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 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.
