American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror

PART ONE

One

THE MAKING OF AN ALLY

THE RESULT OF THE 1997 British election had yet to be declared, but in Washington, President Bill Clinton was excited at the prospect of the imminent victory of his young protégé Tony Blair. With the exit polls suggesting a landslide victory for the New Labour leader, Clinton was pacing the Oval Office wondering when he could telephone his congratulations. The State Department urged caution, pointing out that until the result was officially declared, John Major, the Conservative leader, was still technically Britain’s prime minister. Blair, meanwhile, sat in the living room of his house in the northern England constituency of Sedgefield, watching the results on the television with his wife, Cherie.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, called Blair to pass on the message that Clinton was trying to reach him but the State Department would not yet let him. Blair was flattered, but even though all the available information pointed to the biggest election victory in Labour’s history, he refused to believe it until the result was official. What do they know? Blair asked Cherie as they watched the predictions of the television pollsters.¹

The result was finally announced several hours later, and Blair was declared the winner with the biggest majority in British postwar politics. Clinton was delighted as the extent of Blair’s victory was confirmed to the White House. Clinton had struck up a close relationship with Blair, whom he regarded as a potential political ally, and members of Clinton’s successful 1996 campaign team had been brought to Blair’s Millbank election headquarters to assist the New Labour Party. Having finally been allowed to phone Blair personally to congratulate him, Clinton issued a glowing tribute to the American press. I’m looking forward to working with Prime Minister Blair, declared the American president. He’s a very exciting man, a very able man. I like him very much. Clinton’s enthusiastic response to Blair’s victory was echoed by Sidney Blumenthal, a senior White House aide, who declared: At last the president has a little brother. Blair is the younger brother Clinton has been yearning for.

This somewhat patronizing attitude toward the new British prime minister was just some of the widespread acclaim that greeted Blair’s arrival at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of Britain’s prime minister. It is unlikely though that anyone among the crowd that gathered outside 10 Downing Street to cheer Blair’s triumph thought they were witnessing the arrival of a man who was to become one of the most important and controversial wartime leaders in British history.

The election campaign that had swept Blair and his New Labour Party to power had been fought predominantly on domestic issues, such as improving the state of Britain’s woeful public services. This was reflected in the selection of the pop group D:Ream’s song Things Can Only Get Better as New Labour’s official campaign anthem. The British public, or rather the ever-diminishing percentage of the electorate that actually turned out to vote, wanted better hospitals, schools, and roads. To this end, they had voted Blair into power with an impregnable 179-seat majority in the House of Commons, while the Conservatives had suffered their worst electoral defeat since the Great Reform Act of 1832. After eighteen years of Conservative rule, Britain was ready for a change in direction, and that day appeared to herald the dawn of a new era in British politics.

Tony Blair was four days short of his forty-fourth birthday when he was elected prime minister on May 2, 1997. Born in Edinburgh in 1953, Blair spent most of his childhood in the northern former coal-mining city of Durham. At fourteen, he was sent to the prestigious Fettes College boarding school and from there went to Oxford to study law.

As a young man, Blair gave his contemporaries little indication that he would one day emerge as a leading figure in world politics. To his fellow students, the long-haired Blair, who was usually dressed as a hippie, seemed like a noisy and exuberant public schoolboy rebel who steered clear of the university’s intellectual establishment. At school, Blair had played Captain Stanhope, the lead part in R. C. Sheriff’s antiwar play Journey’s End, and at Oxford, he continued to pursue his thespian interests, playing Matt in a college production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Blair also maintained a keen interest in rock music. His favorite bands were the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Cream, and in his last year at university, he became the lead singer and bass guitarist of Ugly Rumours. Blair took to the stage in purple pants and a cut-off T-shirt and, according to his fellow band members, did a passable impression of Mick Jagger, a bit of finger-wagging and punching the air.² But despite his exposure to the decadent milieu of rock music, Blair, unlike many of his contemporaries, avoided drugs. In an interview many years later, when there was controversy over whether or not President Clinton had taken drugs at Oxford, Blair was asked if he had ever smoked dope. No, I haven’t, replied Blair. But if I had, you can be sure I would have inhaled.³

Blair showed little active interest in politics at university, although fellow students recall he was an avid supporter of the Labour Party. But while at Oxford, he acquired the deep religious conviction that was to lay the foundations for the moral certainty that would dictate his conduct in later life. In 1972, he befriended Peter Thomson, an Australian Anglican priest, an older student who had a profound influence on Blair’s personal development. As a result of many lengthy late-night discussions with Thomson about moral philosophy, Blair became a practicing Christian, and it was as a result of his Christianity that he became actively involved in the Labour Party. As Blair conceded after he had become Labour leader in 1995, my Christianity and my politics came together at the same time.

After university, Blair followed in the footsteps of his father, Leo, and his elder brother, Bill, and trained as a barrister. His Christian beliefs made him a committed socialist who was particularly concerned about inequality, and he formally joined the Labour Party in 1975, whereas most people of his class and background would generally have joined the Conservatives. As Blair himself later remarked, With my class background, if all I wanted to do was to exercise power, I could and would—let’s be blunt about this—have joined another party.⁴

After standing unsuccessfully for the Labour Party in a by-election, he finally won the northern England seat of Sedgefield in the 1983 general election at age thirty. Blair was rapidly promoted through the Labour ranks, and in 1992 became the opposition spokesman for home affairs, such as the penal system and immigration. He married Cherie Booth, another young barrister, in 1980, and the couple had four children. Euan, the eldest, was born in January 1984, followed by Nicholas in December 1985, Kathryn in March 1988, and Leo in May 2000. In 1994, after the sudden death of the Labour leader John Smith from a heart attack, Blair became Labour’s leader.

Blair’s youth and vitality, together with the arrival of his wife and young family at Downing Street, inevitably drew comparisons with John F. Kennedy, who had been the same age as Blair when he entered the White House. The last time a British prime minister of such a young age had occupied Downing Street was under Lord Liverpool in 1812, when Britain was in a battle for survival in the Napoleonic wars.

Europe still remained a vexed issue for British politicians in 1997, and one of the main campaign issues had concerned the extent of Britain’s involvement with the European Union. Although Blair himself was pro-European and keen to have Britain become a member of the Europe-wide single currency that was due to come into effect in January 1999, he realized that it remained a divisive issue with the British electorate. Apart from Europe, international issues, such as the Atlantic alliance, the civil war in the Balkans, resolution of the long-running dispute with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Britain’s role in confronting rogue regimes and Islamic terrorists, did not feature. Most postwar British elections had concentrated almost exclusively on domestic issues, and the 1997 election campaign was firmly set in that pattern.

The new British prime minister reflected the nation’s more parochial concerns when he gave his victory address on the steps of Downing Street before hosting a celebratory family lunch. Having paid tribute to his predecessor, John Major, Blair set out his immediate objectives for the newly elected government. New Labour, he promised, would provide Britain with a world-class education system; it would modernize the nation’s health-care provision; and it would create a competitive economy. His sole reference as to how he would conduct his foreign policy was a rather vapid statement that he would give Britain strength and confidence in leadership both at home and abroad, particularly in Europe. The only hint of Blair’s underlying leadership qualities he had given throughout the entire electoral campaign was at a speech he gave in Manchester just two weeks before polling day. Century upon century it has been the destiny of Britain to lead other nations, he declared. We are a leader of nations or nothing.⁵ This was the language of a man who would soon be responsible for leading his country to war five times in the next six years.

At this stage in his political development, Blair had not given much thought either to being a wartime leader or to countering the threat posed by rogue states and the rising tide of Islamic terrorism. His primary goal leading to the election had been to get New Labour elected to power after eighteen long years in opposition, and then for the party to stay in power for as long as possible. The only international issue on which he had made any firm pronouncement concerned Europe, where he had changed from supporting the traditional 1980s Labour hostility to the policies articulated by the European Union to becoming an active cheerleader for closer political and economic integration with the European mainland. His experience with international political communities was limited to his many visits to the United States to meet with members of the Clinton administration, but these meetings were more to advance his own domestic electoral prospects than to seek a deeper understanding of world affairs.

Clinton’s friendship with Blair developed after he became Labour leader in 1994. Blair did not formally meet Clinton until November 1995, when the American president, en route to Ireland, stopped in London to attend a dinner hosted by the American ambassador, Admiral William Crowe. Links between Blair’s Labour Party and Clinton’s Democrats were already well established. Philip Gould, Blair’s chief pollster, had stayed at Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, during Clinton’s 1992 election campaign and had befriended Stanley Greenberg, one of the candidate’s key aides. The previous April, Labour had suffered its fourth successive electoral defeat and Gould wanted to see if there was anything to be learned from Clinton’s campaign strategy. Gould returned from Little Rock brimming with enthusiasm for the professionalism of the Clinton campaign and its policies. Gould encouraged Blair to travel to Washington to see for himself the Clinton phenomenon, and in January 1993, he flew to the United States with Gordon Brown, another up-and-coming proponent of reforming the Labour Party to make it electable.

Blair knew little about America. He had visited the United States just once previously, in 1982, when he traveled to Tennessee to represent a client in a legal dispute. Blair and Brown were regarded as too junior to be granted an audience with the incumbent American president, but they were introduced to a number of key Clinton aides who were important to Clinton’s successful election. Brown and Blair were struck by the similarities in what Clinton had achieved in broadening the appeal of the Democrats in the United States with what they needed to do to revive their own party in Britain. Under Clinton, the Democrats had sought to move away from their reputation as the party of tax and spend and as being soft on core issues such as welfare, crime, and defense. Blair understood that Clinton’s appeal to what he called the forgotten middle class could be replicated in Britain. Labour needed to reassert its reputation for fiscal probity and social responsibility if it was to stand any chance of gaining power. Apart from policy issues, the other important lesson that Blair learned from Clinton’s electoral success was the need for his party to display unity and discipline. This meant being aided by a highly sophisticated operation to deal with the demands of the twenty-four-hour cycle of the international news media.

By the time Blair and Clinton met, Blair had adopted many of Clinton’s policies and strategies, to the extent of rebranding his party as New Labour, a direct imitation of Clinton’s New Democrats. Blair’s open admiration for Clinton was reciprocated, and in April 1996, Blair was invited to Washington, where he received the warmest reception granted to a British opposition leader since Winston Churchill made his famous iron curtain speech in 1946. At a dinner held at the British Embassy, Blair charmed the assembled guests with his self-assuredness and charisma. The next day, he was given an hour with Clinton in the Oval Office. The New York Times reported that Clinton welcomed Blair to the White House with the kind of exuberance (and the attendant flood of words) that he seldom lavished on overseas guests.⁶ Blair and Clinton spent more than an hour discussing issues that mainly related to Blair’s election campaign—such as the problems of financing welfare reform without raising taxes, and the continuing attempts to find a peaceful settlement in Northern Ireland. They hit it off straight away, said one of Blair’s aides who accompanied him on the trip. They shared a lot of common ground, and there was a lot of mutual admiration. There was also a meeting of minds on the big political issues.⁷

It was not just Clinton whom Blair charmed during the visit. In a whirlwind forty-eight hours of meetings in Washington and New York, he met the UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali and chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, spoke in New York at a breakfast meeting hosted by Henry Kissinger, and addressed the New York Chamber of Commerce, where he assured the audience that his pro-European outlook would not get in the way of his respect for the Atlantic alliance. He consolidated his profile with the American media by addressing the National Press Club and by giving interviews to the major American television networks. He also had a private meeting with Hillary Clinton that was organized by Sidney Blumenthal, a key Clinton aide who was already billing Blair as Britain’s new prime minister. The first lady and Blair spent thirty minutes discussing politics and public policy in their respective countries. She later wrote: I instantly felt a connection.⁸

Clinton’s open support and encouragement for Blair certainly did the Labour leader’s election prospects no harm, and the next time the two men met was after Blair had secured his landslide election victory. But Blair’s relationship with Clinton at this stage was very much confined to learning how to turn the American president’s proven electoral success to his own advantage. It did not go unnoticed by seasoned Washington observers and Clinton’s political opponents that Blair’s primary focus was almost exclusively the campaign and election issues rather than the nitty-gritty of policy, particularly foreign policy.

In view of the pivotal role that Blair would later play in leading the war on terror, it was, perhaps, surprising that he appeared to display so little interest in Clinton’s approach to foreign policy issues, particularly the threat posed by international terrorism to Western security. Perhaps Blair was being naive, or perhaps he was just playing smart, calculating that it was not in his interests to challenge Clinton in an area where he was in no position, at least for the time being, to exert influence. The bottom line was that Blair knew nothing about foreign policy, said one of Blair’s close advisors. Frankly, it is not an issue that wins elections. We thought it was something we could sort out once he got elected. That was always the primary objective.⁹

Relations between Clinton and Blair’s immediate predecessor as prime minister, John Major, who had succeeded Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister in November 1990, had never been particularly warm. They got off to a bad start after it was claimed that Major’s Conservative Party had been trying to dig up, on behalf of American Republicans, information regarding Clinton’s participation in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam while he was a student at Oxford University. The Republicans wanted the information to use against Clinton during the 1992 presidential election campaign. Nevertheless, Clinton and Major managed to sustain a professional working relationship, although Major discovered that the American president was rarely willing to take his advice seriously. As the crisis in Bosnia deepened, Major’s appeals to Clinton to become more engaged in the issue generally fell on deaf ears.

Clinton, who had Irish ancestry, took an active interest in the negotiations to end the violence in Northern Ireland between Ulster Unionists and Irish Republicans. The Northern Ireland peace process was one of the few tangible achievements of the Major government, but Major believed that Clinton’s involvement was too biased in favor of the Republicans. Major deeply opposed Clinton’s decision to grant a visa to visit the United States to Gerry Adams, the leader of the Republican’s Sinn Fein movement and a military commander of the Irish Republican Army. Major insisted that Washington should only grant Adams a visa once he had given an unequivocal promise to renounce violence. Adams was asked by the American consul in Belfast to give such a promise, but his response fell well short of what was expected. Even so, the White House, to Major’s fury, granted the visa.¹⁰ It was a rather brutal demonstration of where the real power lay, said a senior Downing Street official who worked with both John Major and Tony Blair. For all the effort that Britain invests in maintaining a strong working relationship with Washington, there are occasions when the Americans will do just as they please, irrespective of our views on the subject.¹¹

AS THE DATE OF the British general election drew close, Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, arranged a series of seminars with retired diplomats and foreign policy experts to bring the future prime minister up to speed on the main policy issues he would face. Robin Renwick, the recently retired British ambassador to Washington, was one of those who attended the meetings, which took place at Blair’s Islington home on Friday mornings. In all, six seminars were arranged for Blair between late 1996 and early 1997, and the meetings covered a broad range of subjects, including Britain’s relations with Washington and Russia, the Balkans, and the new European currency that was soon to be introduced to mainland Europe.

Blair’s foreign policy tutors were impressed both by his inquisitive mind and by the quality of his questions. He was particularly interested in Europe and eager to move away from the period of paralysis that had defined John Major’s relations with the European Union, and indicated that he thought Britain should join the Euro so that it could consolidate its position at the top table of Europe’s decision-making bodies. He revealed that he was not entirely unaware of Clinton’s tendency to prevaricate on important international issues, such as the Balkans. His tutors recall that he was particularly inquisitive as to why Britain’s involvement in the Bosnia conflict had not been more effective in the mid-1990s, and why the United States was so critical to bringing peace to the region. If Clinton did not want to involve American troops in Bosnia, why couldn’t Britain assume a bigger role? Was it only possible for Britain to act with its European allies, or could it go it alone? It was clear to those who participated in these seminars that Blair’s foreign policy outlook was starting to take shape, and he saw that it was not simply a case of Britain allying itself either with Europe or the United States. Britain should work with both, and its unique position as a traditional ally of Washington as well as its burgeoning relationship with Brussels meant that it was perfectly placed to be a bridge between Europe and America.¹²

The cardinal importance of Britain’s relationship with America was forcibly driven home during Blair’s tutorial sessions. It was pointed out that Britain had developed a close strategic relationship with the United States since the end of the Second World War, even though the relationship had become increasingly one-sided in Washington’s favor over the recent decades. Apart from the obvious commercial, cultural, linguistic, and historical ties between the two countries, the three pillars upon which the strategic alliance was founded were military, intelligence, and nuclear cooperation.

Blair showed a strong interest in the dynamics of the Atlantic alliance and was particularly keen to learn about Britain’s military capabilities and how they could best be deployed. Robin Renwick, who had helped set up Blair’s foreign affairs tutorials, arranged for the Labour leader to meet General Sir Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defense staff, Britain’s leading military figure, at Claridge’s Hotel in London in early 1997. The British commanders had become restless under John Major’s leadership because of his indecision over Bosnia and his failure to address the structural problems of the British armed forces, which were still geared up to fight the Cold War. Major was all over the place and we were all very demoralized because of Bosnia, recalled one of Guthrie’s close aides. We thought it was crucial to get New Labour on board on defense.¹³ Guthrie was pleasantly surprised by the interest Blair showed in defense issues. He understood the need for Britain’s armed forces to be restructured into an expeditionary force able to deal with threats posed to Western security throughout the world. One of Blair’s first acts as prime minister was to order a strategic review of Britain’s defense capabilities.

Margaret Thatcher was another important influence on Blair’s early development as a war leader. There were many areas of domestic policy where Thatcherism and Blairism were opposites. Nor did they share much common ground on the question of Europe: Blair was for closer integration, Thatcher was steadfastly against. Defense and the threat posed by international terrorism were, however, two important policy areas where Blair was keen to emulate the leadership and moral certainty that the Iron Lady had demonstrated in tackling these issues. After being forced out of Downing Street by opponents within her own Conservative Party in late 1990, she had become Baroness Thatcher in 1992, and remained a powerful influence on world affairs throughout the 1990s. She had, for example, openly criticized her successor John Major—and, by implication, President Clinton—for the West’s ambivalence in tackling the bloodshed in Bosnia. She campaigned for the arms embargo on the region to be lifted to allow the Bosnian Muslims, the primary victims of the ethnic cleansing, to arm themselves. As she argued in her book Statecraft, The West’s equivocation damaged our interests too.¹⁴ Blair had reached conclusions similar to Thatcher’s about the West’s failure of leadership over Bosnia.

Despite their political differences, Thatcher warmed to Blair and praised him for being a thoroughly determined person, and she acknowledged his achievements in modernizing the Labour Party.¹⁵ Thatcher’s praise attracted headlines and, although traditional Labour supporters were aghast that their former adversary was lavishing such praise on their young leader, Blair was privately flattered. He responded by acknowledging her achievements in office, when he was guest of honor at a conference hosted by Rupert Murdoch for his senior executives at the Australian resort of Hayman Island. In an attempt to demonstrate that their outlooks were similar, Blair declared, Mrs. Thatcher was a radical, not a Tory.¹⁶

Blair was keen to meet Thatcher before he became prime minister, but Thatcher was hesitant about being publicly associated with Blair while a Conservative prime minister still occupied Downing Street. She was already being accused of treachery by Conservative officials and was advised that it would be unwise to attach herself too closely to the Blair camp. A line of communication was, however, opened between Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and Thatcher’s private staff. The facilitator of this unlikely arrangement was Charles Powell, Jonathan’s elder brother, who had been Mrs. Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor in Downing Street. It was agreed that no formal meeting would take place until Blair won the election. Until that time, contact was confined to chance meetings at official functions and ceremonies, where Blair deployed all his charm to flatter the grande dame of British politics. Blair basically modeled himself on Thatcher so that he would be taken seriously on the world stage, said Charles Powell. He had learned a lot from Clinton about campaigning and how to win elections, but when it came to leadership he looked to Thatcher, rather than to Clinton.¹⁷

Blair did not officially meet Thatcher until his 1997 election had been secured. She wrote him a note to congratulate him on his victory, in which she said she would be happy to meet him to talk about any issue, including the administration of his private office, the future of NATO, or any other subject he might find helpful.¹⁸ An invitation for her to visit the new prime minister duly arrived and Thatcher and Blair spent an hour together on May 22. They mostly talked about international issues, ranging from Russia to the future of the British colony of Hong Kong, which was due to be handed over to Chinese control later that summer. Thatcher expressed her well-known hostility to the European single currency. A significant proportion of the conversation concerned Britain’s historic relationship with the United States, which she urged Blair to maintain at all costs. Her message to Blair was very straightforward, said Charles Powell. Thatcher told Blair that it was the primary duty of a British prime minister to get on with a U.S. president.¹⁹

WHEN TONY BLAIR ENTERED Downing Street in May 1997, he was well briefed on the many challenges that he would face. But he and his colleagues had little or no experience of government or the wider world. The size of his victory could not conceal the fact that the new Blair government was the most inexperienced to take office for nearly 150 years. Of Blair’s new ministers, only one had sat at the cabinet table before—John Morris, the attorney general—and they had no experience in running a department or giving orders to civil servants.

For all of the briefings Blair received in private, in public he didn’t display much interest in world affairs. He had not served on any of the parliamentary committees that dealt with foreign affairs and had not made a speech of any significance on world issues. Before becoming party leader in 1994, he had not involved himself with any of the political pressure groups campaigning on foreign issues, be it the plight of the Kurds under Saddam or the collapse of Yugo slavia. He spoke passable French, and holidayed regularly in France and Italy. Little else was known about Britain’s new leader.

It is ironic that Blair, who would risk his political career and reputation on his alliance with the United States, should have spent much of his first days in office laying the ground rules for his future dealings with his new European colleagues. The vexed question of Britain’s role in Europe and the nature of its relationship with the bureaucracy of the European Union had brought the Conservative Party to its knees, and led to its devastating defeat in the 1997 election. Most of the newly elected Labour members of Parliament were pro-European, having been seduced by the attractive social welfare, employment, and human rights provisions advocated by Brussels. The majority of the British press, however, remained deeply Euroskeptic, and Blair was mindful that he needed to choose his words carefully if he was not to upset his otherwise supportive media. Labour’s election manifesto had skillfully managed to be both pro-European and patriotic, with Blair indicating that he was in favor of playing a more constructive role in Europe. But on the question of Europe’s new single currency, Blair had not come to a firm decision, although his gut instinct was that Britain should join when both the political and economic conditions were right. When asked about the subject shortly before the election, Blair had answered that it was no big deal either way,²⁰ although many of Blair’s close advisors were enthusiastic advocates of British membership.

Blair calculated that he could use his impressive domestic election victory to become a dominant force in European politics. His first priority was to establish good relations with Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, and French president Jacques Chirac. Blair figured that with Kohl nearing the end of his remarkable career, and Chirac weakened by the defeat of his government in recent French parliamentary elections, he was in a strong position to be a dominant figure in European politics. His first European summit took place in Noordwijk in Holland on May 23, 1997, when he spoke enthusiastically about the politics of the Third Way, of which he had become a close adherent following his discussions with Bill Clinton in Washington. Chirac, the leader of France’s right-wing Gaullist party, was so confused by Blair’s remarks that he later asked him if he was sufficiently right-wing to be an honorary member of New Labour.²¹

Two weeks later, Blair gave a clearer exposition of his likely approach to European issues when he delivered an address to the Congress of European Socialists, held at the Swedish port of Malmö on June 6. Having overseen a radical overhaul of his own party to broaden its appeal and make it electable, Blair believed that he was well equipped to do the same in Europe. Blair complained that, in his view, the institutions established by the European Union were impossibly remote from the people. Am I satisfied with Europe? he asked his audience. Frankly, no. The union, he declared, must modernize or die. Blair’s comments caused a degree of consternation among some of his Socialist counterparts, particularly the French prime minister Lionel Jospin who had a more traditional attitude toward social democracy. Many European Socialists did not take kindly to being lectured by someone with little experience of how Europe managed its affairs. Blair, however, drawing encouragement from his domestic election success, believed he could persuade his new colleagues to come around to his point of view. He was particularly confident that he might make an ally of Gerhard Schröder, the leader of Germany’s opposition Social Democrats who was developing a reputation of his own as a modernizer.

A few days later, Blair again managed to upstage his new European allies when they met in Amsterdam on June 16 for the Inter-Governmental Conference. The mayor of Amsterdam had the rather unusual idea to give the fifteen attending leaders new seven-speed bicycles to race through the city streets. While the more portly leaders, such as Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl, politely declined the invitation, Blair made sure he was first across the finish line. The popular British press could not restrain their delight. Blair Leads From the Front, the headlines read. Tony Blair had made his mark in Europe.

The highlight of Blair’s first weeks in office, however, came at the end of the month when Bill Clinton arrived in London to pay tribute to his political little brother. Blair was eager to discuss the priority he intended to give the transatlantic alliance, and Clinton was afforded every possible privilege to underline the importance Blair gave to their political friendship. Clinton was invited to address the British cabinet, the first American president to do so since Richard Nixon. At the end of Clinton’s speech, the new ministers gave him a standing ovation. Blair and Clinton then retired to the prime minister’s private quarters, where they discussed various international issues, including Northern Ireland, the withdrawal of NATO peacekeepers from Bosnia, and the upcoming handover of Hong Kong to China. They compared notes on their respective election strategies and, as one Clinton aide put it, spent time simply shooting the breeze.

Later in the afternoon, amid bright sunshine, Clinton and Blair participated in a decidedly relaxed press conference in the garden of Number 10. Clinton did his best to compliment his host, expressing his envy both at the 179-seat majority Blair had achieved at the election and the fact that the new British prime minister was so youthful. I’m sick of it, because he’s seven years younger than I am and he has no gray hair, Clinton joked. Becoming more serious, Clinton paid tribute to the unique partnership that existed between the United States and Britain. Over the past fifty years our unbreakable alliance has helped to bring unparalleled peace and prosperity and security. It’s an alliance based on shared values and common aspirations. In response, Blair outlined the policy that would underpin his difficult balancing act of maintaining a close working relationship with Europe while also making sure that the Atlantic alliance did not suffer as a consequence. Britain does not need to choose between being strong in Europe or being close to the United States of America, said Blair, but that by being strong in Europe we will further strengthen our relations with the U.S. In the years that lay ahead, this delicate balancing act would be tested to the limit.

Two

ENEMY TARGET

ONE OF THE FIRST visitors to be received at Downing Street by the new prime minister was Sir David Spedding, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. C, as he was known among his colleagues, had spent most of his career fighting Middle Eastern terrorism. The fifty-four-year-old spy’s most memorable achievement had been to thwart a plot by the Palestinian terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal to assassinate the queen during an official visit to Jordan in 1984. Spedding, an urbane, Oxford-educated Englishman, had forsaken a promising career as a historian to join the Secret Service, and was appointed director-general in 1994. Sir David had been called to Downing Street to educate the new prime minister in the global threats to Britain’s security.

When Tony Blair became prime minister, he possessed few of the attributes usually associated with a war leader. Unlike Winston Churchill, Britain’s most famous wartime commander, Blair had no military experience. As a schoolboy, he had mocked the Combined Cadet Force, where British adolescents are taught the basic skills of soldiering, and as a young politician, he had favored a number of antiwar organizations, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a powerful pressure group. Blair’s lack of military experience was reflected throughout his cabinet; none of Labour’s front bench had any military experience. Indeed, during the long years of opposition, Labour had acquired a reputation for being weak on defense and lacking the will to defend Britain’s national interests overseas. Apart from his preelection conversations with Charles Guthrie, the chief of the defense staff, Blair had very little understanding about military strategy or handling threats to the Western alliance.

Spedding brought with him briefing documents from senior intelligence officers, who were experts in their fields. Blair learned of the heavy responsibility his office carried when Robin Butler, the cabinet secretary, gave him instructions on how to use the secret codes that would launch the Trident nuclear missile system. Blair had displayed his quick mastery of his nuclear brief during a meeting of the Defence and Overseas Policy Cabinet Committee. Although the discussions involved complex and secret issues on Britain’s nuclear deterrent and the loading of missiles and warheads, the military were impressed by Blair’s grasp of detail and his contribution to the discussions, which they thought was impressive and helpful.¹

Spedding first explained to Blair how the intelligence establishment operated; he then set out the specific threats his officers were acting against. Blair was made fully aware of the close cooperation that existed between the British and American intelligence agencies, and how the CIA and SIS shared information and operations. Spedding listed the priority areas that occupied most of the time and resources of the intelligence community.

Spedding, an Arabist by training, had spent most of his career in the shadow of the Cold War. Since his appointment in 1994, he had been responsible for overseeing a radical reappraisal of the intelligence community’s priority targets. During the Cold War, most of the organization’s resources had been directed specifically at containing the threat posed by the Soviet Union. This included trying to discover the likely target range and trajectory of Soviet nuclear missiles, monitoring political intrigues at the Kremlin, and trying to contain the Soviets’ efforts to spread their influence around the world, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. By the mid-1990s, the intelligence priorities had undergone a radical transformation. The newly created Russian Federation was still kept under close observation, but it no longer posed a direct threat to Britain’s security.

By the time Blair came into office, the intelligence community’s focus had altered significantly. A great amount of its resources was directed against so-called rogue states, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea, which were suspected of either helping to train and support Islamic terror groups or attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction. The collapse of the Soviet Union meant that significant quantities of state-of-the-art nuclear material and expertise had found their way to the black market, and a great amount of effort was expended in trying to prevent this material from falling into the wrong hands. British intelligence was particularly concerned that, following the success of the Aum Shinrikyo sect in staging a sarin gas attack on the Japanese underground in March 1995,² Islamic terrorist groups might try to acquire nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. By the spring of 1997, Spedding had given instructions that the primary intelligence priority was to keep a watchful eye on rogue states, to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to prevent such weapons from falling into the hands of Islamic terror groups.

At the head of Spedding’s list of rogue states was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.³ More than six years had passed since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, and the UN had still not managed to persuade the Iraqi dictator to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction arsenal. Under the terms of UN Resolution 687, the American-led coalition had agreed to bring hostilities to a halt in return for Saddam’s promise to disarm. But by the time teams of UN weapons inspectors began arriving in Iraq, President George H. Bush, who had led the coalition, was in the midst of a presidential election campaign. Saddam, who had proved himself to be a skillful manipulator of international public opinion, was well aware that there was little chance of another international military coalition being assembled to confront him. He took advantage of Bush’s preoccupation with the election to obstruct the inspectors.

Despite a brief breakthrough in 1995, when Saddam’s two sons-in-law defected to Jordan and revealed details of the Iraqi dictator’s illegal weapons programs, by 1997 the UN’s efforts to get Saddam to comply with his disarmament obligations had reached stalemate. Tony Blair was under pressure from human rights groups, and many members of his own Labour Party were waging a vociferous campaign to lift the rigorous UN sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Intelligence reports showed clearly that Saddam was selling vital medical and humanitarian supplies on the black market while using the profits to sustain his regime. Even so, serious cracks were beginning to appear in the policy of containment that Clinton had imposed against Iraq, as many of Washington’s former allies, including France and Germany, argued strongly in favor of having the sanctions lifted.

Spedding told Blair that despite the growing clamor for sanctions against Iraq to be lifted, British intelligence and the CIA remained deeply concerned about Saddam’s illicit weapons arsenal. Although the evidence provided by Saddam’s sons-in-law suggested the Iraqi dictator had abandoned his attempts to build an atom bomb, grave concerns remained about his chemical and biological weapons capabilities. Both American and British intelligence were convinced that Saddam was still hiding some chemical weapons agents, munitions, precursor chemicals and production equipment, and that Iraq was capable of regenerating a chemical weapons capability in a matter of months.⁴ There were also significant numbers of Iraqi missiles that were unaccounted for.

The United States and Britain were the only two countries at the UN that continued to argue in favor of maintaining sanctions against Iraq and of forcing Saddam to comply fully with the ceasefire terms he had agreed to at the end of the Gulf War. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the American and British governments authorized their respective intelligence agencies to arrange a coup in Baghdad that would remove Saddam from power.⁵ In the mid-1990s, both the CIA and SIS worked closely with different Iraqi exile groups, but their attempts to stage a coup came to nothing. An attempt by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC) to overthrow Saddam in 1995 failed when Washington pulled its backing at the last moment. Another attempt by an Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which was planned with the help of British intelligence in the summer of 1996, similarly ended in disaster when Saddam’s agents uncovered the plot and executed the ringleaders.⁶

Iraq was not the only major threat that Blair was briefed about by Spedding. The other area of pressing concern was the activities of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who had built his own uranium-enrichment facility. After Iraq, our biggest worry was Khan, and the illegal trade was our primary concern, said one of Blair’s senior aides. We had a great deal of information of the trafficking in technology and equipment, and all our efforts were devoted to trying to prevent this material from falling into the wrong hands.⁷

Khan’s work enabled Pakistan to test its first nuclear device in 1998, and the reports received by British and American intelligence showed that in order to finance his research, Khan was prepared to sell his technological expertise to other states, including Libya and Iran. Like Iraq, Libya was subjected to wide-ranging UN sanctions because of Colonel Gadhafi’s refusal to hand over two Libyans suspected of masterminding the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, with the loss of 270 lives. Although Gadhafi had indicated that he was interested in reaching a rapprochement with the West, there were incomplete intelligence reports that the Libyan leader was attempting to develop nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Iran was another country that was giving the international intelligence