Mr David Blair

14 August 2003

Q220  Sir Philip Mawer: So you returned to the hotel at that point, to where you were staying at that point?

Mr David Blair: We put the files into the boot of the car. Drove to the hotel. Put everything in my room Locked them in my hotel room and then we went and got some lunch. Then we returned to the hotel room and started going through it And the way we did it was we got a box file that was labelled 'Britain', opened it, took out the first pale blue folder. Each pale blue folder has its own labels on it. One was labelled—they were obviously labelled Britain And the way we did it was the translator and I sat side by side. We had it open in front of us and I just asked the translator to read me out in English each page at a time. So he just started with the first page and turned it over. And eventually we evolved a sort of system whereby he would look at a piece of paper and he would tell me first of all who it was from, because most of them were letters/correspondence of some sort. Who it's from, who's the letter to and what's the subject. And then I might say "Oh well that's boring, move on to the next one." Or I might say "OK, read me more of that." But what struck me immediately was it was clear to me that these were official documents. Before the war during my time in Baghdad I had occasionally seen information ministry official documents. When you arrived and left Baghdad, there was quite a lengthy bureaucratic process you went through. And often official folders had been opened in front of me and I'd seen the sort of letter heads that Iraqi government ministries used. These ones corresponded to that. They had the Iraqi eagle in the centre. They had the Arabic lettering on the right. They had reference numbers and dates. I speak no Arabic at all but its obvious even when you look at an Arabic document what the numbers are—there are reference numbers and dates. And most of them said in English on the top left hand corner 'foreign ministry', 'minister's office'. So it struck me immediately that these were obviously, in my view, authentic documents. They were clearly official documents .

Q221  Sir Philip Mawer: And there was nothing that—just glancing backwards as it were for a moment—there was nothing that would suggest, that would have suggested to you, that these documents were different in character from all the other documents that were in that room on the first floor of the ministry building?

Mr David Blair: No.

Q222  Sir Philip Mawer: So, you describe in one of your reports having spent two days, I think, reading through these documents … eventually, and I think having to bring in a second translator to assist with the task?

Mr David Blair: Yes. Perhaps I can take just take the story forward, I'm afraid it is rather lengthy.

Q223  Sir Philip Mawer: No, it's alright.

Mr David Blair: So, we started going through the first folder and it became clear that what we really had was correspondence which Iraqi foreign ministers had, in many cases, signed or would have been circulated and referred to them by other ministries And there was a lot of very trivial stuff. I remember there was endless, endless correspondence about a proposal by the Anglican church in Britain to send a plane full of medical supplies to Iraq. The flying hospital is what the Iraqis called it and there was endless correspondence about that, much of it signed by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who was then the foreign minister at that time. There was also stuff about requests for western military publications There was stuff from the Iraqi Interests Section here in London forwarding press cuttings and things like that. But all of it very … pretty dull. There was nothing really that I could hang a story on. So we went through it for about, I guess about two/two and a half hours, something like that, and got about half-way or three-quarters of the way through that first file. And then I said to the translator "OK we'll call it a day." And I sent him home, and this was about five-thirty in the afternoon, I guess. The following morning I—the whole question of the documents actually began to recede from my mind. And I met my photographer, Heathcliff O'Malley who was staying in a different hotel at that time. And, following a suggestion from him a number of days earlier, we went off together to do an entirely different story. We went to Abu Graib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad, with the idea of doing a story about this vast prison lying empty and being looted and so forth. We drove out there and, as it turned out, when we got to the prison the place was … the looters were scurrying all over it. There were no American soldiers nearby and very few along the route from Baghdad. So I felt we were out on a limb and that it was unsafe being there. So Heathcliff and I decided that we were just going to turn around and go straight back. So we wasted the morning, effectively, we just turned around and went straight back to Baghdad. We arrived in Baghdad at about twelve noon. And then I thought something else I'd been turning over in my mind was the curious story of the Americans' attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein by bombing a restaurant in Baghdad. What struck me about that story was the American description of that restaurant as being an elite haunt of the Ba'ath party apparatchiks and that, as it happened, I'd been to that restaurant before the war and bought a chicken lunch there for about fifty pence. So I thought that was a bit curious, so I thought, well, let's go to that restaurant and see what we can find. And we went along and found that not only had the restaurant not been bombed it was still there, still serving chicken lunches And the Americans actually bombed two houses behind it and killed two families and it was a bit crazy. Anyway, so I went about doing that story and once I'd finished that I decided to go back to the hotel. Heathcliff went back to his different hotel and as we were driving through Baghdad the route that we were taking to the hotel went quite close to the foreign ministry anyway. And then my mind began to return to the question of the documents and it began to occur to me that there was a huge amount of material in that room and that it might be interesting to get more of it, because as far as I knew I was the only person who actually knew about that room. And it struck me that I should use that advantage a bit more. And as we were driving I was thinking, well, I've got stuff about Britain, what else might be interesting? And I was thinking, well, the French were the nearest thing that Saddam had to an ally—if one can use that word in western Europe—it might be interesting to get something about France too. And I remembered that we had seen a box file labelled 'France' the previous day. So we stopped off at the foreign ministry, went in—this time I don't think we saw any looters. We went straight to the room. We knew what we were looking for this time. We went straight to the relevant room. Found our—the translator found a box file labelled 'France' very quickly. We took that. We went straight out again. We put it in the back of the car and took it to the hotel. And then what happened was I sat down and I wrote my story about the failed attempt to kill Saddam …

Q224  Sir Philip Mawer: In the restaurant?

Mr David Blair: Yes. So I wrote that out. And then, at the end of that, I called the translator and said: "Well, we might as well start again where we left off yesterday and carry on going through this stuff." If I can be absolutely frank, on the previous evening I came within an ace of just giving up the whole thing. I came very close to thinking that going through the documents would be a time-consuming, laborious waste of time. So I actually considered briefly, well, maybe I can just kind of leave them in my hotel room and pass them on to my successor to go through. But on the Sunday I decided, well, we might as well carry on. So we picked up exactly where we'd left off. We'd marked the spot where we'd got to in the first file, which was about three- quarters of the way through. We picked up, we went through the rest of that file using the same method. I don't think we found anything interesting, remotely interesting at all, in that file. It was just more of the same hum-drum stuff. So we put that file aside. We started on the second one and we used exactly the same method. We started going through that. And then quite close to the top of that file, if I remember rightly, we came across a document, a letter from Tariq Aziz circulated to four cabinet ministers. And the letter was very intriguing because it said—I'm just giving the best of my recollection—it said: "Please find enclosed George Galloway's 'work programme' for the year 2000 and take whatever action you see fit." And at the bottom of the letter there was a little footnote which said: "To be circulated to the head of the Mukhabarat to take action please", or something like that. So this was when I began to think—hang on, we might have something interesting here. It just struck me as very, very strange that here was Tariq Aziz—one of the most powerful people in Iraq—circulating a letter at a very high level to four ministers about George Galloway. And 'work programme', well what could that mean? It was intriguing. 'Work programme'? There was nothing, whatever that document had been—if it had ever been attached to something it wasn't there, so we didn't have this strange 'work programme', whatever that might have been. But it began to dawn on me that we might actually have something important. And at this point, I thought, well, perhaps I ought to actually tell the foreign desk that I had got some documents. Right up unto now I hadn't even told them that I'd been to the foreign ministry and that I had, in my possession, some documents. So I rang up the foreign desk , spoke to, I think it was Francis Harris that day, and said "This is what I've been doing. I've got these documents from the foreign ministry." And I just gave him an account of the 'work programme' letter signed by Tariq Aziz. And he agreed it was interesting and he raised—he asked me, you know "What do you think we should do? Should we try and write a story about that now?" My advice was "No. Let me carry on going through what we've got." Because I didn't really know, wouldn't know what to make of the particular piece of paper, signed by Aziz, about the 'work programme'. So my suggestion was that I just carry on going through them. And Francis said that he thought that was a good idea, but he would have a word with Neil Darbyshire, the Executive Editor, who was on duty that day. And if my memory serves me rightly, and we're still piecing together phone conversations, but I think he rang me back about ten minutes later to say "Yes, just carry on, carry on going through it." And he also suggested "If you want to speed things up a bit, don't worry about hiring a second translator." And the issue there really was, you know, don't worry about the extra money. If you want to hire a second translator then do it. And the issue there was just to speed up the process.

Q225  Sir Philip Mawer: So you did, in fact, hire a second one pretty much straight way?

Mr David Blair: That came later. So we carried on going through it in much the same way as we had before and then there was a point when I was turning the pages and I think I probably turned over two pages at the same time, or something. And then I came across the letterhead which you've seen saying 'Iraqi Intelligence Service.' And that immediately caught my eye because we hadn't seen any letterheads like that in the file—in the first file that we'd looked through or that file—up to that point.

Q226  Sir Philip Mawer: Were there subsequent letterheads with that same?

Mr David Blair: There were. There were quite a few examples.

Q227  Sir Philip Mawer: Subsequently?

Mr David Blair: Yeah. So I saw that, and that then immediately caught my eye. So I asked the translator to move straight on to that document and I think we skipped the one or two pages that were immediately before that. And then we adopted the same process I asked him "Who's it from?" He looked at it—"The chief of the Mukhabarat." "Who's it to?" "The President of the Secretariat." "What's the subject?" "The Mariam Appeal." Now I'd heard of the Mariam Appeal and I knew that Galloway was linked with it. So then I thought, this is the head of the Mukhabarat writing to Saddam's office about the Mariam Appeal. Earlier we saw this document about a 'work programme', whatever that might be, mentioning Galloway. And I thought—it was then that I began to think this is interesting. This is really interesting. So I asked the translator to just read me out every word of that document with special care. So he went through it. If you remember its quite long.

Q228  Sir Philip Mawer: Yes.

Mr David Blair: Five pages long. So he went through it, just reading it out to me. And I just listened By the time he had finished reading it, it was obvious to me that this was crucial. That this was a really, very important story indeed. This was about eight-thirty or so on the Sunday evening. It was about five-thirty pm London time. So I had the option then of immediately ringing the foreign desk and saying; "I've found this thing. What shall we do with it? Let's go with it immediately. I can write a story based on it." But I didn't do that because I—it was immediately apparent to me the importance of this document, that we had to get it right. So, what I did was I said to the translator "OK, you can go home. That's it for the day." It was eight-thirty in the evening. He was tired. He'd been working almost a twelve-hour day. And I said to him "Tomorrow, we'll go and find another translator to help you and then we'll go back to this document that you've just translated for me and we'll go through it again so that you, with the help of the other translator, can produce a full written translation." So he left. And then I turned back to the documents and it was then that I began turning over in my mind all the questions that one would consider. I began to think could this possibly be a forgery? And then the way I approached it was to say suppose it was a forgery and someone had just planted this forgery. What would have had to have happened for that to have taken place? And the way I thought it through was: well if this is a forgery, somebody came up with this very complicated document in Arabic. Photocopied it. Found a foreign ministry file filled with all sorts of other pieces of correspondence. Unbound it. Inserted it into that file. Bound it up again using this quite distinctive single-bowed knot that all the pale blue folders I saw were tied in. Put in a box file. Took it to the foreign ministry and then buried it there on the off-chance that someone might come along and might happen upon it and might go through it and might bother translating it. And that struck me immediately as just being wildly improbable. And then I thought, have we got other examples of the same letterhead? The same type of notepaper? So I looked though some of the other pale blue folders that we had and I came across some examples. I think there were three or four examples in total, maybe more. But I found a couple. Then I thought, have we got other examples of the same signature? So I looked back through the files and I found a couple. So I satisfied myself on those points. And it was then really that I became convinced that the probability of this thing being forged and planted was negligible and that we could discount that. This was an authentic, an authentic example. And then my mind turned to the next hurdle which was we had to get the translation right. So the plan I had in mind then was that I would get a second translator first thing in the morning at nine o'clock, when my regular translator would come back and see me the following morning. We would go through the documents and that by the time London woke up, which was about twelve noon our time …

Q229  Sir Philip Mawer: You'd have a translation?

Mr David Blair: I would have a final translation[6] and I would be able to put that to them and say "There we are." So the following morning I met the translator. Things didn't quite work out that way because I asked him to recommend a second translator. He recommended his professor at Mustansiriya University. We tried to find him. We failed to find him. Baghdad at that time, with no telephones, was a pretty difficult place to find people in. So we didn't locate him. So I went to the Palestine Hotel, the informal headquarters of the city. And there I met a French journalist, who I knew vaguely, and she said to me "I'm about to leave Baghdad I've got a translator, would you like to hire her?" So she introduced me to her translator, [Ms B]^.[7] I was immediately impressed by her. First of all because her spoken English was very good and, secondly, because she was a medical doctor and, while she had never been a specialist translator, she told me she had translated medical documents, which I thought by their nature would have been quite complicated documents. And that pointed to her as being a good translator. And also I knew from my pre-war visits to Baghdad that Iraqi doctors tended to speak very good English. They tended to have a very good grasp of English because a lot of their medical course was taught in English along British lines. So it was always known in Baghdad before the war that if you had an Iraqi doctor as your translator that was a good deal. They would know what they were doing. So I explained to her that we had a very important document relating to a British politician which I needed to have translated very accurately. And she said she was willing to do it. So we brought her back to the hotel and …

Q230  Sir Philip Mawer: And the two set to work?

Mr David Blair: And the two set to work. And they started work, as it turned out they started work at about twelve noon, so it was rather later than I would ideally have wished. And this time I rang up Francis Harris on the foreign desk and I said "Look, a few hours after I spoke to you yesterday we came across this other document." I then gave him an outline of it, based upon the verbal translation I'd had from [Mr A] the previous evening. I was cautious because I didn't want to tell him something which I later had to retract when the final translation was available. So I was very cautious. I gave him the outlines and he said "Well I've got to go into Conference in about half an hour's time so can you put that down in writing for me as a sort of summary of the central facts?" So I typed that out and filed it. Again it's very cautious, I just give—I give what I knew for certain to be true, but it doesn't go into the details of what the document outlined. And I said to Francis "I've got two translators working on the document at the moment. The moment they're finished I'll send through the completed translation." So the two translators carried on working. I wanted to give them space to work so they were inside my hotel room. I sat on the balcony a few feet away from them. There was a glass door between me and them so they were always in my sight. And I kind of put my feet up for a couple of hours and read, because I already knew that I would obviously be working very hard and I would have an awful lot of copy to churn out that day. And it struck me as kind of the calm before the storm, if you like. So they carried on working. And I watched them working and I was quite impressed by how they were doing it. They were taking it very seriously and they were discussing among themselves things that they weren't sure of. [Ms B] had with her an Arabic/English dictionary and they were checking words that they weren't sure of and so forth. So they went through it and they took quite a few hours over it. They finished at about—my recollection and again timing recollections, I must say, well I can't be sure of it—but they finished about five pm, Baghdad time. And they called me into the room. And what they'd done is they'd written it all out by hand. So then what I asked them to do was to read out what they had written while I typed it into my laptop. And that's what they did. And as they went along they corrected some things, they checked a few words. They asked me , they said, you know, "What's the best way of expressing this?" And I offered suggestions for the best English way of expressing something. So, finally, I had the complete translation. I'd typed it out. I sent that through to the foreign desk immediately, without comment, because I think it kind of spoke for itself. At this stage [Ms B] asked to go home, which was fair enough as she had worked hard all that afternoon. So I paid her—I gave her a hundred dollars—and she went home. I've had no contact with her since. And then Francis Harris rang me back almost immediately after I'd sent through the document. My recollection is that he rang me rather than vice versa. But we're checking the telephone records on that, so we'll know for certain soon. And then, it was then that the day was planned out, as it were. He said "Right, OK, I want four pieces from you: I want the main account, the main news story based upon the contents of the documents; I want an account of how you came to find the documents in the foreign ministry; I want a story about the middle man named in the document, Fawaz Zureikat", because attached to the document there was a profile of Zureikat which we'd had translated as well. "And I want a story about the other Britons who were mentioned in the files" because we'd come across those various other English—

Q231  Sir Philip Mawer: The letters that you mentioned?

Mr David Blair: Yeah. That's right.

Q232  Sir Philip Mawer: Similar to …

Mr David Blair: And also he asked me "How can we be sure that these documents are genuine?" He'd asked me that earlier as well when I first called him that morning and we went over the same ground again, really, much as I've outlined to you. I outlined to him very much what I've said to you about my reasons for believing that this document was genuine. He accepted that. And then shortly afterwards I had a conversation with Neil Darbyshire, the Executive Editor, in which we went over the same ground. I mean he asked me the same question "How can we be sure that they're not forged, that they are genuine?" We went over the same ground and Francis and Neil agreed with me that the circumstances in which I found them made the possibility of forgery so remote as to be …

Q233  Sir Philip Mawer: Essentially, the argument to rebut the charge that they're forgeries is that there was—it would have required such a combination of coincidences as to, you know, stretch credulity beyond the breaking point, in essence?

Mr David Blair: In essence, yes, in essence. And the bottom line would be that if you went about that extraordinary method of trying to forge a document, the overwhelming probability would be that your hard work would either be incinerated unread or would just lie there forever and no-one would ever see it. It was a rather—it would have been a rather bizarre way of going about it.

Q234  Sir Philip Mawer: It would only have been explicable if you had been—if the document had been planted and someone had prompted you to go …

Mr David Blair: And someone had steered me to go there.

Q235  Sir Philip Mawer: Yes. But according to your account that in no way occurred?

Mr David Blair: No.

Q236  Sir Philip Mawer: You must have been exhausted at the end of a very busy day?

Mr David Blair: I was pretty tired I finished at about eleven-thirty, or something like that, Baghdad time. I was churning out quite a few thousand words.

Q237  Sir Philip Mawer: Indeed, we've read them carefully. And then the next day came and you continued the task of translation?

Mr David Blair: Perhaps I might just add a couple of details. What I did was I expected that the foreign desk would come back to me with queries about the translation. So I asked [Mr A] to stay that night in the hotel. And I got him a room so that he would be on hand. And sure enough there were queries. In particular, the foreign desk wanted to be sure that we had correctly translated the crucial sentence which, if I recall rightly, had Mr Galloway saying that he obtained from Mr Tariq Aziz three million barrels of oil etc etc. They wanted to check that we'd got that absolutely right and that the key word "obtained" was correct. So I went back to [Mr A] on that. He checked it in the dictionary, checked it very carefully and I reported to the foreign desk that I was satisfied with the translation that we had. The foreign desk also said to me "We can expect that once we run the story there's going to be a lot of interest, so you can expect that you're going to be in demand for interviews tomorrow." So we agreed that I would speak to the Today programme and that I would do one or two others, but I wouldn't spend the whole day appearing on TV, if that was demanded of me. I would keep it to the minimum. And the foreign desk also said to me "Look, tomorrow morning, why don't you go back? Because as soon as the first editions of the Telegraph land at eleven o'clock on every news desk in London they're going to send their journalists to the foreign ministry tomorrow, so why don't you go back." So the following morning, this is the Tuesday now …

Q238  Sir Philip Mawer: Tuesday, the twenty-second?

Mr David Blair: Yup. I did go back to the foreign ministry. I went back there at nine o'clock. But seven or eight guards from the Free Iraqi Forces, which was the militia attached to the Iraqi National Congress, were actually at the gate and they didn't let me through the gate. They said they had been sent—deployed—they'd been deployed to secure the foreign ministry and the other government ministries. So I didn't even get through the gate. So I turned around and went straight back to the hotel. And then we went back to the business of translation. And it was then that we translated all the other documents[8] that were connected with the crucial one. You will recall that there was a couple of replies and follow-up documents. So we went through all of those and that was pretty quick because those documents were quite short and quite easy to translate.

Q239  Sir Philip Mawer: And you knew what you were looking for in this instance?

Mr David Blair: Absolutely, we knew exactly …

7   Identity not relevant to a conclusion on the complaint and therefore not disclosed above. Back

8   Volume II, WE 7-8. Back