Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
In this week’s One Decision In Brief, hosts Kate McCann and Sir Richard Dearlove examine Israel’s expanding operations in Syria and its backing of the Druze minority amid renewed violence. As Iran prepares to meet with European nations—without the United States—questions emerge about the coherence of Western diplomacy. Meanwhile, a sensitive data leak hidden by the UK government for over a year has sparked outrage over secrecy, oversight, and trust in government.
Episode produced by Situation Room Studios. Original music composed and produced by Leo Sidran.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Mccann: Hello and welcome to this One Decision in Brief. I'm Kate McCann and I'm joined as ever by my co-host Sir Richard Dearlove. Today we are going to get into discussing a little bit about what's going on in Syria, particularly relating to Israel. We'll talk about Iran and some potential talks with the UK and other EU partners. And we will discuss the fallout of a significant leak of really very sensitive information here in the UK, which has had a ripple effect around the world. We'll work out what happens next from here. But, so Richard, should we start by talking about what's happening in Syria? Because I think this issue, it's a conflict that involves a secretive sect, the Druze. It's quite a complicated picture, and in some senses, it's going under the radar a little bit. What do we know about it at the moment?
SYRIA AND ISRAEL
Dearlove: Well, we know that this conflict in the town of Suweda, which is in the south of Syria, is between basically Bedouin tribes and their leadership, and then this Druze community, which is a subsect of Shia, but very specific and different Muslim group, which of course is also strongly represented inside Israel and unusually in Israel is integrated into the sort of Jewish state and quite a significant chunk of the Israeli military, the IDF, are Druze. They are very independent and have a sort of warrior tradition as well. So the conflict, as it relates to Syria, is actually quite important because it raises the whole question of whether this new government in Syria, which says it wants to be multiethnic, has been pretty incapable of actually dealing with conflict inside its borders. And this particular conflict, I think, been escalated because of Israeli support for the Druze and the fact that the Israelis have, well, have continued attacking strategic targets in Syria implicitly in support of the sort of looking after the Druze community. It raises really significant issues about how successful the new Syrian government can be. And at the moment, it looks absolutely chaotic.
Mccann: I find the Druze community fascinating. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were saying that it's such a close-knit sect that there is reportedly a secret that you will only find out if you become a sort of member of almost an inner circle and a sort of ultra element of the Druze community. And no one really knows what it is. There's a lot of conversation around it being something to do with reincarnation, the belief in reincarnation. But no one knows or really talks about it publicly what this kind of secret is. And it's a small community. But as you say, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli forces defending the Jewish population, has essentially stepped into the middle of this huge row about what is going on in Syria at the moment. And America's attitude towards Syria seems to be much more open to dialogue there than the UK and others. And in response to what America has seen from Israel and Netanyahu, I mean, there are some remarks in The Times, the Times of London, about Netanyahu's a madman for doing this. The IDF bombed the Ministry of Defence. I mean, it's quite a significant intervention from Netanyahu.
Dearlove: Yes. But I think what you also have to bear in mind was before this crisis erased down in Suweda, quite quietly without a lot of publicity, the IDF had been taking out a lot of the Syrian Armed Forces capability, like sinking its naval ships, bombing its airfields, just generally making sure that even a new Syrian state wouldn't have the military power to threaten Israel in the future. So it's not as though this support for the Druze came out of the blue. It's a continuation of a policy which has actually been going on ever since the previous government, the Ba'athist government in Syria fell, and Assad, you know, went off to Moscow. So there is a consistency about the line that has been taken, but I think the thing that's changed is that Trump made a statement supporting the new Syrian government and raised sanctions. And I think the hope was that the Israelis would, at that point, think that they had done enough to degrade the Syrian defense capability. But clearly, this has, let's say, catalyzed the continuation of it so that they're still attacking, you know, not just the people who've been attacking the Druze, but strategic targets in Damascus. As you say, they hit the Ministry of Defence, which is pretty extraordinary.
IRAN AND THE EUROPEAN TALKS
Mccann: We should talk about Iran because after the American intervention, after the bombing of those deep targets in Iran at the time when there was a lot of conversation around the development of enriched uranium, after that, there's been not so much conversation about how we move away from Iran enriching further uranium. Talks have not been successful. Iran is reportedly going to meet, or Iranian representatives are going to meet, with Britain, France and Germany this coming Friday. And the conversation around sanctions, if there is no agreement, is coming back to the fore. Where do you see this going from here?
Dearlove: I think the Iranians are keen to, you know, continue a dialogue with the Europeans who originally were the backers of the JCPOA. And my understanding is that the US position on the nuclear program is intransigent, you know, no program at all. So does this represent an Iranian attempt to sort of split off the Europeans and have a dialogue with them? Or are the Americans also backing these talks? And I don't think we know the answer to that question. And I find it quite concerning that there are talks going to start which don't include the Americans or don't seem to include the Americans.
THE AFGHAN DATA LEAK
Mccann: Shall we finish up by talking about the issue which has really dominated the headlines in the UK, but I know that you're in the States now. I don't think it's really made the same impact over there, has it? The issue of the Afghan data leak.
Dearlove: No. It hasn't. I mean, it's been reported more as a curiosity for this super injunction and the legal process than the actual events. So it hasn't attracted the attention that it's had in the UK. But I do find the whole thing a bit extraordinary. The reason for that is that, you know, all governments at times, even if there's a major cock-up, may need sort of short-term secrecy, which is what applied in this particular case. And, you know, it was a terrible cock-up. Someone, I mean, how it, I really just don't understand how something as stupid as that can happen.
Mccann: So I've spoken to quite a lot of people who were very close to this at the time in the previous government. And my understanding of it is that it was a member of staff in an office in London, essentially, a soldier, although potentially not a full-time soldier, which might complicate things, who at the time, there was an understanding that the situation in Afghanistan was very, very precarious. And there were lots of applications from people who wanted to leave Afghanistan to come to the UK. But the UK government was really struggling to obtain records or data or information on these people because just the political situation there on the ground was impossible. And in order to try and verify that some of these people had the right to come to the UK, they'd helped or they'd worked with special forces. There were a group of soldiers in the UK Special Forces who were using their own network of people on the ground in Afghanistan to verify the identities of people, basically to run intelligence. And this one soldier had meant to send and actually had already been doing this for quite some time. This wasn't the first time he'd done it. Sending out lists of names of people to a contact group in Afghanistan who would then send to their own groups and say, did you work with this bloke? Was he any good? Was he connected to the Taliban in any way? Should we be a bit worried about him? But instead of sending a short list of names, he accidentally sent the whole database. And the whole database was thousands of names and family members. And we now know also British military personnel and intelligence personnel. And when it was discovered, it wasn't discovered until eighteen months later. When it was discovered, that's when we ended up in this situation with a super injunction, which was not requested by the government at the time, but was suggested by the judge in the case because of the risk of the data, because of what was involved. But at that point, the data was already being passed fairly freely between people in Afghanistan. Previous government, previous Conservative government and current Labour government say they've got no evidence that the Taliban ever obtained it. But that was always the worry that they would obtain it and that they would go round and try and round people up and kill people. So I can understand why in the circumstances of a sort of panic they would put a super injunction on and say that it couldn't be reported.
Dearlove: Because, obviously, you would alert the, if the Taliban hadn't obtained it first time around, they would alert them to the leak, they would then be looking for the document. So, I mean, it does have a certain logic behind it. And, of course, there there was a whole lot of reference to MI6 stuff on it, but I'm pretty skeptical in terms of my own knowledge of how things work. I think all of them would have been was the identity, perhaps, of small numbers of people who are actually members of MI6, not contacts, who were seconded to special forces in Afghanistan. But I can't imagine that people who were in touch with MI6, as it were Afghans particularly, would have been on the list because that's not exactly the way that MI6 works. It doesn't share that sort of stuff with other departments. I felt reading it, it was almost an emotional reaction on the part of the media to the fact that this whole thing had been hushed up through a super injunction rather than the events that it was talking about. But I may be wrong.
Mccann: I think that's a really interesting question because one of the things that this story has prompted is a conversation about what right the government has to keep secret information from the population. And as a man who was previously in a position to keep a huge amount of secret information to yourself and to the state and not to all of us, I'm sure you would argue that we don't have the right to know everything, and we would never have the right to know everything.
Dearlove: I always said, you know, in our personal lives, there are things which we want to keep personal and secret. That may not be a permanent state. It may be something that we don't want someone to know for six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, three years.
Mccann: And, I mean, states have the same requirements and needs at certain times. But how do we know we can trust you? How do I know I can trust your judgment?
Dearlove: Very good question. I mean, there are certain guarantees and oversights. You know, MI6 doesn't operate independent of political control. It's under the political control of the government. And, you know, sensitive stuff has to be cleared. You have to have ministerial clearances, and then you've got the further guarantee of an oversight committee in parliament, which does operate within the ring of secrecy and is meant to scrutinize the service. All I can say is that if the service were acting in a way to sort of deceive the government or deceive the oversight, you know, that's a very serious breach of the way that the UK does things. So, I mean, there are guarantees which are designed there to create trust. I think maybe there are certain occasions when they don't work very well.
Mccann: On this occasion, one of the criticisms of the process and the cover-up was that the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is the committee you referenced that does have that clearance that could scrutinize this kind of decision, it was not allowed to know what had happened. Even though at that point in time, the Speaker of the House of Commons was aware, as were some of the sort of very senior politicians, the committee wasn't. It was unable to be part of it.
Dearlove: That does surprise me, but I've got a feeling that's something to do with the technical side of the legal context. If there was a super injunction, they couldn't be briefed. But if I had been chief at the time, my advice would have been, I think, to the lawyers, you don't have to follow the lawyers to the letter all the time, would have been to brief the Security and Intelligence Committee because that gives you the sort of degree of, because it's a multi-party committee. You've got a degree of political coverage, and that's important in those sorts of circumstance. So I'm puzzled, but, you know, it's very easy to be critical after the event. And I can see why it intrigued so many people in terms of following the story, but I think it's been overhyped as a story. And unless the Taliban did have the list right from the word go, in which case it was a pretty serious situation.
Mccann: Can I ask you finally? We talked about the trust that politicians provide and oversight. Would there ever be a situation where you would not trust politicians with some of this information, even if you were supposed to?
Dearlove: There was a couple of incidents in my professional career where I was extremely worried about the behavior of some politician who I felt were acting for their political careers rather than in the national interest, but I prefer not to specify what happened.
Mccann: I think that's fair enough. We'll leave that one for now, but it doesn't surprise me. It was nice chatting.
Dearlove: Lovely chatting to you. I think actually we've had a very interesting review of current topics as it were engaging the media.
Mccann: We have. Exactly. Yeah. The media is always part of these conversations, and we hope that you are all also enjoying listening to us on One Decision in Brief. We're really enjoying making them. You can, of course, let us know if you have any ideas about what you'd like to hear from us. We are available. You can find us online. You can find us on YouTube. You can find us on onedecision.com, in fact. So do stay tuned for our regularly scheduled episode. It's a really good one coming this Thursday. You won't want to miss it. And for any exclusive content from other world leaders, you can find that on onedecision.com and on our YouTube page. I'm Kate McCann. See you soon.
