Why do revolutions such as Tunisia’s come by surprise? | Richard Norton-Taylor

Diplomats and intelligence agencies often tell ministers what they want to hear – and overvalue secret sources of information Reporting from Tunisia in 1997, I referred to claims by human rights groups that Ben Ali’s government in Tunisia was holding some 2,300 political prisoners. “How long,” I ventured to ask, “will the country remain a haven of stability?” The question was scornfully dismissed as the result of ignorance. Years earlier, similar scorn was directed at those, very few in Britain, who suggested the shah of Iran was about to be toppled from his Peacock Throne . The Foreign Office recently published an internal postmortem into why it utterly failed to predict the shah’s fall in the 1979 revolution. The report chastised the British embassy in Tehran, saying it “overstated the personal popularity of the shah” and “knew too little about the activities of Khomeini’s followers”. It described how the UK’s Ministry of Defence was engaged in a “helter skelter rush to sell as much [arms] as possible to Iran”. Tunisia, too, came as a surprise. Intelligence officers were always worried about Egypt, given that country’s pivotal position in the Middle East, desperately hoping that simmering anger at Mubarak’s rule would not spill over. Diplomats – and the intelligence agencies – don’t believe what they don’t want to. The occupational hazard of cognitive dissonance , to which military commanders also succumbed over Afghanistan, is implicated in evidence that Sir Gus O’Donnell, cabinet secretary and Britain’s most senior civil servant, has now given to the Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq . He disclosed that he is carrying out a review of Whitehall’s intelligence-gathering machinery, notably the role of the joint intelligence committee. The next chairs of what is known in the corridors of power as “the Jic” must avoid saying what they think ministers or government officials want to hear, said O’Donnell. “I don’t want them to repeat the mistakes of the past”. Secret intelligence services, naturally enough, want to emphasise secret intelligence – a product which only they, in their special and privileged role, can offer. As a result, they have seriously underestimated what can be gleaned from “open sources”. It was a fault brutally identified in the Franks report into the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982. More accurate and timely information could be gleaned about the Argentinian junta’s intentions from local newspapers than from British secret agents in Latin America, it said. Britain’s diplomats and spooks who, in common with all western intelligence agencies, also spectacularly failed to foresee the fall of the Berlin wall, must in future pay much more attention to “open sources”, what they can hear on the Arab street, and what they can read, notably on the internet. “It is amazing”, said O’Donnell driving home the point, “what you can get through open sources with the right search engines”. The problem was how to get the right information. “The problem with the internet is there’s too much information”, the cabinet secretary told the Iraq inquiry. It is a luxury most people on the Arab street in the past have not been able to afford. They have been deprived both of information and the means of communicating it. Now they can use it. Governments, not only in the west, have been slow to recognise the importance for both their intelligence agencies and their citizens of these new – or not so new – weapons. Democratic forces are being unleashed, confronting the friends of the Arab world’s autocrats with a problem. It was spelled out by Sir John Sawers , chief of MI6 and former British ambassador to Egypt, last October. “Over time, moving to a more open system of government in these countries [what he called the Islamic world] one more responsive to people’s grievances, will help”, he said in the first speech in public by a serving head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service. He warned: “But if we demand an abrupt move to the pluralism that we in the west enjoy, we may undermine the controls that are now in place. Terrorists would end up with new opportunities”. Egypt was one country he had in mind. Egypt Middle East MI6 Richard Norton-Taylor guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry