The stunning victory of a woman licensed to chill
0 Comments | Herald, The; Glasgow (UK), Jul 22, 2010 | by anne johnstone
Licensed to chill. Of all the images to emerge from this week’s news, the one that will etch itself in the memory is that magnificently pugnacious profile of the ex-chief of MI5 Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller being driven to the Chilcot Inquiry. The severe black coat dress, the neatly coiffed silver hair, the pursed lips and tense jaw, the flared nostrils, the tightly knotted gold earrings and that icy unwavering gaze: every detail was perfect.
She has been compared with James Bond’s “M”, the fictional head of MI6, but even in all her pomp, Dame Judi Dench, who has played the part since 1995, was never quite this formidable. Here is more than just another woman to have burst through the glass ceiling without getting her throat cut. For goodness sake, even her onomatopoeic name is ferocious enough to strike fear into the average mortal. In fact, the predominantly black and white image of the Baroness being borne toward the QEII Conference Centre had a certain timeless quality that evoked another Dench classic role, Queen Victoria in tragic widow mode.
It was hard to square this image with the affable Desert Island Discs castaway of a couple of years ago who managed to slip The Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man in between the customary Schubert and Mozart. (In conversation with Kirsty Young she took the opportunity to deride the TV series Spooks for making her job look too easy and implying that spies “break endless laws”.)
As she strode into the inquiry on Monday, it was obvious that here was a former spy chief with a final mission to accomplish. As it turned out, there was indeed a bomb in her handbag and though it was fabricated from words rather than fertilizer, its impact on Tony Blair’s legacy may be just as lethal. She had waited years for this moment and she wasn’t going to fluff it.
To appreciate the significance of her testimony, two brief flashbacks are required: to 9/11 and 7/7. On September 12, 2001, the then deputy director-general of MI5 was one of three intelligence chiefs ordered by Blair to fly to Washington, one of just a handful of planes given clearance to fly that day. Over dinner at the CIA headquarters, she was told that the focus would be on Afghanistan. The next day, flying up the eastern seaboard, she saw the smoke still curling up from the rubble of the Twin Towers and wondered how Americans would respond. “It never occurred to me they would go into Iraq,” she recalled.
Fast forward to July 7 2005, two years after the Iraq invasion, and EMB is now in the MI5 hot seat when four suicide bombers hit London in coordinated attacks, something she had both dreaded and, as she now admits, “half expected”.
She remembers going home late that night and getting “very emotional”. Soon MI5 was in the firing line: why didn’t they prevent this happening? Worse was to come: it turned out that two of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, had flitted across MI5′s radar but were not assessed as targets worth pursuing. In security parlance they were “parked up”. In retrospect, that looked like a fatal blunder.
This iron lady waited until this week to give a full account of her side of this story. Her evidence drives a tank through the Blair narrative on virtually every key point.
Blair claimed there were links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. EMB says: “There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection.”
Blair told the Commons in 2003 that the intelligence was clear on Saddam’s WMD. EMB says the intelligence was “fragmentary” and revealed MI5 refused a request to put some low-grade intelligence into what we now know as the Dodgy Dossier, “because we didn’t think it was reliable”.
Blair told the Commons in 2002 that Saddam posed a direct threat to Britain
etched glass