i would have had to sit through all the cigar smoke. >> you have a great picture. >> nicholas longworth was a very suave person from cincinnati, married to alice roosevelt longworth, quite a good politician, and very friendly with his democratic counterpart. when he was speaker, he had one of the few cars that was available to the house of representatives. the republican speaker used to pick up the democratic minority leader and drive him to work in the morning. when the democrats won the majority back, the senate speaker sent a telegram and said, who's car is it? he said, think it mine, but you are welcome to ride. that is the way in which you got those bipartisan friendships that existed in those days. >> we will finish with this. >> this is what the tour guides

tell me. we have a lot of students -- lots of groups in town. there are all sorts of visitors. you also see families coming in, taking their children around, pointing out what is happening in the capitol building. with the visitors center, there is more opportunity for them to learn about what is going on in congress. i worked for many years on the exhibits, talking about the senate, the house, the differences between them and how they functioned. that is what i tried to do in this book, give an introduction to people about these very different bodies. hopefully, they will get curious enough to ask other questions. >> you can find this book

through oxford books. it is called "a very short introduction." thank you for joining us. .

>> did morning, and welcome, everyone. welcome to the director general. we have published one declassified document we recognize they give evidence

based on recollection. i will remind each witness on each occasion. she will be later asked to sign something saying the evidence is truthful. >> i think it would be helpful if you can tell us how the security service was involved. >> perhaps can i precede that with a sort of more general description of the role of the security service? >> that would be helpful. >> which is to collect >> can i precede that with a general description? and to develop that

intelligence, to analyze it and, where necessary, to act on it in mitigating or reducing those threats and also using intelligence generated by us to provide information to government on which policy can be based and on which more general countermeasures can be developed. in terms of iraq, we were not directly involved in the decision-making to go to war in iraq. that was generally other people, although we were involved, obviously, in a number of meetings and in some of the discussions and of course in the jic. our focus was then on dealing with the manifestations of terrorist threats in the united kingdom since 9/11, and since

9/11 and before our work was increasing exponentially. it increased very much more when we went into iraq, but our main focus was dealing with the protection of the united kingdom. >> what about espionage and sabotage? >> we were still concerned, as we are today, with the threat from espionage and the threat from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. in law we still have a responsibility to work on serious crime. in practice, while i was director general we pretty well gave that up because of the pressure of wo on terrorism, and of course terrorism, not only terrorism from a global perspective but irish terrorism, continued to take quite a lot of our resources. >> there was establishment of the joint terrorism analysis center in 2003.

can you say a little bit about that? >> yes. obviously, after 9/11 we were l considering the implications of this attack on the way we did business and before the arrival of jtac, there were a lot of separate bits round whitehall dng terrorist assessment, but actually my service had the sort of monopoly responsibility for producing terrorist assessments and had done for many decades, and we suggested that we should give up this monopoly role and build something that was cross- departmental. i had extensive discussions with david omand, who i think has given evidence on this, on creating this new organ.

several departments were anxious about this, notably the mod and the dis to begin with, but once everybody decided to go for it, departments like the mod were very supportive and i think we created something which thrives -- i don't know how big it is today -- which brought views from across the whitehall community, from within the intelligence community, from other departments, and led to a more comprehensive and richer analysis of the threat. it has also, jtac, become very helpful in guiding investigations and operations and it is much imitated. when i was director general, senior visitors to london very regularly wanted to visit it

and it became a tourist destination, almost too much of one, and was imitated by many other countries. so i think it was a way of dealing with a large amount of material in an ordered and comprehensive and cross- departmental way, of which i and ma others involved from other departments, the other agencies, the mod, the police, government departments, should be proud. >> can you say a little bit about your personal position as a member of jic and those aspects of the work that you were involved in? >> yes. as you know from, i thi, probably other witnesses, the jic is an organization which deals with quite a broad range of issues and there will be people there who are experts on

what is being discussed and people there who are not expert on that particular thing but come as an informed outsider to give commentary, to ask questions. i started -- i had obviously sat on the jic before i became director general intermittently. when i became director general, i attend it as regularly as i could if i wasn't travelling. so i was party to, as all other members of the jic were, the jic assessments that came out. i was obviously more authoritative and able to speak better, i think, on the terrorist papers than on the ones about iraq, on which my service is obviously not an expe, compared to other government departments. >> but how complete was the intelligence picture and how did your service go about filling the gaps in relation to

iraq? >> the intelligencpicture on what? >> on iraq. >> it wasn't for my service to fill the intelligence gaps and the picture was fragmentary and, as you will know from the fact that some of the sis intelligence has been withdrawn, the picture was not complete. the picture on intelligence never is. my service's job was to try and have as thorough and complete a picture as possible on threat within the uk and to british interests overseas and neither i nor my precessors nor suessors would ever suggest that was ever going to be complete. but if i can refer to the letter from me as deputy director general from march 2002 which was released -- a redacted version was released today, six months before i became director general we felt we had a pretty good intelligence picture of a threat from iraq within the uk and to

british interests, and you will see from that letter we thought it was very limited and containable. >> before we move on, my last question really is -- was there any other personal involvement that you had on policy in iraq that you haven't covered? did u, for example, advise misters, or was there any other rsonal involvement in this area of work? >> certainly i had regular discussions with the home secretary and with the permanent under secretary in the home office, and you will see from the jic assessments on terrorism that actually they are very consistent. therefore i can't give you specifics but there was an expectation, i think, from pretty early on that the threat from terrorism would increase.

what i don't think we appreciated early on would be the effect on uk citizens and -- but that was becoming apparent during 2002 and 2003. can i make a few more general points? >> it would be very helpful. >> i think for the inquiry in considering this very complex issue, it is important to say that threat from al-qaeda did not begin at 9/11. my service was already engaged in ccern about the threat posed by al-qaeda from the late -- mid- to late 1990s, after all the fatwa by fawwaz from osama bin laden was issued in london in 1996. we had various operations at that time, some of which had connections to afghanistan, and well before 9/11 we were anxious and worried and doing

investigations. i think one of the things that is often forgotten, and i was asking my colleagues to produce it yesterday and they couldn't remember it, was that actually a month after 9/11 the government put a paper into the public domain -- i'm sure the inquiry is aware of that -- which was full of intelligence. if you like, that was the first dossier, which was who was responsible for 9/11, to which my service and i contributed. so ourocus was actually not on iraq, on which we had very few people working, not on iraqi activity in the uk, but our focus was on various forms of terrorism relating partly to al qaeda and partly to extremism from that sort of area. that was our focus. >> thank you very much. >> i turn to sir lawrence freedman then. lawrence? >> you have just mentioned your letter that has been declassified and put on our website of march 2002, to john

gieve at the home office, and it deals with the possible threat to e uk from iraqi agents in the event of an effort to topple saddam hussein's reme. perhaps you could just give us a gist of the nature of the threat that you saw at the time from the regime itself. >> i think you asked david omand -- were we ked to oduce this? i think i can asre you we were not. the service would regard it as its duty to alert government to threats as they emerge -- this is pre-jtac. as i said to lady prashar, we regarded the threat, the direct threat from iraq as low. we did think -- and it comes in that letter -- that saddam hussein mighresort to

terrorism in the theater if he thought his regime was toppled, the capability tdo anything much in the uk. that turned out to be the right judgment. what the letter -- has been redacted from the letter, like i say, in general terms is that is partly as a result of action we took. but i don't think the threat in the uk was anything other than very limited. >> you mentioned tt you were not asked to produce this assessment. what was it about the circumstances of march 2002, which is before crawford and so on, that led you to think it would be useful to produce an assessment? >> that's a difficult one to answer and i noted that it is before crawford. i said to richard norton-taylor of the guardian, when i gave an interview to him, that at the time of 9/11, when i went to

america the next day with sir richard dearlove and sir francis richards -- sorry, i'm deviating, but there is a point. >> that's fine. >> we flew back over new yor where fires we still burning, and i think we were all in separate ways reflecting on what this meant for our organizations and generally, and also on how the americans would react, and at that stage i have to say it did not occur to me that we would be going to war in iraq a year and a half later. but sometime between then and my writing that letter in march 2002 it must have become apparent that this was a possibility. so i think ibecame apparent much quicker than i remembered until i went back and reviewed the pape but i can't tell you specifically what triggered

that. >> the letter refers to some things that the iraqis might try -- and, as you say, they are believed to have limited capabilities -- if there is an effort to topple the regime and it is suggested that what he could do, he would try only if the survival of the regime is threatened. at that time did you -- i'm asking you to go back to what you thought at this time -- did you see regime change itself, the effort that was going on, as likely to lead so far to a real challenge to the survival of the regime or just a sort of series of measures of the sort there had been during the 1990s, that mighte seen to put a threat on the regime that they could possibly survive? >> i am afraid, sir lawrence, i really can't honestly answer that. i don't think i anticipated what would happen, but it is hard to remember eight years on

exactly the provenance of that. i think it is worth saying that that letter -- i mean, throughout my career i have been involved in the service producing analyses like this and writing to alert senior officials of them. so this seemed to presumably at the time part of routine work. i'm sorry i can't be more helpful. >> it may or may not be relevant but the cabinet office was at the very same time, march 2002, starting work on options. so that would have been in the air, in the atmosphere, exactly in that month. >> yes. if i go back to the 9/11 release of information by the government on 4 october 2001, which i re-read, in that document there is no reference to iraq and certainly in the early time we were focused on

afghanistan and the implications of this for that theater. >> as the effort to develop plans for regime change, the united nations resolution, the build-up in the preparations, did your estimate change at all about the risk to the uk from iraqi agents? >>o. >> and you have already, i think, answered this, in suggesting that you felt pretty confident that your assessment was correct. can you say whether there were any attempts even by iraqi agents to do anything as a result of -- >> no, there weren't. >> there weren't. can i just ask you then about one -- perhaps just one other question related to this.

this is a letter to the home office. it is copied to a number of other people. would you expect there to be any direct response to a letter like this or is it the sort of thing that gets noted perhaps to go forward into a jic assessment? was there much response to what you had written? >> i think it is worth -- i don't remember whether there was a response but -- yes, there was a responsand i'll come back to that, but theseetters are churning out. >> they are standard? >> they are standard and therefore you would not always expect a response. my recollection, though, is that officials in the home officeere -- and senior officials -- were anxious that action might need to be taken against iraqi nationals in the uk and there was quite a debate, includg on the possibility of deportation, on which i can remember advising the home secretary and others would be unlikely to be possible because

of echr considerations. but there was quite an animated exchange of information, which you may have the papers on, about whether people should be deported, as they had been in the first gulf war. that had been a slightly messy process, which we were not anxious to relive, and i think we were not convinced that anybody presented sufficient threat that action needed to be taken against them, even had that been possible to do legally. >> what the letter says is that most of the dgi agents here in the uk were watching out for their own opposition forces. >> yes. i think that it is perhaps worth saying that from the service come a range of material to government -- security service reports -- now of course much of that is subsumed in broader jtac reporting -- letters from

the top to senior people. when i was director general i would be sending several of these a week. on some there were reactions. some formed the basis of subsequent discussions with ministers. some fed into jic analysis. but there is a standard flow of information because clearly it is important that ministers and senior officials know what domestic intelligence work is showing and illuminating. >> just to clarify, you said there was a response and then you referred to considerations of deportation of iraqi nationals and the problems for human rights that that would cause. were there any other responses at all? >> well, there was discussion about whether -- i think with the foreign office -- about whether the iraqi interest section in london should be closed. there were sort of things about if war came, what would it be

necessary to do. i have to say my service felt pretty relaxed on that side of things. we were far from relaxed about the threat from al-qaeda, which again, if i can refer to that open document, said back in 2001 the uk was a target. there was increasing information around the world of that. that was where our energies were placed. >> i'm going to ask youome questions about that soon. can i just ask one final question, which is related to the things that iraqis might have done, and this refers to the proposition that saddam's regime were in some way responsible for providing support, potential support to al-qaeda, and even mighthave been involved in 9/11. to these sorts of assessments? >> no. i think you have material

suggesting that there had been intelligence on occasional contact in the past but i think -- i wrote this down when i was preparing for today -- there was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, i might say, of the cia. it was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the american machine, as you have also heard evidence on, which is why donald rumsfeld started an intelligence unit in the pentagon to seek an alternative judgment. but there were tiny scraps suggesting contact, usually when saddam hussein felt under threat, and the danger was that those tiny scraps of intelligence were given an importance and weight by some which they did not bear. so to my mind iraq, saddam hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11 and i have never seen

anything to make me change my mind. >> were you given sight of some of the material produced by the pentagon? >> i don't think i was. probably a good thing. it would have made me cross. >> thank you. >> thank you. i'll turn to sir martin gilbert now. martin? >> by march 2003 we had already been militarily inlved wh iraq in the first gulf war, in the no fly zones and indeed in naval operations in the gulf. from your view, from your perspective, did any of these involvements affect the domestic terrorist threat? >> i think the -- as i have said, the domestic -- the threat within the uk and to british interests overseas wasradually increasing during this period and during 2002/2003 we were receiving more and more

intelligence showing that the uk was a focus. i suppose the attack in istanbul in early 2003 on the hsbc and the british consulate was a significant manifestation of an attack on british interests. osama bin laden had made it clear that america and their lies were targets. as time went on, and the real change came 2003/2004, when there was a sharp increase of threat intelligence relating to british citizens -- perhaps you want to come on to that in a minute, but that's the main change. >> i think another of my colleagues wants to ask on that. if i could just go back to the immediate pre-conflict period, what assessments were you making with regard to the terrorist threat, should britain become involved in a us-led

conflict? >> i think you will see from our report in early 2003, which is reflected in the jic repoing, that the threat from al-qaeda would increase and the iraqhreat was similar to what i have already said to sir lawrence. >> was there some assessment of what this threat might be, should we support the united states but not militarily? >> no, i think that's probably a false distinction because i think even if we had supported the united states in sentiment but not militarily, we would still have been seen as supporters so it probably wouldn't have altered it. i don't know. that's a very hypothetical question. >> okay. >> on to the post-conflict period. roderic? >> you mentioned earlier your interview with richard norn- taylor of the guardian, which i assume was the one that you gave which was pubshed on 11

november 2006. in that interview you said that -- >> sorry to interrupt. i think there is a typo in the titling of that. i believe you gave it in july 2009. >> i don't remember. it was to mark the 100th birthday. >> it was july 2009, we have just discovered. >> the guardian magazine, richard norton-taylor, whether it was 2006 or 2009 -- >> yes, it was definitely not 2006. it was after i retired. >> we will come back to november 2006 in a minute. you are quoted as saying that as us and uk forces were preparing to invade iraq, you were asking "why now?" "she said it 'as explicitly as i could. i said something like, "the threat to us would increase because of iraq."'" going back