Mr David Blair

14 August 2003

Q200  Sir Philip Mawer: So this was an idea from your own head? It was not prompted by anybody else?

Mr David Blair: No, no. I thought we'd give it a try and if you'd asked me on that morning as I was going to the foreign ministry, I would probably have said "Well I think its going to be a waste of time but I've got a day free. You never know." It was worth a punt if you like. It was worth a try. So we went over there at about eleven o'clock.

Q201  Sir Philip Mawer: You and the translator?

Mr David Blair: Myself, the translator and the driver. We went over there at about eleven o'clock in the morning. We parked the car outside the gates of the foreign ministry. The driver stayed in the car, which was the way we always did things. The translator came with me. He came with me everywhere. We walked through the gates and into the building. We saw the picture of the outside of the building there, the exterior of the building. So we walked through that little courtyard. The gates were open. There were no guards of any sort. The main glass door leading into the foyer was just hanging open. Inside the building there were looters present. We saw a couple of them in corridors nearby, I think running around the upper storeys of the building. The foyer was a completely open space so you could see the balcony.

Q202  Sir Philip Mawer: This was the chandelier?

Mr David Blair: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And we heard them hammering away. So I was quite apprehensive about being in the same building with a group of looters. Not least because I was carrying several thousand dollars in cash with me, so I was quite apprehensive at that time. And what happened was we walked to the foyer. We looked around. There weren't, I don't think, any looters on the ground floor, so we felt safe to walk through the rooms on the ground floor. Mainly there was just one large open space, actually—partitioned into rooms. There was one large open space. Everything had been taken away. Furniture had clearly been removed. The whole area had been stripped bare. There were torn fragments of papers all across the floor. Some of them were posters of Saddam Hussein that had been ripped up. And I remember picking up the odd fragment and showing it to my translator and saying. "What does that say?" And the few pieces that I picked up were all completely mundane. I remember there was one piece of paper that turned out to be a notice telling civil servants how long they could take for lunch. It was that sort of thing. It was just blowing around.

Q203  Sir Philip Mawer: Just the trivia of bureaucracy?

Mr David Blair: Yes. And there were just torn fragments, just scattered around on the floor. I think you might have seen that on one of the pictures there. So there was nothing really on the ground floor at all. We found a staircase, so we went up the staircase to the first floor. And again we moved through the first room that we came across, just opposite the staircase on the first floor. And it was pretty much the same. The furniture had been taken away. There were torn fragments, rubble, just pieces of rubbish lying on the floor. Nothing much really. So I followed a corridor past that room and then, turning right, we came to what had clearly once been the main archive of the ministry. And here the fire had burned particularly fiercely. The whole room had really been gutted and . . .

Q204  Sir Philip Mawer: Again, there was film of this on the …

Mr David Blair: Yes, exactly, yeah. And as you saw, the frames of the files of the archive survived but what were once the paper storage was just ash. So I turned away from there and I walked down a corridor away from the archive. There was a room on the left. I remember that caught my attention because there was a desk in it and, I think, a chair and those were about the only items of furniture that I'd seen. And then the next door down was ajar. So I looked through it and what immediately struck me was here was a room with lots of stuff in it. It was full. It was packed. It was also in a very chaotic state and it was quite dark. There was obviously no electric lighting of any sort in the corridors, quite clearly, so the room was quite dark. So I walked—I went inside it—and I remember I couldn't open the door any further. So I kind of went through the gap in the door, because it was standing ajar, to have a look. And in the room there were lots of box files piled on shelves. The shelves lined three sides of the room, three walls of the room. The room itself was very, very small and the box files were stacked on the shelves. And there was a big heap of them in the middle of the floor, really covering the whole floor of the room. So instantly my interests were aroused because of (a) that there was material inside the room at all, and (b) there were obviously documents. So the translator followed me inside the room and we looked at it. And then I was looking around and I saw that each box file had a small label on it in Arabic. So I asked the translator, I said "What does that say?" And he said "That one says Tunisia." And what does that say? "That one says Mauritania." "What does that say?" "That one says Algeria." And then he went round and he was saying "That one says Security Council. That one says France. That one says United States." So it became clear to me very early on that all the files, all the box files, seemed to be labelled by country. So then I thought, well, let's see if we can find some labelled Britain. What I began idly turning over in my mind was maybe there are going to be documents here about Tony Blair. What I was thinking—something that had intrigued me during my pre-war visits to Iraq—was how the Iraqis viewed Tony Blair. What did they think of him? And there seemed to be, as it were, two schools of thought. The one most often expressed by the information ministry people was that Blair was a useless lackey of Bush and he was just doing whatever Bush told him: he was a puppet of the Americans. And there was another rather more interesting view, which I heard expressed at a press conference once by Izzat Ibrahim, which was that instead of Britain being America's puppet it was actually the other way round. The British, with their long-standing knowledge and historical links with Iraq, had it in for Saddam Hussein and were using their influence to push the Americans to wage war against them. So what I was idly turning over in my mind was finding a document which showed either one of those views—their genuine assessment of him. So that was what I was thinking as we started looking for box files labelled Britain.

Q205  Sir Philip Mawer: Can I just stop you there?

Mr David Blair: Sure.

Q206  Sir Philip Mawer: Do you have any explanation for why there was this slightly separate archive of material? I mean, you describe the main file-room which was clearly gutted by the blaze and then this separate, as it appears, store of files. Have you heard any explanation, you know, as to why there was this separate room with these still-intact documents in it? I suppose the questions are (1) why the separate archive and (2) why still intact—before we … and then we can … if you can answer those then we can move on to what you did.

Mr David Blair: Sure. Sure. In answer to the first question, I'm only speculating here but my guess would be that the main archive covered all the business of the foreign ministry, Iraq's whole foreign ministry archive. The room I was in, based on what I learned later looking through the documents, clearly had correspondence which crossed the desks of Iraqi foreign ministers. So my theory would be that everything that the foreign ministers actually saw was kept separate from the main archive with all this kind of humdrum stuff that the foreign ministry paper machine would generate. That's my theory. And secondly, as to why the contents of the room survived, if you looked at the door of the room the exterior was very heavily scorched and blackened.

Q207  Sir Philip Mawer: Yes, you mentioned this in one of your reports.

Mr David Blair: Yes. The interior, however, wasn't very severely damaged. So my theory is that the door was closed, and the fact that the door was closed protected the contents of the room from fire. There was also a large hole in the door where, I imagine, the looters kicked out the lock and broke through the door. So I think what happened was the fire burned, came down the corridor, scorched the exterior of the door but didn't penetrate into the room itself. Then the looters came along, kicked down the door, went in, probably found all the box files neatly stacked on the shelves lining the three sides of the room, pulled them down onto the floor looking for hidden safes on the walls behind the shelves, and then, finding nothing and not perhaps being particularly interested in paperwork, they left. That's my theory based upon what I saw .

Q208  Ms Alda Barry: Can I say, the files on the floor added to the files on the walls would have been enough to fill all the files, would they? I mean, to put it more elegantly, it wasn't a question of somebody having chucked some additional files onto the floor?

Mr David Blair: I don't think so. I don't think so. There were empty—there were lots of empty spaces on the shelves and I think, if I remember rightly, the shelves on the left were largely cleared actually. So …

Q209  Sir Philip Mawer: And the files you found relating to Great Britain—because you described a process in which you were looking at the labels and then the translator took up the strain and said "And this one says Security Council" etc—where were those files found? Were they on the floor or on the shelves?

Mr David Blair: My recollection is that we found the first one on the floor and the second and third boxes on the shelves. That's the best of my recollection. What happened was we actually stood on the files that were piled on the floor and the translator was looking on the shelves and looking beneath his feet as well. And I was picking up a box file and showing it to him and saying "What does that say?" And I remember I picked up one and showed it to him and he said—I said—"What does that say?" And he said "That's Turkey." So I put it to one side. We looked at those at our feet and I don't think any of those were labelled Britain, so we actually kind of burrowed underneath -

Q210  Sir Philip Mawer: You shuffled around a bit? Understood.

Mr David Blair: We shuffled around and we kind of stuck our hands down beneath. And my recollection is that the first one that we found was on the floor and the translator found it. He said "Yes, you know, this one is labelled Britain." And the second and third were on the shelves.

Q211  Sir Philip Mawer: And, I mean, you wouldn't know whether you found all the files that were of Great Britain or not, presumably, because you—the room was in such a state of chaos that …

Mr David Blair: Absolutely.

Q212  Ms Alda Barry: Do you know what happened to the other files, eventually, the ones you didn't look at?

Mr David Blair: No, I don't.

Q213  Ms Alda Barry: Nobody knows?

Mr David Blair: No idea. Nobody knows.

Q214  Sir Philip Mawer: Can you—thank you for filling in those details. Now, you were describing you got—that, you know, in the main flow of your description—you got to the point at which you identified the files. You've pulled out three with Great Britain on …

Mr David Blair: Yes. One was actually labelled Britain/France.

Q215  Sir Philip Mawer: Ah, right.

Mr David Blair: Two Britain, one Britain/France.

Q216  Sir Philip Mawer: Right. That was the French dimension?

Mr David Blair: Yes.

Q217  Sir Philip Mawer: And you then sort of said, "Well that's enough", did you, or something? I mean there was clearly quite a lot of paperwork there for you to look through. So at that point you thought it best to leave?

David Blair: Yes. Perhaps it might be helpful if I just paint a bit more of the picture. What happened was, I remember the first file—it might have been the first, either the first or second that the translator passed to me—I actually opened it. I opened the box file because he was looking, so I had my hands free. So I opened it and had a look. And inside were the pale blue folders which you've probably seen. So I actually flicked through a couple of those. And in one of those I—my eye fell on the letter from George Galloway nominating Zureikat. It stood out because it was in English. And a couple of other things—the letter from Edward Heath to the head of the Iraqi interests section here in London also stood out, simply because it was in English. But I didn't think a great deal of them at the time because they were pretty meaningless to me really. So I went back to helping him on the search. And once we had the three box files I thought it was time to go—not only because we had a lot of material, but actually what was weighing more on my mind was the fact there were looters scurrying about. At one stage we could actually hear them hammering on the first floor—probably in a room a couple of doors away from our own. And at one stage some of them actually walked past the corridor just outside the room that we were in. So I didn't want to hang around. So …

Q218  Sir Philip Mawer So you, with the translator, went back downstairs carrying the files, and put them in the car?

David Blair: Perhaps I can just add one detail. The translator had two box files. I had one. As we went out of the room there were three loose folders on a very small desk just by the door, so as we went out I just picked those up as well and put them on top of the box file I was carrying and took them away.

Q219  Sir Philip Mawer: These were blue folders, were they, similar to—

Mr David Blair: If I remember rightly, two were blue folders and one was actually a lever arch file, a black lever arch file. As it turned out I never even looked at them. I think we trans—I asked, subsequently I asked, what the labels were but I never even looked at the contents. I don't actually recall what the labels were. They weren't related to Britain or anything that was immediately interesting.