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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2024
[This is a transcript of Michael's testimony to the Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction (known as the ‘Butler Review’ after its Chairman) on 7 May 2004]
LORD BUTLER: Thank you very much for coming. It's very useful for us to be able to draw on your experience and your expertise and your ideas. Just to say this is on the record, in other words there will be a transcript of it but it's private to the Committee, though you will be very welcome to see the transcript of it in case there is anything you want to correct or add. But really it's your ideas we want to draw on, and you will have seen that you have had an extra sale. I do not know whether that's the book of yours you would recommend …?
MICHAEL HERMAN: So I see. There is a more recent one actually.
LORD BUTLER: That's Intelligence Services in the Information Age is it?
MICHAEL HERMAN: Yes.
LORD BUTLER: I have taken particular notes of your chapter on accuracy in that book – and you say in your, I think it was RUSI wasn't it, your RUSI address …?
MICHAEL HERMAN: Yes.
LORD BUTLER: … that intelligence has turned out to be a disaster. The disaster, I expect you would say, is the fact that the intelligence so far appears to be wrong? MICHAEL HERMAN: Yes.
LORD BUTLER: I think we have got to take a provisional view about that, because we do not know quite how wrong it is – some of it was right. Now, drawing on what you say about the reasons why intelligence can be inaccurate – have you got a view of why in this case the intelligence – if wrong – has turned out to be wrong?
MICHAEL HERMAN: Well, that's correct. I have only seen what the ISC has said about the reports, so it is a pretty provisional judgement. But I suppose my judgement, well my diagnosis, is the familiar one that it was too difficult for people to get, as it were, outside the box of the thinking that they themselves had got locked into.
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