right and it was as hard to explain his closeness to Tony Blair as it was the prime minister’s closeness to George Bush,” Campbell would later confide to Peter Stothard, the former editor of The Times .

The fact was that Blair and Aznar were united over how weak their domestic support was for going to war with Iraq. Aznar’s calls to Blair were taken in the prime minister’s Downing Street den. It was a cosy room dominated by a small desk, on which stood a large framed portrait of Nelson Mandela, a hero of Blair’s. Next to it was a telephone. But the ringing came from an extension placed on a small table in the far corner of the room. It was where the note taker sat. The room was closed off from the rest of Downing Street by tall blue-leather doors. Blair always greeted Aznar with affection, saying, “Hullo Jose Maria.” It was Blair at his telephonic best, transmitting his accomplished skills in making a person he was talking to feel like the only person who matters. In these conversations Blair tried to convey his messianic view of the importance of removing Saddam Hussein; speaking of creating a United Nations being freed from its present helpless torpor; how the removal of the dictator would serve as a warning to other extremist nations that terror would be met with massive force. It would also be a message to Palestinians and Israelis that the present conditions of instability in the Middle East must cease.

Across the river Thames on that February day, Dearlove had continued to make his own calls. Aznar now commanded less than 5 percent of the Spanish electorate to support his decision to back Britain and the United States in going to war with Iraq. “That’s even less than the number of those who think Elvis Presley is still alive,” Blair had joked to Alastair Campbell after another call from Madrid. It was that low electoral percentage that lay behind Dearlove’s phone calls. Would Spain’s prime minister remain committed to the ever-louder drumbeat of war, or would he waver and undergo a mind change that could wreck the military plans being finalized in London and Washington to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein? The only way to find the answer was to bug Spain’s ambassador to the United Nations, its key Foreign Ministry officials in Madrid, and the discussions Aznar had with them.

By the end of that cold February 9 day in London, the decision to bug Aznar had been taken. Those directly involved were Sir Richard Dearlove, George Tenet, John Scarlett, and the directors of GCHQ and NSA. The green light to do so had come from Downing Street after a lengthy conversation between Bush and Blair the previous day.

The decision to mount Operation Condor came when Frank Koza, a senior analyst in NSA, had sent his counterpart in GCHQ an e-mail asking for a surveillance “surge” against key members of the UN Security Council. Koza asked for “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy makers an edge.” His request was marked “Top Secret/COMINT/XI.” The “XI” coding signified the request must never be declassified. It must stay Top Secret. However, a copy of the message somehow later found its way to GCHQ translator Katherine Gun. She passed it to an intermediary, who gave it to the British journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had achieved fame after being freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and became a strong supporter of the antiwar movement. She, in turn, passed the memo to a journalist on London’s Observer . Gun was arrested under Britain’s Official Secrets Act; later, the case was dropped.

On that February day, the focus in GCHQ, NSA, MI6, and the CIA was spying on Aznar. The operation would be run out of Menwith Hill using NSA’s ECHELON system’s program called the Dictionary: its computers can target specific telephone numbers, words, and voiceprints, and includes “Tempest,” which deciphers individual voices from laser beams directed at windows to read vibrations generated by people speaking. A segment of Aznar’s voice was fed into the Dictionary computers, which were programmed to track every word Aznar and his key officials spoke in relation to Iraq anywhere in the world. Information obtained was downloaded to the Menwith Hill computers. Interlinked banks of computers decoded and analyzed the data and fed it down a secure line to GCHQ, where the material was turned into transcripts marked “Highly Classified.” These were then sent to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. From there they were hand carried the short distance to Downing Street in buff-coloured files each with the bold Cross of Saint George on their covers, an open indication of Scarlett’s patriotism. To reach Blair, the intelligence supremo had to frequently step over the toys of Leo, the prime minister’s youngest son, who often used the floor of Downing Street as a playground. Copies were sent via NSA to George Bush. For both politicians they became the prime source for judging the mood of Aznar and his officials. After the war it emerged that Aznar had remained consistent in his support. It would cost him his post as prime minister in Spain’s next election.