Mr David Blair

14 August 2003

Q180  Sir Philip Mawer: And of course I read your accounts in the paper of these things but really I need to go to the primary source on all these occasions, wherever possible, and you are the primary source. I've had the opportunity, thanks to your colleagues, of seeing the files on a previous occasion and clearly they, you know, are—as you yourself mentioned in that Channel 4 interview we just saw a recording of a moment ago—there are various circumstantial features of them which, put together, are powerful indicators, as it were, of the veracity of your account of the circumstances in which you found them. But it will be helpful to have that account from yourself directly.

Mr David Blair: Sure. Absolutely.

Q181  Sir Philip Mawer: Can I start with just some basic questions about when you actually went—when you were first posted—to Baghdad? You mentioned a moment ago that you first went there in April of 2002, did you say?

Mr David Blair: That's right, yes. I was actually—I was reporting from Israel during Operation Defensive Shield and while I was in Jerusalem the foreign desk here was offered the opportunity of an Iraqi visa for someone to go and cover Saddam Hussein's 65th birthday party. So they contacted me in Israel and said that that's what I should do. So I travelled there via Amman, collecting my visa in Amman, my Iraqi visa in Amman, and going on from there to Baghdad.

Q182  Sir Philip Mawer: Right. And your return there—you presumably returned there to cover the war at some point earlier this year?

Mr David Blair: Yes, that's right. I in fact went backwards and forwards several times. First visit was in April 2002. Second visit was in October 2002 for the referendum that the Iraqis held on Saddam's rule. Visit number three was in late November 2002. What happened was, after the referendum in October the foreign editor decided that I should spend as much time in Iraq as I could. So once my visa in Iraq had expired and renewals—once renewals were not forthcoming—I would leave Iraq, come back to London, seek another visa, go back and that's what happened. So I returned in November 2002. I stayed for about two weeks on that occasion. Came back to London. Went through the process of seeking another visa and went there again in late January 2003. And this was obviously in the run up to the war. It was quite clear that the conflict was approaching so I managed to stay in Baghdad and had my visa renewed several times over. And I stayed right up until March the 18th—I think that's right—when the paper took a decision to withdraw me. They decided that no Telegraph correspondents were going to be in Baghdad during the war itself, for obvious reasons. So I left. I went to Jordan. I stayed in Jordan during the course of the conflict and then I was under instructions that once American forces reached Baghdad and appeared to secure the city then I should return as soon as possible. And I returned to Baghdad on Friday the 11th of April. If you recall the famous statue fell on Wednesday, Wednesday the 9th. I returned on Friday the 11th having travelled in a convoy with quite a large number of other journalists from Amman. We actually departed on Thursday and ended up spending the night in the desert on the Jordanian side of the border. We arrived late on Friday afternoon.

Q183  Sir Philip Mawer: Right. And so it would be fair to say that by the time these particular events which are the focus of my interview with you occurred, you'd been several times to Baghdad and you were familiar with the geography of the place and so on?

Mr David Blair: Yes I added it up the other day, actually—I was on my fifth visit and I'd spent about three months in total in the country.

Q184  Sir Philip Mawer: Had you had cause in the course of your previous visits to, you know, become interested in Mr Galloway as a feature in the Iraqi scene? Had he been someone on whose activities you'd had cause to report on previous occasions?

Mr David Blair: There was only one previous occasion. During my first visit to Baghdad. At the end of that time Mr Galloway happened to be in Baghdad on one of his regular visits and he brought quite a large number of journalists with him. I think he brought eight or nine journalists and I learnt that he'd arrived in Baghdad, that he was staying at the Al Rashid hotel. And I went there with another journalist, Ewen Mackaskill, the diplomatic editor of the Guardian. We went there together and we met George Galloway together and we had a talk with him for about half an hour or so in the coffee shop of the Al Rashid hotel. And later that evening Mr Galloway plus the ten or eleven journalists he had brought with him—I think there were a couple of Labour MPs with him as well, now I come to think of it there were a couple of Labour MPs—they all went out to dinner at a restaurant and we joined them and we were part of the group of I guess about a dozen people, so we had dinner and I exchanged a few words with Mr Galloway over dinner as well.

Q185  Sir Philip Mawer: Did you report on that visit for the paper? And was there . . .

Mr David Blair: I wrote one story, a short story—not a great example of journalism—about one incident which was while I was talking to Galloway in the coffee shop of the Al Rashid hotel who should walk in but Jorg Haider. So I wrote a frankly rather trivial story about Galloway keeping slightly strange company in Baghdad and that was the one occasion that I had written a story about him. I think there was a subsequent travel piece I wrote about Baghdad where I referred to the same incident in a paragraph somewhere towards the end of the story and that was a long time ago I wrote it.

Q186  Sir Philip Mawer: And were you interested in his activities in Baghdad from that moment on, as it were? Or was he just another regular feature of the scene but of no particular interest?

Mr David Blair: He was of no particular interest to me. I've lived abroad really pretty much continuously since August '98 so I must confess that British politics is not a subject I follow in great detail. I'm very out of date. I'm not sure I could actually name every member of the cabinet, I'm ashamed to say.

Q187  Sir Philip Mawer: Well, nor could most of the British people!

Mr David Blair: So Labour politicians are not people whose careers I follow, I'm afraid

Q188  Sir Philip Mawer: Right. So, can I ask, when you went back to Baghdad—this is for your visit on the 11th April after the US troops had secured Baghdad and it was safe for you to return—were you given any particular briefing in connection with your return, by the paper or by anybody else for that matter? Were you given any particular ... focus?

Mr David Blair: No, I wasn't, and the reason for that was that the situation in Baghdad was so extraordinary with the city being looted, with no-one being in control at all, with the state of anarchy the city was in. It was really obvious what I was there to do. The stories, as it were, fell from the trees.

Q189  Sir Philip Mawer: Exactly. They weren't difficult to find?

Mr David Blair: They weren't difficult to find. The first story I covered was the attack on the museum—the extensive looting of the museum. I did that on the Saturday morning, the day after I arrived. And on the very first day I arrived I wrote a story just about the journey into Baghdad itself because, although the Americans had secured an area in the heart of the city, most of the city was really under no-one's control whatsoever and the guns were walking around and there was lots of shooting, so it was really obvious to me what I was there to do.

Q190  Sir Philip Mawer: How were you supported? I'm interested in how you met your translators and so on. Were they people you'd worked with before during previous visits? Or …

Mr David Blair: They weren't, no. Really the situation in Baghdad had just been transformed beyond recognition. When I arrived in the city it was an extraordinary situation. I mean what struck me most was the way in which no-one really knew what was going on. The Americans didn't quite know whether they had secured the city and whether the war was over or not. The Iraqis didn't really know whether the regime had really fallen or not. The only things that were obvious were that no-one was in control and there was no government and the familiar faces who I had known in Baghdad pre-war were nowhere to be seen. Tragically, in fact, the driver who I'd employed several times, had go to know extremely well—was … when I arrived, I learned that he was missing. And a few days later I learned that he had been killed in the last days of the war. So what happened was, I did what journalists tend to do in those situations: I met other journalists who I knew well. I met a journalist from The Daily Mail who I knew very well on that night, the first night I arrived, the Friday night. I said "I need to find a driver and a translator." He said "I'm leaving tomorrow you can have my driver, he's a good man." So, on his recommendation I hired his driver on Saturday morning. Then I said to the driver "I need a translator. Is there anyone you can recommend?" He said yes he knew someone, and he introduced me to a translator [Mr A],[5] on the following day, Sunday morning. So I met [Mr A] at the Palestine Hotel. It may sound rather strange but the lobby at the Palestine Hotel was the informal headquarters, capital of the whole city if you like. It was the place where all the journalists were. All the Iraqis who wanted to work with the journalists, they all went there. The Americans were there.

Q191  Sir Philip Mawer: It was a kind of exchange? Like a little market if you like?

Mr David Blair: Exactly, yeah.

Q192  Sir Philip Mawer: The usual trading in skills and information and so on? I understand.

Mr David Blair: So I met [Mr A]there and I spoke to him. His spoken English was very good. He struck me favourably as being a very easy character to get along with. I asked him whether he had worked for any journalist before and he had worked for CBC, the Canadian TV people, before the war. As it happened I knew a couple of the CBC people and I had a very high opinion of them. I thought they would only hire someone who knew what he was doing, so I thought that was a good reference.

Q193  Sir Philip Mawer: What was his background, from your knowledge of him? I mean what was … had he been full-time involved in translation work of one sort or another in the past? Who had he worked for apart from CBC?

Mr David Blair: He was my age, he was thirty years old. Before the war he had worked as a translator for a car hire company in the Al Rashid Hotel. He had also worked as a guide for pilgrims visiting the various holy sites in Iraq and he was studying for a translation qualification at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. His studies had obviously been interrupted by the war. He hadn't qualified. In fact he took his exams a couple of weeks ago. So all that plus his manner and his command of spoken English led me to think that he would be worth hiring. What I did was what I usually do in these situations, I said to him "Right I'll use you for today and then we'll see how it goes." And I used him on that Sunday and I used him on the Monday and he was fine. Not only was he quite comfortable translating interviews, he was also a very pleasant person to get along with, which is extremely important. And he was very—he was quite diffident, didn't tend to take the initiative—he would do what I asked him to do. Very calm and that gave me a lot of confidence in him because Baghdad at the time was a pretty frightening place. I didn't want to be with someone who was going to be hysterical.

Q194  Sir Philip Mawer: No, or suddenly panic if you were in a difficult situation.

Mr David Blair: I do remember actually we got into quite a sticky spot on the Monday or the Tuesday when we went to a hospital in Saddam City, which is perhaps the most volatile area of Baghdad. And we arrived at the hospital a couple of minutes after a Fedayeen attack had taken place on the street outside. And the Fedayeen were still being pursued and shooting was going on a little way away. And they were carrying the corpses into the hospital in front of us. And the crowd was obviously quite hysterical. And there was one man whose brother had been killed. He was in hysterics and I remember [Mr A] just turned to me very calmly and said "David, I fear for your life . We need to leave." "Right. OK, we'll go." So he had a cool judgment.

Q195  Sir Philip Mawer: You came to rely on his judgment?

Mr David Blair: Well, yes. In a difficult situation, if he told me there was a difficult situation, then we moved. So I came to rely on his appraisal of what the situation was like.

Q196  Sir Philip Mawer: His sense of what was happening and the kind of vibes if you like?

Mr David Blair: Yes, exactly. So I had a high opinion of him and in fact on my last trip to Baghdad I worked with him and as far as I know he's working with the Daily Telegraph correspondent who's there now.

Q197  Sir Philip Mawer: Right. Now, can you say what were the circumstances in which you went to the Iraqi foreign ministry building? What was the sequence of events? Why go there? What prompted you to go there?

Mr David Blair: Sure.

Q198  Sir Philip Mawer: And then take us through the process of coming across the documents. I mean, did you go because of your translator's suggestion or somebody else? Did you hear from other correspondents that this thing was—the building was there and people were discovering papers in it, or what?

Mr David Blair: Perhaps I can begin answering that by talking about the time three or four days after I arrived, on the Monday and Tuesday of that week. As often happens in this situation, I was talking to my colleagues, I was talking to a lot of other journalists I knew. And journalists were talking about documents. They were talking about finding interesting documents and I learned, I think it was on the Tuesday, from the foreign desk that a Sunday Telegraph correspondent had written a story based upon a document he had found in the Mukhabarat headquarters. And the foreign desk suggested to me that I should see if I could find any interesting documents. No specifics were mentioned. They didn't say we want documents on subject 'X' or anything like that.

Q199  Sir Philip Mawer: So there was no suggestion you had to go and look for Mr G—documents about Mr Galloway?

Mr David Blair: No. Not at all, just in general terms that I should try and find interesting documents. What the foreign desk reminded me of was that when Kabul fell in November 2001, which was the nearest sort of precedent we had for this kind of situation, interesting documents did appear. Stories were written at the time. So what I did on the Wednesday was I went to the Mukhabarat headquarters with another British journalist—Kim Sengupta from The Independent. We went in my car with [Mr A] and my driver. We went to the Mukhabarat headquarters. It's quite a large complex of buildings. It had been both bombed and extensively looted and had hundreds of journalists gone through it as well. When we arrived I remember there were a couple of camera crews there and other journalists around and we went through some of the outbuildings. Everything had gone, it was just stripped bare and there were lots of looters present as well. So we stayed about an hour—found absolutely nothing of any interest at all. So then I went off and did a couple of other stories on the Thursday and on the Friday and the whole question of documents receded from my mind. But then on the Saturday—the way we work of course is that Saturday is the one day of the week when I'm not expected to file for the newspaper because I don't . . .traditionally its your day off if you're in the field. But Baghdad at that time offered few opportunities for leisure so I had the Saturday free. And what I thought was, well, I might as well try and try again to see if I can find some interesting documents. And I thought the Mukhabarat headquarters was obviously a waste of time. Where else might one go? And I thought, well, I guess one could try the foreign ministry. The reason why that came up particularly was because the foreign ministry was located very close to the Al Rashid hotel where I had stayed during three of my four pre-war visits. So I'd driven past the foreign ministry every day during that time. I knew exactly where it was. And there was another aspect, which was that I was genuinely curious to know whether it was still there. There was a sense in Baghdad at that time that, if you'd been there before, as you drove around the city you were looking at familiar landmarks and thinking "Oh, it's survived—it's still there—what's happened to it?" So I was quite curious to know whether this building was still there. And it seemed to be the obvious choice now that the Mukhabarat headquarters had been pillaged to the point of destruction.