Interview with Mr Carne Ross, former British diplomat. Bbc World, “hardTalk” with Stephen Sackur, 05.02.2007

This is BBC World and HARDTalk with Stephen Sackur.

Stephen Sackur, the BBC presenter: Tony Blair has thus far resisted pressure for a far-reaching independent inquiry in the Iraq war. In fact, the British Government has tried hard to stop publication of insiders’ accounts of the run-up to invasion and its aftermath. My guest today was till 2002 a senior British diplomat at [the] United Nations. He has decided to ignore those official requests for silence. Why?

Stephen Sackur: Carne Ross, welcome to HARDTalk!

Carne Ross: Thank you!

Q.: You are publishing a book in just a few weeks’ time called “The Independent Diplomat” and you call it a “personal account of the descent from illusion to disillusionment”. What do you mean by “disillusionment”?

A.: Well, I’d always wanted to be a diplomat, ever since I was a little boy. I was fascinated by international affairs. Now, I was very committed to what it meant to be a British diplomat and through various experiences but I suppose, in particular, what happened on Iraq, I became deeply disillusioned and the book is the story of that disillusionment and the conclusions I drew from it.

Q.: But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you are a “high-flier”, who for one reason or another has turned your fire on the system that actually nurtured you.

A.: I think that’s right. I think I’ve struggled with my conscience over the disloyalty that you could argue I’m showing. But I felt that…

Q.: Did you see it as disloyalty?

A.: At times I did and was very torn up about it. But I think the points that I wanted to make about the problems in the system of diplomacy today were more important.

Q.: We gonna talk about the system at some length but I want to start considering Iraq and what you’ve written about Iraq. There are real issues of confidentiality, aren’t there, in what you’ve decided to do?

A.: I made … I was very careful in writing the book not to break any particular national secrets. I didn’t write about whose phones we were bugging or whatever. That was not my intention. What I wanted to talk about …

Q.: But lots of detail in the book has been excised, hasn’t it?

A.: Not lots. No, I took care to submit it to the government for clearance before publishing it and they asked me to change a few things. I don’t think things that changed the substantial arguments in the book in any way.

Q.: What did you have to change?

A.: Well, if I told you that, then I’d be revealing state secrets.

Q.: No, I’m not asking for every single detail but what were the subject areas?

A.: Well, there are areas of things in national security, you know, – the role the Intelligence Service and things like that that I did talk about that I’ve removed. But I don’t think they are particularly important for the arguments in the book.

Q.: But they don’t want you to publish it, do they? Even now.

A.: They haven’t forbidden me from publishing it. They were, I think, discouraging about it and I can understand why – it’s a very critical account.

Q.: Well, you say: “I think they were discouraging”. You know they were very discouraging, they sent you a letter just a short while ago, which you described in the press as, quote on quote, “unpleasant”, which sounds like a diplomatic euphemism, if ever I heard one.

A.: I say it was euphemistic. At official level the Foreign Office has been pretty hostile about the book but I still have many friends in the Foreign Office, who are much more supportive about it, so it’s a very ambiguous reaction that I’m encountering.

Q.: But what did they say in this letter, this official letter that you got?

A.: Well, I have chosen not to make the letter public. I don’t think it will be right to. I don’t want particularly to have a row with the British Foreign Office about it. But they were discouraging about it and felt that the tone of the book was hostile to the Foreign Office as an institution.

Q.: Well, let me, perhaps, make a stab at the tone because they did release a statement, which goes like this: “Mr Ross has chosen to misrepresent the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In so doing he risks damaging the credibility and the morale of the FCO and relationship of trust and confidence within government”.

A.: Well, I disagree with that very strongly. I think that the government per se in Britain, but also the Foreign Office, should encourage a much more open debate about foreign policy. I don’t think it helps to try and stifle debates and I think officials like me, who resigned on a point of principle, should be allowed to have our say. I don’t think it makes a healthy policy making to try and prevent that.

Q.: But hang on a minute! You are a man, who as you’ve said, always wanted to be in the Foreign Office, you actively volunteered for the job, you have signed the Official Secrets Act; you wanted to be at the centre of decision making in a highly sensitive area; all of these are voluntary decisions; all of them are jobs that are based upon trust and confidence between elected politicians and civil servants. You think it is just fine of you to walk away from the job and then reveal all?

A.: Well, I haven’t revealed all. As I said, I submitted the book for clearance…

Q.: You’ve revealed the secrets; the Foreign Office thinks is a great mistake…

A.: No, they’ve asked me to take out things on the grounds of national security and those things I’ve excluded, so I don’t think I’m breaching trust in that way…

Q.: No, but I just told you that the Foreign Office believes that you are jeopardising the relationship of trust and confidence within government.

A.: Well, I don’t think they are right. I think that there is a belief in government that we need to be secretive and closed about all of these decisions and think that belief is wrong. I think there needs to be much more openness about it. And I’m trying to contribute to that openness. I’ve not made “at home” and more personal criticisms in the book. I’ve criticised the system and I think I’m justified in doing that. If you read the book, I think you’ll see that the way policy is made leads to bad mistakes – and that’s what I’m talking about in the book.

Q.: I just want to compare and contrast your position with that of your boss at the UN for quite some time – Jeremy Greenstock – former British Ambassador at the United Nations. We had him on this programme. Now, he was trying to write a book. He put it before the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They didn’t like quite a few parts of it and he decided in the end not to go ahead with the book. And he said to me, he said: “When these issues arose, there was a lot of unhappiness – more then I was comfortable with and I decided to delay it”. Your boss took a very different position from your own.

A.: Well, he has taken a very different position from me on several issues. I mean, I think I’m entitled to the position that I have. I strongly believe that the sorts of things I’m talking about in the book need to be ventilated. It’s not a kind of kiss-and-tell of Britain’s secrets that you would be. You would not find that in the book.

Q: Let’s go back to the specific origins of your disillusion and you’ve said that the prime cause was Iraq. Now, you served at the United Nations dealing with Iraq policy from 1998 to 2002. When did you begin to feel that the policy you were advocating was fundamentally wrong?

A.: Well, slowly during those years it began to dawn on me: the sanctions policy was punishing the wrong group of people, namely – Iraqi civilians, and was not doing enough to pressure the Iraqi regime. In fact, as the UK and US governments were not doing nearly enough to stop sanctions busting by Iraq and that was, I suppose, the beginning of a certain doubt of my mind.

Q.: Well, you say “certain doubt” but there was more then a certain doubt – you were deeply troubled, weren’t you? You say that the policy that you were advocating was achieving the wrong objectives and it was harming the Iraqi people. So what I’m interested in is process. How did you express these grave misgivings that you had?

A.: Well, I repressed them for a long time. I mean, I was extremely vigorous and defending British Policy at the Security Council, I was well known for the aggressiveness and robustness of my approach…

Q.: So, you were defending a lie, basically, as you saw it…

A.: Well, I don’t think it was a lie. I don’t think our policy was dishonest that leads to that point.

Q.: Well, you weren’t to the United Nations and saying: “We are doing terrible harms to Iraqi people”, were you?

A.: No, and one doesn’t… , I mean, as a diplomat you tell versions of the truth and the degree to which those versions are diverted from the actual truth is of course contingent but in that case my doubts stopped to be private, I began to voice them inside the government and in our talks with the US and the State Department, for instance. I began to become quite vociferous about those doubts.

Q.: What did you say to your boss, Jeremy Greenstock?

A.: We talked about it quite a lot. I think many diplomats …

Q.: You said: “I think this policy is wrong, Sir Jeremy”, did you?

A.: Well, it wasn’t working. I mean, it wasn’t persuading Iraq to accept full weapons inspections and the evidence of civilian suffering in Iraq was mounting to the extent that it was undeniable.

Q.: And, you know, you were the First Secretary, you were senior…, you were not the boss, but you were a senior official in the Embassy. What did Sir Jeremy, the Ambassador, say to you? Did you feel that your doubts, your misgivings, your feeling that the entire policy was misguided – did you feel that was being fed into the system?

A.: Well, I can’t claim that I did as vigorously as I should have done. I mean, the doubts that I now feel very strongly were at the time more, as I said, more repressed. And I didn’t do enough myself to voice them inside the system, so I can’t blame others if those doubts were not taken seriously. But I did try to raise it with ministers, I would get into cars with them on the way to airports and I would find them quite sympathetic. But often such is the nature of the machine that even ministers felt that weren’t able to alter the direction of policy. And this, I think, is a real problem in policy making. The doubts of conscience of this kind don’t have enough room in the policy debate. There’s a kind of commitment to empirical information and to a very hard-edged and moral approach to foreign policy which, I think, excludes that kind of debate.

Q.: I wanted to discuss those big-picture thoughts later. But let’s move away from the sanctions issue and think about Saddam Hussein, the threat he posed, weapons of mass destruction, ’cos you describe in your forthcoming book how, and I’m quoting again, “We chose the facts to suit the policy not the way around. We were 8 thousand miles away from the Iraqi reality and there were times when we might as well have been talking about the surface of the Moon”.

A.: Yes! Well, we had no embassy in Baghdad during the years I worked on Iraq. We were very reliant on particular forms of information, including intelligence information. And these were proven not to be very reliable, event at the time we didn’t feel they were particularly reliable. I don’t think we had a rich or full sense of what reality was like for Iraqi people in Iraq at all during the period we were making policy on Iraq and this was a fundamental problem.

Q.: Well, you may not have a rich sense of that but clearly overtime, and I imagine by the time you left the UN job in 2002, you clearly had a sense and again I’m quoting your own words here that “Iraq did not, did not (!) pose a threat with weapons of mass destruction to the UK or UK interests”.

A.: This one was not just my view – this was the view of the British government internally and, indeed, the US government at that time. We did never ever in the years I worked on it make a judgement that Iraq was in any way a threat to its neighbours, to our interests, to us, to whatever. We thought that they had some weapons of mass destruction, some residual stocks from their earlier substantial holdings but we didn’t think that they posed a serious threat. The all they had – the means to deliver such weapons.

Q.: You talked about this, for example, to Doctor, the late Doctor David Kelly.

A.: Here, now, I did talk about it, yes!

Q.: And what did he say to you?

A.: He agreed, we all agreed. I mean, nobody, who worked on it, felt otherwise. There was a very small group of the officials in the British government and, indeed, in the US government, who worked on this subject, and I think our collective view was pretty much the same. This was our official view internally.

Q.: This is the crock then of why your testimony is so important! Because what you are saying unequivocally is that the Blair argument for going to war with Iraq was based on a deliberate deception.

A.: I am saying that the government misrepresented the evidence, as we knew it. The evidence was inherently unreliable and what …

Q.: I am asking you to address my phrase. Am I wrong? I think that you are saying that Tony Blair was engaged in a deliberate deception.

A.: I think the government was dishonest, yes!

Q.: Yes, “deliberate deception”?

A.: It’s the same thing! “Dishonesty” and “deliberate deception” – that’s the same thing!

Q.: So, how do you feel when members of the government, who hear what you now say, respond by saying: “You haven’t a clue!” Because you were relatively junior in the decision making process, you didn’t see all of the intelligence and tick off Margaret Beckett. I’m not sure how key Mr Ross was. Lord Butler, whose report we know all about, took evidence from many officials and *she says rather cattily “some were a great deal more important than others”.

A.: Well, I was the First Secretary, I wasn’t any Ambassador. I’ve never claimed that I was anything other then what I was. But I worked on Iraq in the UK Mission for four and a half years between 1998 and 2002. I read intelligence on Iraq every day of those years. So, I think I had a pretty thorough picture and, as I said, that there was a very small group of us, who did work on it.

Q.: You’ve just said something very powerful to me – you’ve agreed with this idea of deliberate deception – “dishonesty”, you called it. Why, on earth then, if you believe that, why did you sit on your hands for two years from leaving the Embassy, the Mission at the United Nations, to your decision to testify to Lord Butler in 2004?

A.: I think it’s a very good question and I’ve often asked myself the same thing. At the time I had a lot of doubts, I drafted resignation letters – this is before the war – and as it started, I didn’t send them.

Q.: Why?

A.: Because I didn’t think it would make any difference, I didn’t think I would stop what was about to happen. There was a tremendous sense of …, you know, the decision had been taken, there was no way that I could affect that. And also, I guess, I was scared for myself and for my future. I was selfish.

Q.: Do you think you were wrong? Do you think, actually, it might have made a difference if an important official like yourself had quit the Foreign Office and had made a big, loud noise about your doubts, about the use of the intelligence on WMD?

A.: I think I would have been publicly rubbished and dismissed and I would’ve found that very difficult to deal with and I’m not sure that would have made any difference.

Q.: You were a friend of David Kelly.

A: Yes.

Q.: Do you think it might have made a difference to him if you had spoken out?

A.: Well, he didn’t speak out, he briefed the press and indeed I talked to journalists off the record at the same time and no doubt in the same way that was not permitted that he did. How it would have made a difference – I can’t tell. I think what happened to him was tragic but also unpredictable.

Q.: I mean, not to put too final point on it – it’s a difficult question – but do you feel any sense of guilt?

A.: Yes, I do, absolutely! I feel profound guilt about the whole thing. It has affected my life profoundly and has caused a lot of cons and searching about my own role in all of this and that of my colleagues.

Q.: To quote you again, last November you appeared before the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee and I was struck by this – you said: “I did say things at the time but not enough. When I tried to instigate the discussion of policy, I was accused of being a troublemaker or an iconoclast.” You get marks in the FCO with a little red sign. And it means, for instance, “you will never be made ambassador to Washington”. Is that what it was in the end about – a fundamental lack of professional courage?

A.: Perhaps, yes. I was very committed to my career, I wanted to be successful, it’d been my life-long dream to be a senior diplomat. But, as I said, at the end, inside the Foreign Office, as it is in many of such institutions, you are not rewarded for speaking out.

Q.: What turned you? What changed your mind? Because, of course, in the summer of 04 you made a U-turn and you decided that you would testify to Butler and in so doing effectively end your Foreign Office career?

A.: Well, writing that testimony to Butler ended it because I realised – writing those things down I couldn’t honestly go back and work for this government with a smile on my face. That would’ve been, I think, hypocrisy. So that was the catalyst for me.

Q.: But, quite frankly, you were only writing things down that you talked for a long time and I’m just amazed that you could have worked for the government with a smile on your face for the intervening two years…

A.: Well, I wasn’t actually working for them directly, I was on sabbatical on end, I was on secondment to the UN and that was my way of dodging the question. I was not working directly for the British government as the British diplomat and that was my way of avoiding this choice I didn’t want to make.

Q.: In the end, did you decide to turn into speak-out because you were furious with the Blair government in particular?

A.: No, I was … honestly speaking, I was very happy when Blair won the election in 1997, I can’t remember the date. I was very pro what they were trying to do, I was very supportive of the interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. There were many things about Labour foreign policy that I was deeply sympathetic to. So it was not in any sense a kind of political decision. I think it was about the facts and about what I knew and about my own doubts about what had happened.

Q.: Do you hold Tony Blair, thought, personally responsible for what you’ve described as the “dishonesty” that the government was engaged in?

A.: I don’t know enough about him or the way he took decisions, or what information was presented to him to make such an accusation. Of course, at the end of the day, he is the Prime Minister; he’s responsible for these decisions. So in that sense, of course, I think he is responsible just like everybody else does. And he has accepted that responsibility but it’s not for me to kind of point my finger and say, you know, “he knew this” or “did that”. I don’t know, I didn’t work with him.

Q.: You’ve eluded already in this interview to the degree to which you think the system, the foreign policy making system, is broken. And, again, I refer you to something you told to the Foreign Affairs Committee. You said: “There is a subtle and creeping politicisation of the diplomatic service. To get promoted one has to show oneself to be sympathetic of the views of ministers, especially of the Prime Minister. Decision-making has been concentrated in Number 10”.

A.: Yes!

Q.: It sounds like you’ve lost faith in the fundamentals of foreign policy making.

A:. I have! I don’t think the system is right, I don’t think it’s fit for purpose. I think decisions are taken by far too small groups of people on the basis of far too partial information – whatever the subject! Sometimes they make the right decisions but sometimes they make the wrong ones. And I think we need a much more eclectic system of policy making with officials, as well as ministers, open to scrutiny – a much more transparent system.

Q.: But I come back to what we were talking at the very beginning. You signed on to a job dealing with the most sensitive and confidential information involving relations between nation-states. How can that be transparent and fully accountable in real time? It never can be!

A.: Well, I would question that assumption. I don’t think this is some secretive discourse that deserves to be kept away from the public’s eyes. I think it’s about all of our business. There is nothing more important then war or, indeed, all the stuff of foreign policy these days. It affects every aspect of our lives and that should be open for scrutiny to everybody. I simply don’t accept that there is this “secret little room” called foreign policy or international relations, which should be kept private from everybody else. I think that’s wrong!

Q.: Aren’t you confusing role of politicians and civil servants. You, in the end, were a civil servant. Tony Blair is an elected politician. He went back to the public and faced an election based on his record not least in Iraq. And he won that election. He has a right to dictate foreign policy. You, as a civil servant, are there to implement it!

A.: I absolutely agree, that’s why I resigned! I think civil servants are there to implement it but equally I think there is far too much [that] is done in the name of foreign policy by institutions like the Foreign Office now to be simply accounted for once every five years and in election. That’s not enough! The systems of democratic scrutiny that we have in Parliament or outside by the press, by the courts are simply not sufficient. I think the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, for instance, which is the primary body of democratic accountability, is not functioning, as it should do, in any way. But that’s symptomatic of a much broader problem.

Q.: Do you think in retrospect, and I’m interested you said that from being a child you wanted to be in the Foreign Office, do you think in retrospect, actually, you were never cut out to be a diplomat?

A.: I don’t agree, actually. I mean, I think in many ways I was very cut out to do – I love international relations, I’m very …

Q.: Well, lots of people… . I love international relations but I’m not a diplomat and never wanted to be. And the reason I ask is because we had Jeremy Greenstock on this programme. And in the end he said: “Look, we are civil servants. I was a government servant – he said – Iraq policy was a collective effort under the leadership of the Prime Minister and we cannot do our job as civil servants if we get emotionally caught up”.

A.: I disagree fundamentally with him about that and I think he and I have had this discussion. I’ve great respect for Sir Jeremy and we were very closely with him. He was a very, very good boss to me. I’d like to make that clear but I think the philosophically wrong different pages about this. I believe that …

Q.: So, you think you can and should get emotionally caught up?

A.: I don’t think you cannot. I think if you’re dealing with the issues of genocide, suffering, you should be getting emotionally caught up. If you are not, there’s something wrong. I think these are powerful and complex issues and if you are claiming that you are emotionally unconnected from them, there’s a degree of … not dishonesty ... but I don’t … I simply don’t think that’s true! I think these things are un…inseparably emotional and that needs to be acknowledged and the political reality of these things needs to be opened.

Q.: And you are trying to change them by turning yourself into a sort of diplomat for hire? A “hired gun” – you will work for, as you put it, for downtrodden, the speechless, the voiceless…

A.: Yes! Well, we’re not ready for diplomat for hire – that makes them sound like mercenary. We’re a non-profit organisation.

Q.: No, I understood: non-profit! But in the end you do work for various different peoples and groups, whom, you think, are deserving of diplomatic representation. It strikes me that you are going to be now fighting the sorts of values represented by Jeremy Greenstock in the British government.

A.: I suppose in a way we are. I’m kind of a gamekeeper turned poacher, if you like. I’ve gone over to the other side. I don’t really believe in the 21^st century or, perhaps, ever, in the notion of “my nation”, “my state” having rights and needs that are superior to others, which in some ways is the fundamental premise of diplomacy – that we have to fight for interests. I don’t believe in that notion as an organising thought of diplomacy.

Stephen Sackur: Carne Ross, thank you very much for being on HARDTalk!

Carne Ross: Thank you!

BBC World, 05.02.2007,

http://www.bbcworld.com/