He covers that whole area from Peshawar through to Bukhara, and it is an intelligence nightmare. This book plunges you into Afghanistan, in particular, and the tribal areas of Pakistan. He was a truly brilliant linguist, unlike Lawrence of Arabia, who was a bad linguist. Next up is Travels into Bokhara by Alexander Burnes, a 19th century British traveller and explorer who took part in the Great Game.Īlexander Burnes was an officer at the time, and he travelled to Central Asia. His book answered the question as to why they were lying. Yes, and he also looks at why it was going on. And then when your predictions turn out to be wrong, you go back and adjust how you weigh information, and what you do with it.Īnd you think that John Gray’s book shows what was really going on. It gives you a predictive ability that most people don’t get to have from just reading the newspapers. You look at enough intelligence and you start to assemble a view of the world. Human sources and informants are often the worst, although sometimes they can be very good. Those two things really force your nose into reality. There is nothing like a good intercept to get at a truth, or photography from satellites. That is just simplistic.”įor my part, when you know intelligence is being manipulated, you learn to weigh up what is good and what is bad intelligence. “I think it is overly cynical to think that Bush was doing favours for his friends in the oil industry. It was this fascination with the Middle East, and with Christianity and Muslims and the rest of it, that drove him. I think the man was seriously flawed and was looking for a cause. I think it is overly cynical to think that Bush was doing favours for his friends in the oil industry. We sort of knew about that one meeting that happened between one of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence officers and Bin Laden in Khartoum, and nothing came of it.

I went to the journalist Judith Miller and told her they don’t know these things, and that The New York Times shouldn’t be leading with front page stories saying there are weapons of mass destruction, or writing about “Al-Qaeda and Saddam” – it was just wrong. So there was this idea of misusing facts to achieve a higher good.Īnd how did you feel about what was going on, knowing the true evidence? You saw it in World War I when they talked about the Belgian nuns and the Huns – all that propaganda was to manipulate the US into getting involved. There was the idea that you could tell a benign lie. They really thought that if they could just get rid of Saddam, it would help convert the unbelievers. I think Blair and Bush have a Christian foundation to their way of looking at the world which motivated them. So why do you think Bush and Blair still went ahead with it? In both the US and the UK there were protests against going to war, and a feeling that the intelligence didn’t stack up. We knew that Saddam Hussein had already destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, and that he was pretending to keep them in order to deter Iran. What kind of intelligence did you see on the ground that was being manipulated? If you are in the intelligence world it is much easier to manipulate that narrative, because intelligence isn’t public. Gray constantly comes back to this happy Christian narrative that humanity is perfectible, that at the end there is this city on the hill, and that man has a purpose. There was this idea that if you just got rid of a couple of obstacles, then the Middle East would catch up with the vision the US and the UK had of the 21st century. It bled into the belief that we could change the Middle East – that you could speed up human progress there. A narrative was written in national intelligence estimates that justified the war, and that happened in Britain as well. One is how the intelligence was manipulated when we went into Iraq. That book accounts for a lot of things for me.

First up is Black Mass by the British political theorist John Gray.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

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