UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE Private annexe to HC 496-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

Wednesday 23 May 2007

LORD TRIESMAN and NEIL CROMPTON

Evidence heard in Private Questions 132 - 138

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 23 May 2007

Members present:

Rt. hon. Sir John Stanley (in the Chair)

Mr. Fabian Hamilton

Rt. Hon. Mr. David Heathcoat-Amory

Mr. John Horam

Mr. Eric Illsley

Mr. Paul Keetch

Andrew Mackinlay

Mr. Malcolm Moss

Sandra Osborne

Mr. Greg Pope

Mr. Ken Purchase

Ms Gisela Stuart

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Lord Triesman of Tottenham, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, and Neil Crompton, Iran Co-ordinator, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, gave evidence.

Q132 Chairman: Thank you, Minister, for giving us further time with you in this private session with the Committee, which your officials indicated that you would like to have. We would be grateful if you started by telling us what you want to tell us on a confidential basis. I know that my colleagues will then have some questions that they would like to put to you.

Lord Triesman: May I just touch on three things, Sir John? The first is to do with the process at the United Nations. We were reasonably confident, when we got into the process, of two things. The first was that only Russia would be really difficult, and it was. Nobody else was. *** Secondly, we knew that Iran would dislike the fact that we had used that as a lever. It is very averse to being criticised in the UN and by UN resolutions, ***.

The second thing is on the military point and the rules of engagement. I just want to clarify this. What we do in the FCO is provide a risk assessment-a solid, serious risk assessment-and we update it, because of course the nature and the level of risks changes as time goes by. It is for those in theatre to design the rules of engagement around it, ***. I just wanted to be clear about that.

My third point is about the sequence of the discussions. What I found from the very first discussions-I hope that the Committee will not mind my saying that I come to this as a former trade union general secretary who is used to the life of negotiation-was that ***.

In a nutshell, what happened over the first period, against the background of international pressure building, which was helpful for this purpose, was not that we were able to identify some sort of deal about consular issues, exchanges of people or anything of that kind-that simply did not happen. Speaking for myself, however, I think that I was able to detect that, because the Iran-Iraq war had started in the upper Persian Gulf, the security sensitivities for the Iranians were very acute in that area. They did not express it in terms of particular demands or conclusions that they had drawn, but it was hard, after many hours of hearing this-these were long meetings-not to understand the degree of sensitivity that they were expressing about what they saw as their security problems. So *** it was understandable that we needed better security arrangements in the region, so that we did not have either seizures of people or accidents, which could be even worse than seizures of people, and that we needed to get to some proper mechanisms between us.

I can tell the Committee that ***. That was something that the ambassador and I discussed in detail: ***.

Part of the conclusion that I draw from all of that, if I may for the Committee, is that, however difficult the circumstances, we learned that when we focus on some real things, we can begin to do some real work. I do not promise that that work will come to fruition in other areas, but what I do know is that, one way or another, Larijani, Sheinwald, us, the ambassador here and Foreign Secretary Mottaki now have some channels that are more active and more likely to be the conduits for serious business than we have had for some time.

Q133 Chairman: Thank you. Perhaps I can start.

Given the fact that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has access to the most secret sources of intelligence within the Government and is astride the diplomatic environment, and that there was clearly a major issue developing in the United Nations with regard to Iranian sanctions, was any assessment formed inside the FCO that British service personnel in the Gulf might be at a heightened risk of kidnapping, and if so, was any warning given to the Ministry of Defence?

Lord Triesman: Our view was that the rules that they operated under, with the buffer zone between the two sides in those waterways, should have kept them out of harm's way, with helicopter cover and the other arrangements in place and operating. Everybody understood that with the two United States battle groups in the area and other pressures in the background, it was going to be very important that the whole of the operational package held together properly.

Chairman: If that was the view, it was a very serious misjudgment in relation to the people on the ground, but that is for a later date.

Q134 Mr. Keetch: I asked you about the rules of engagement earlier for that very reason, David. You have done exactly what you should have done, but what was happening on the ground is a bit more concerning. I do not know whether you want to, or can, answer this, but do you believe that HMS Cornwall was doing something else at the time as well, because there has been a suggestion that she was equipped for carrying two helos, but she was only carrying one? She was ferrying a BBC television crew around at the time, and those sailors were out there doing something while her helicopter was ferrying the media around, or possibly doing something else. That is the suggestion that has been put out there. I do not know whether you want to, or can, answer that.

Lord Triesman: I honestly do not know the operational details. I have seen many of the same stories that you have referred to, but I do not know the operational detail, and I have no doubt that the military authorities will have to answer all those questions and we will know the facts-hopefully, sooner rather than later.

Q135 Mr. Hamilton: David, how would you react to the information that I have been told, that there is no internationally recognised border, or divide, if you like, in the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, which means that we cannot have said that we were 1.7 nautical miles inside Iraqi waters, because no one recognises that there are Iraqi or Iranian waters, and that in any case military shipping has a different status to commercial shipping in such waterways?

Lord Triesman: I know that the headwaters of the Shatt-al-Arab have been the subject of controversy, and indeed, as I said a few moments ago, were the focal point for the start of a massive war. I know that some of the physical features move around not on a day-to-day basis but between seasons. For those reasons, there is a process-the Algiers process-that enables all the parties in the upper Persian Gulf to raise questions about where the international boundary should be thought to be at any one time. There is a formal mechanism for doing that, and it has been used: it is not a kind of antique that nobody has ever touched. The process is available, but on this occasion, there was no question of that kind raised. The Iranians, in all their discussions with me, and as far as I know with Geoffrey in Tehran, were not raising that issue at all. They came along with their maps-and we all had maps in front of us-with that international boundary on them, and that was the basis on which they were operating as well. The only question they had was which side of that line it was.

Q136 Mr. Hamilton: So let me be clear: the notion that there is no internationally recognised boundary is a false one.

Lord Triesman: I think that de facto it is a false one. De jure, maybe nobody has yet agreed about where it will be permanently, but given the movement of sandbanks and so on, it may be that it never will be de jure.

Neil Crompton: If I may, one of the points is that there are very established channels of navigation that shipping in that area uses, so there is a clear de facto line, and the Cornwall and our boats were well inside it.

Q137 Mr. Hamilton: What about the issue of military versus commercial shipping-or civilian shipping?

Lord Triesman: I think pretty much everybody who has charts will have the line, as it is, on them. Certainly, the military, which includes the Australians as well as the United States and us, have used that and stick to it scrupulously, and stick to a buffer zone and do not get closer than, I think, half a kilometre from the line in any circumstances.

Commercially, I think that that is a really difficult question to answer. I have asked it myself, and what I am told is that there is a huge amount of movement, of small craft particularly, backwards and forwards and everywhere in the upper Persian Gulf. Small trading craft going backwards and forwards, hard to police, show up as a snowstorm of dots on a radar screen at any one time, which means that who everybody is is itself not instantly recognisable. I am sure that the military will look at such questions and say, "Are we able to discern better?" It is a trading area and a smuggling area, and there is a huge amount of maritime movement by small craft that have no military capacity.

Q138 Ms Stuart: I know that officially, the Government, whenever they are asked about a potential military action against Iran, say "We have taken nothing off the table, but of course we are not contemplating it." One of our earlier witnesses put forward a theory that it took us a little bit of time to really understand. He said that at the moment it would take Iran between five and 10 years to produce military nuclear facilities. However, if there were to be any kind of action, the Iranians would simply concertina whatever they are doing at the moment and ditch the civil activity, and could probably produce military nuclear weapons within a year or 18 months. Would that be an analysis that would carry some weight with you?

Lord Triesman: Well, let me try to answer that, but Neil may have a more analytical answer from the desk, because in normal circumstances I would not be handling this part of the Iran portfolio. ***. I have heard different estimates from all sorts of sources about how fast that could be brought to the production of nuclear weapon grade uranium, some of them quite short timescale ones, and all I can say is that growth in capacity, whether it is distributed or in one place, is growth in capacity, and that in itself is one of the worrying things.

Chairman: Thank you, Minister, very much indeed, we are very grateful for your time. Thank you, Mr. Crompton, as well. That concludes the session.