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BACK TO : PSYOPS IN IRAQ 2003-6
Air Vice Marshall Heath & W/C Ian Chalmers on IO/PSYOP before HoC Select Committee on Defence 
Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1571-1579) AIR VICE MARSHAL MIKE HEATH AND WING COMMANDER IAN CHALMERS 16 DECEMBER 2003 Q1571 Chairman: Welcome, gentlemen. We have quite a large number of questions we have to ask. I will start by giving you the overall question and then I will go back to the first part so you can see the direction we are going in. I really want to ask you to explain the United Kingdom concept of Information Operations and how it fits in with other aspects of campaign planning, and how far have Information Operations really achieved a cross-government government approach to its challenges, and which departments are most concerned with it other than the Ministry of Defence? That is the overall question, and I will kick off with the first part, if you can briefly explain to us the United Kingdom concept of Information Operations. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Mr Chairman, the concept of Information Operations for the military is to garner cross-government activity, not just military activity, to contribute towards influence and persuasion. I like to think of it as a continuum, that if you get it right it starts during pre war fighting where you are looking towards dissuasion and coercion; it continues into military operations; and, of course, it then wraps up and it is just as essential that you carry it through into post conflict restoration and reconstitution. If you do not mind I would rather like to read you the pat definition of Information Operations which I think will give you a good insight to the definition we work to. Q1572 Chairman: Mind you, we do not believe anything the Ministry of Defence writes so we will have to tease out additional elements of it, if you prefer! Air Vice Marshal Heath: Sadly, however, the truth here is that I wrote these words so they may come home to roost! "Information Operations is co-ordinated actions undertaken to influence an adversary or potential adversary in support of political and military objectives by undermining his will, cohesion and decision-making ability through affecting his information, information-based processes and systems, whilst protecting one's own decision makers and decision-making process." It is a bit trite but I think that gives you a wide feeling. Q1573 Chairman: We have been on the receiving end of it now for twenty years so I do recognise the concept! If we were students of Information Operations, what documents are publicly available for anyone listening to look at? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The joint services military doctrine is an Unclassified document which maps out the lower level of process. At the more senior level, I provide the strategic oversight: there are no documents today. A large element of Information Operations is, of course, Classified. It comes under several disciplines and those include electronic warfare, psychological operations, operational security, deception, computer network operations, and information insurance. Q1574 Chairman: Are we very good at it? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes, I think we are exceptionally good at it, and getting better. I have a very positive story to tell this afternoon. Q1575 Chairman: Because when we were inquiring into the lessons of the Falklands I really did not have the impression that the skills had advanced very far. I can recall the amusing session we had on who accepted responsibility for Radio Atlantic del Sur, and no hands went up, and to this day I have no real idea who it was. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Indeed. Q1576 Chairman: So you say we were excellent at it and we are getting better? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes. Q1577 Chairman: How does this fit in then with campaign planning? You have given us the broad concept. How would this fit into the early stages of a conflict? How do you deter? If you fail to deter, what is the transition then from deterrence to operational decision making? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The underpinning is, first of all, a positive statement of national intent from the government. Without that it is nigh impossible to come up with a military Information Operations package. The Committee suspended from 3.02 pm to 3.07 pm for a division in the House of Commons. Q1578 Chairman: We were discussing campaign planning. Could you amplify how it fits in, please? Air Vice Marshal Heath: As I said, the first starting point is government policy and government intent. My task is then to try and make sure that we can align that as closely as possible with our close allies. In a perfect world we will all go forward with the same espoused common policy. In reality that is hardly achievable but it is at least essential if we are going to be coherent that we start from the same starting point. Now, once I have that and depending on where we are in terms of the tension or situation that is arising, I would look through the DTIO staff to raise the best profile we can of understanding the potential adversary. We will look at crafting what the target audiences are: we will look at the type of message that we would need to respond to them with, and we would look for the avenues that we could employ. The very next thing is to make sure we are closely co-ordinated with media operations. Without coherence between the two we do not have an erudite plan and then you would start to conduct military operations across government activity at the same time, and you would hope that the other departments would buy into an understanding of why you felt it was necessary for the Ministry of Defence to become engaged. What I can tell you today is that, through Iraq, that is exactly how things happened. If it fails to deliver an avoidance of conflict then, frankly, all that changes as you move into conflict is that the style of the messages change. The audiences remain the same but the messages now become more crafted to individuals in some instances or to wider groups depending on the vehicle you are using. Once you move into restitution, the audiences still remain the same but once again the type of message and the emphasis on the audiences shifts. Q1579 Chairman: The theory very often or the word used endlessly is "cross-cutting", cross-governmental approach. Can you give us some indication how other departments fit in, not just at the abstract level but, if it is rather detailed, the departmental structure of taking a genuinely interdepartmental approach? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes. The Ministry of Defence as far as Information Operations is concerned is willing to talk to anybody and everyone who will listen. It is obvious in what we are talking about today that the major interlocutor is the Foreign Office, and through the process of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, which is the time I have been engaged in this particular department, we have had a meaningful and constant dialogue with the Foreign Office. We have also had dialogue with the Cabinet Office, and through Iraq we had conversations on the daily basis with the Campbell group in No 10. On an ad hoc basis we have included DfID in our discussions and the Home Office, although I have to say those are infrequent. The advantage we have had in the Ministry of Defence is that we have a directorate that stood up for constant engagement in this area. The disadvantage of the Foreign Office and this is not a criticism but an observation of reality, is that they are regionally focused rather than information focused, although that has recently changed, and I will ask Wing Commander Ian Chalmers, who is still involved in DTIO, to bring you up to speed on that because I have been out of the directorate for about four months now. Wing Commander Chalmers: The Foreign Office has a group now called the Information Directorate which used to be part of the Public Diplomacy Department with whom we directly interact. Additionally, we have two cross-government organs, I would say, with which we try and formalise our co-ordination. The first one is a group called the Information Campaign Co-ordination Group, it is chaired by Ian Lee, DG Op Pol who I think has been before you already, and the aim of that really is at a 1/2* level to agree in general terms that the themes and messages that we propose are agreeable to other government departments - we obviously could not force them on them - and then within the Ministry of Defence to decide our individual lines of attack between individual ops and media ops. At a working level, this group was set up for the first time for the first conflict in Sierra Leone, we have a cross-government implementation group, whose purpose really is to ensure our activity either in theatre or directed towards theatre is ideally co-ordinated but at the very least deconflicted, so that the target audiences around the place hear hopefully a similar message from us although produced by different means. Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1580-1599) AIR VICE MARSHAL MIKE HEATH AND WING COMMANDER IAN CHALMERS 16 DECEMBER 2003 Q1580 Chairman: So is it a lead department? Wing Commander Chalmers: Theoretically our view is that the Foreign Office has a theoretical lead because they provide the foreign policy under which we operate. We often host meetings at Ministry of Defence because we have the space, and also because we have a deliberate planning process which tends to lead in many ways to the other departments, so we do not take the lead but we ensure that we fit into the foreign policy at the time. Q1581 Chairman: And which were the key events that led you to an improved approach, because Kosovo was quite good, NATO was a catastrophe, we were very good, the Gulf war before last was not very good, the Falklands war was a disaster - so is it just those military experiences you have that leads change, or is it a more rational incremental process? Wing Commander Chalmers: I think there are really three parts. Firstly, there are the lessons identified of how we can do things better, and that goes on a routine basis as we review our doctrine and our policy. Secondly, there is a quite simple reason that it is best use of scarce resources. If ourselves, the Foreign Office and DfID intend to transmit into particular area, it makes sense for us to use the same equipment and messages, so it is quite simple. Lastly, we moved away some time ago from the wars of national survival to wars of choice so it is extremely important that as government departments we are in tune with each other as we represent ourselves to the various target audiences, so I think these are the three main reasons. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Adding to that, if I may, when we created DTIO it was obvious that any purely military action would be incomplete. It had to be a cross-government activity so during the early months we spent considerable effort persuading the Foreign Office that we were not their enemies, we were actually their friends, and we shared a common goal in terms of defence diplomacy and the delivery of war avoidance. Once we had them alongside, a slightly more difficult tussle was with the media ops folks, that we were bedfellows and we had a common goal and coherence was necessary, and once we started to make friends around Whitehall we made enormous inroads into persuading other departments that dialogue was not just legitimate but necessary. Q1582 Mr Blunt: You seem to imply that it was initially quite difficult to get linkage with media ops. Did I hear you say that correctly? Air Vice Marshal Heath: That is correct. Q1583 Mr Blunt: Can I ask therefore about the role of No 10 in this, who were obviously extremely central to media operations and the campaign together. What linkage did No 10 have on a regular basis, and how much were they effectively in the lead on this? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Will you forgive me if I digress for a second and then I will answer your question, I promise? The problem with Information Operations, and I would very much like to go on record with this statement, is that most of the people who are peripheral or outside of the art believe that a large element is focused on deception or deceit. With the very specific exception of that bit where we would try and lie or dissuade or persuade military commanders, the entire art of Information Operations is based on truth. Q1584 Mr Blunt: Perhaps that is why I assumed No 10 would be involved! Air Vice Marshal Heath: And that is why media operations were very reluctant to talk to us, because if you have this perception, "Well, you do not want to talk to Mike Heath because all he is going to do is persuade us to lie to the public or the press", then you are intuitively at loggerheads, so we had to persuade people that my remit under both law and the direction of my Secretary of State was that we were to be truthful at all times. Once you have established that then you move into a process of who has primacy. We forced our way into the Campbell group because we felt that, if there was going to be cross-government ownership of an information campaign, it had to be led from the very top. If it was going to be married in with government policy, then what better place to go and see him, so we sought to be engaged in the Campbell group, and Alasdair Campbell was welcoming and I think we added to the process. We provided a matrix that allowed the Campbell group to become more coherent. I am not suggesting in any arrogant sense that we directed it but when we went there it was a purely media-driven function. We demonstrated that there were key messages that should not be released as soon as you had them, they needed to be crafted to be released at certain times, and that is I think the strength we brought to the Campbell group. So we went there largely on receive, but we were able to give a military take on some of their activities. Q1585 Mr Blunt: Could you explain the timing and the methodology by which you broke into the Campbell group? Did you need to get the Secretary of State to say, for example, that you needed to be on the Campbell group? How did that work? Air Vice Marshal Heath: No. We went into the Cabinet Office and spoke to Desmond Bowen and said, "We need your buy into this; we need you to own this process". It was a good concept for a couple of weeks but then Desmond was too busy with other things going on, but he by then had provided the link to the Campbell group. Mr Chairman, I am not going to offer you this document I have brought with me as evidence because it has "Secret" stamped on it - Q1586 Chairman: Well, there are cameras - Air Vice Marshal Heath: We produced this matrix which became the cross-Whitehall bible for developing information and media strategy. Q1587 Mr Blunt: Why is that secret? Air Vice Marshal Heath: It identifies who the key audiences were, and also what the themes and messages that you should employ were. This was updated on a regular basis; it became the Campbell group directive; it became the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence directive; it was very much a living document that we ran throughout. The answer to your question why was it secret - Q1588 Mr Blunt: Why is it secret now? Air Vice Marshal Heath: It is not now, in truth. We could downgrade this; it still is a living document. It was secret at the time because there were times when there were individuals named on it, and there were people at the Campbell group who were not cleared for access to that, so it was a way of controlling the release of the information it contained. Q1589 Chairman: To save us getting a video of these proceedings and then an expert in freeze-framing, would you mind giving us a copy, please? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Of course. I would be delighted.[1] Q1590 Chairman: On the question of Psychological Operations, can you tell us in more detail how Information Operations differs from Psychological Operations? Is psyops really a part of Information Operations, or is it better to understand it as separate from Information Operations? Could you show us where it fits into your overall scheme? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes. As I said earlier on, I owned the strategic piece that fits above the operational piece, and above the tactical piece, and below that. Psychological Operations is very much a part of Information Operations: its place really is at the tactical level, but without the coherence of strategic advice, operational development and then tactical practitioning, you do not have coherent psychological operations. Psychological Operations, if you like, is the more public part of military activity. It is specifically military and I cannot say that about most of the rest of Information Operations - that is cross-government. It is specifically tactical, and it is specifically targeted by military means into target audiences, so I saw it as the end instrument of what we were crafting in London. Q1591 Chairman: Have you been able to evaluate how successful psyops was? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes, we have, and yes, it was successful, but can I give you a definitive answer today in terms of percentages of people who were persuaded? No, I cannot. We might return to this later, but measures of effectiveness for Information Operations are immensely difficult. What I can tell you is that prisoners of war who were interviewed were persuaded by leaflets not to open valves in the oilfields: we saw battalions that took up defensive surrender positions that came directly out of the psyops messages; we had people in Basrah who, when they were asked to go out into the streets and riot against the Ba'ath Party, said, "No, the reason we are staying indoors is because you have been telling us on the radio for the last month to keep out of the way and we will be out of harm's way and we will be safe". When we asked for Iraqis to come forward to effectively act as radio presenters, we were inundated with 400 phone calls within the first ten minutes and we had to pull the plug because we did not need any more volunteers. In some small way I see those as measures of effectiveness. In terms of the wider scale of how effective was the psyops campaign, I do not have an answer today but the whole concept of measures of effectiveness is taxing us and we are trying to come up with a methodology. Chairman: It would be helpful, certainly to us, and whether this is open source published or not the Ministry of Defence will decide, for you to look in your files and perhaps talk to your superiors to see whether we can have a version or look at that document, because obviously this is crucial. It is obvious there were a lot of elements of success.[2] Q1592 Mr Viggers: We are briefed that the information campaign objectives are contained in an Information Operations Annex to the CDS directive which will identify key or master information campaign messages that must be put across. It may be that was the document you showed us, but can you say what were the key campaign objectives of Information Operations within Operation Telic? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I certainly can, Mr Viggers, and I will refer to my notes to make sure I do not miss anything here. Initially, the key objective was to deter the deployment and use of weapons of mass destruction. It was to deter wilful damage to the Iraqi infrastructure either by the people or by the regime; it was to promote the coalition's aims and objectives in terms of deterrents, potential hostile action and the reconstitution that came afterwards. All three were equally important. It was to prevent or limit civilian casualties, predominantly through creating an understanding with the population that they were not the target group if we moved into conflict, and how they could remain relatively safe, and also to convey to military personnel how they could surrender and remain safe throughout the process once again if we went into conflict. Those, widely, are the grander, strategic concepts. Q1593 Mr Viggers: Were these encapsulated in a planning direction to you from the Joint Force Commander? Is that the way it works? Air Vice Marshal Heath: No. It was the other way around, sir. I worked directly for the Secretary of State and CDS. CDS's directive reflected the Secretary's directive from the government, and we informed PJHQ of what the strategic requirements were. The Joint Force Commander then crafted his orders to his forces which worked on the principle of never being greater or offering more than the CDS directive, but he could obviously constrain in terms of military action his commanders in the field if he so wished. Q1594 Mr Viggers: That sounds very much like the United Kingdom working alone. How did this co-ordinate with the rest of the task force? Air Vice Marshal Heath: It was anything but the United Kingdom working alone. We obviously had our own national policy and our own national directives but I was under remit to make sure, as I alluded to earlier on, that we were as closely crafted to the Americans as possible, and to flag up very early where I believed there could be any differences that might subsequently cause problems if we moved into conflict. An example of that would be that if the government had decided not to say that regime change had become necessary or was appropriate, then we would have had an entirely different target set and an information campaign from the United States. As it happened that was not the case, and therefore we were allowed to go along a carefully crafted path where we were able to come up with a lot of common themes and messages from the United States. So certainly with that coalition partner we were totally on side. Q1595 Mr Viggers: So you referred to a reference by you up through to the CDS? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes. Q1596 Mr Viggers: Did you work with your American colleague, and was he similarly making recommendations to his equivalent to the CDS? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes, very much so, sir. During this work-out period I spent more time in Washington than I spent in London. Once the conflict started I was entirely tied to London but predominantly for the other part of my job, the targeting part, rather than the information piece. The reason I brought Wing Commander Chalmers today is that my proper deputy was deployed at that time and Wing Commander Chalmers was given acting rank, if you like, to act as my deputy, and that is why he is here today. So he ran the information piece predominantly through the campaign: I ran the targeting piece through the campaign. Q1597 Mr Viggers: What were the pre combat priorities for combat of the information you had in relation to American attitudes, avoidance of conflict, distancing Gulf War 1 from Gulf War 2? How did these build on previous Information Operations? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I think the truth is they did not build because in Gulf War 1 this was not something we acknowledged as a legitimate military discipline, and during Kosovo the target set and the needs were entirely different, so we built on limited experience but we went into this conflict very much apprised of the need to do everything we could to make regional players, international audiences, the domestic audience and the Iraqi people - and I have carefully chosen to put them in that order because, perversely, the Iraqi people were the lowest priority at this stage - understand that we believed there was legitimate cause in law and international law for what we were doing, to make sure they fully understood they were not the target group and that we would do everything possible to make sure they remained safe and, finally, to make sure they understood that we were committed to the longer term and if we went to conflict there would be a reconstitution and a resurrection phase where we would look after the Iraqi people after it was all over. Q1598 Mr Viggers: Did the whole of the coalition have a coherent information strategy that you were able to use in drawing up the British Information Operations campaign? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The honest answer to that is no, but coherent enough. We had an entirely coherent information strategy with the United States. The truth is - and I suspect there is a degree of arrogance or a degree of necessity in what I am about to say - some of the smaller partners were not consulted. They were offered the advice that this was the combined strategy that we were providing but no, I am afraid we did not go to all of the other nations and ask them their opinion. There, frankly, was not the time to do it anyway. Q1599 Mr Viggers: What about the different groupings within Iraq, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shias? Did you have different strategies in different parts? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Of course is the glib answer. Perhaps I ought to say that, although I am sitting in a Royal Air Force uniform today, I represent a microcosm of the DTIO staff which is some 98 personnel. Within that staff we have a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, an anthropologist, a couple of Arabists - these are the people who are getting inside the minds and understanding the Iraqi people, and understanding the Iraqi people makes you quickly realise that you have at the very minimum three distinct target audiences, so the way you deal with the Shia is different to the Sunni, and certainly very different to the way you deal with the Kurds. The truth is, as we went up to the initial position of coercion or dissuasion, they were not the target audience. The target audience was the regime and the Ba'ath Party, so while we were doing a calming action, the priority remained at the very early stages on the coercion or dissuasion. Once we moved into conflict then the people became a predominant part of the theming and messaging, and we tried as best we could to craft our target audiences and our target messages to represent their concerns, their religious beliefs or their tribal and ethnic origins. Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1600-1619) AIR VICE MARSHAL MIKE HEATH AND WING COMMANDER IAN CHALMERS 16 DECEMBER 2003 Q1600 Mr Viggers: At what level was the information campaign owned? How far down was authority delegated? I suppose I could turn that round by saying what ease of access did you have to the highest levels of authority? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I felt I had complete access to ministers and, if it was necessary, to the Prime Minister. The way it was exercised, and the truth is there were no difficulties that arose that should have been taken or needed to be taken to the Prime Minister, I felt that working in Whitehall I had free and full access. In terms of the theatre, we do not just produce, for instance, in the psyops campaign leaflets and allow young majors to start distributing those around the streets or giving them drops by the Americans. Those messages are approved at Ministry of Defence level, and by the Ministry of Defence I mean the Secretary of State, so initially we were maintaining and insisting on oversight on all of these messages until we were comfortable that the theatre and the young operators, particularly in the psyops arena, understood what the requirement was. Similarly we insisted on oversight of American messages and themes, so if we nationally disagreed with them we had the power of veto over the Americans. Q1601 Mr Cran: I wonder if we could move to the international context of the information campaign because, of course, all of your activities are not taking place within a vacuum. How would you respond if I said to you that at least it is my view, and I think it is many other people's view, that in fact when the war began we were dealing with a very negative international context, were we not? I am interested, and the Committee would be interested, to know how you dealt with that, because I presume it was at least in part your responsibility. Air Vice Marshal Heath: The truth is I suppose that the weakest area of our performance was our ability to counter either the negative press or the negative messages that in fact were coming out of Baghdad. There was no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a seasoned practitioner of Information Operations. Q1602 Chairman: Was. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Indeed, and actually we came second most of the time. Okay, we managed to make the Minister of Information a comedy or a parody character but in the very first stages he was quite coherent and issuing messages that were doing us harm, and the weakness in our performance which we are now addressing is we were not very good at responding in a timely fashion to the criticism being issued around the world. One of the dangers of Information Operations, of course, is that sometimes you do not have the vehicle to release your reply or your response into the international communities. Media operations will tell you - I trust have told you - that you can craft the message but if the media do not want to run with the story or the riposte or reply, then you have no other vehicle of getting it into a democratic media community. The BBC were at pains to tell me that they were not an instrument of government and they were independent, and therefore no matter how much we would like a story to be carried, a riposte to be carried into the public domain, if they were not interested because that was not the sexy story this year, week or day, then you would find it nigh impossible to counter some of the messages being used against you. It is an area of weakness, and it is a critically important area that we have to address in the coming months. Q1603 Mr Cran: You have said to the Committee that the Iraqis were really rather sophisticated in what they had to say in influencing international opinion but apart from what you have already said, if you had your time again, what would you do differently to capture the high ground, given that you had pretty negative press at the time? Air Vice Marshal Heath: First of all, if I may just slightly correct you, I do not think I said they were sophisticated; I just said they were very good at it. Q1604 Mr Cran: Do not let's worry about the words; just better. Air Vice Marshal Heath: It is a lower scale but sheer volume and sheer arrogance and, of course, the ability to lie, because that is not something that we allow ourselves to do, and neither do I think that we should ever lie - I think that the truth can be very compelling. You can say the same message twenty ways and still be telling the truth and say the same thing with slightly different nuances but the truth is compelling in that sense, so we will always be at a disadvantage against an adversary who is willing to lie. There is no answer to that unless you can demonstrate that he is lying by proof. It often is inadequate to go into the public domain and say, "He is not telling the truth". A sceptical audience will say, "Well, you are the one who is lying", or "You would say that, wouldn't you", and I think those are not compelling answers. What would I do differently if I started again? You have to start early, is the answer. We should have started an information campaign a couple of years before we did against Iraq, in my personal opinion. Q1605 Mr Cran: And that is a practical proposition? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I believe so, yes. You have to persuade in this particular instance the Foreign Office that defence diplomacy needs to take on a more aggressive style, and I am not sure that I or the Ministry of Defence can deliver that but I think you have to be compelling in your argument to say it is necessary and appropriate. So the key to Information Operations is start early. If you genuinely believe that the Ministry of Defence can deliver avoidance of war fighting, then you have to give it time to run through, otherwise what you find yourself doing is preparing the battle space, and I feel that is woefully short of the remit placed upon me to deliver. Q1606 Mr Cran: I know the Chairman wants to intervene but I have one more point: again, just so that the Committee can understand what you are all about, how limiting was the explicit lack really of UN authority? Of course, the Attorney General made it very clear that in international law the action was legal, but there was not that explicit UN approval for the action itself. How limiting was that for you, and also the divisions within the Security Council? Were these massive minuses for you? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Ultimately not very limiting at all. You just have to recraft your messages to see what legitimacy is placed in front of you. In this particular instance the emphasis shifted to what Lord Goldsmith had gone on record and said rather than where the UN had given us legitimacy, so you just recraft your messages to convey a different government policy. It would have been nice to have had buy-in at the UN level at that stage because it would have allowed us to address some of the international concerns, but in the end if you cannot deliver that then you have to focus on what you have got, and I do not think it was a major debilitating factor. Q1607 Mr Cran: I understand the word "recraft" as you use it, but give me an example, because without an example I really do not know what you are saying. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Well, if I want to tell the Iraqi people that I believe what I am offering them is a better form of life and a better future, then they need to understand why I am prepared at the extreme end to invade their country. It would be easier to tell them that the international community through the auspices of the United Nations believes that is appropriate. If you cannot do that, then you have to come down to more specific instances and say that the United States and the United Kingdom believe that there is a justification that their leader is not just an outrageous man but is a man who presents a threat to both the region and world stability. So now you focus on Saddam Hussein rather than the international community. In both cases you would have ended up at Saddam Hussein; in the second case you just get there quicker. Q1608 Chairman: You touched upon the skills that the Iraqis had in countering our efforts. The popular image of their effort is comical Ali who is seen as a buffoon. Who was directing their psyops and Information Operations? Was it a member of Saddam's cabinet, or mainly this guy who attracted such amusement and bemusement, particularly towards the end of the campaign? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I will need to be cautious here so that I do not stray into classified information but I will endeavour to give you the best answer I can. There is no doubt that the Minister of Information, and his directorate, were part and parcel of the process. There is no doubt that their intelligence service was conveying that, but I think this frankly came from the top. We have indications that, prior to Kosovo, Milosevic sent a considerable number of people to Baghdad and there is no doubt in my mind that the main reason they went to Baghdad was to understand Information Operations. Milosevic effectively was better at using this tool against us in the initial stages of Kosovo fundamentally because he was able to lie again, but also because he understood the need and how important this was. My directorate came as a direct result of coming second to Milosevic, not Saddam Hussein, but there was a recognition after Kosovo that we needed to be better over this. Q1609 Chairman: You have explained our success rate in influencing Iraq. Were you responsible for trying to influence thinking amongst allies who were, putting it mildly, less than enthusiastic - ie France and Germany? I would not quite include Russia yet as an ally, but was that part of your remit or somebody else's? Following on from that, who was responsible for trying to persuade domestic opinion, particularly domestic media, of our message? Did that come under the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office, or whoever? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The reason I smiled when you asked the question is that my opposite number in Washington owns the Office of Strategic Influence, and when he fell foul of - well, I will not say the name but when he fell foul of the State Department, of course, his directorate was dissolved within twelve hours because it was seen that he was using deception to persuade allies, including the United Kingdom, to make sure that we were joined up to the campaign. These key things, if you bear in mind this document I showed you was produced not for the Ministry of Defence but for the cross-government piece, start with home. I do not own that - that is very much media operations, the Campbell group, the Foreign Office and the Home Office, if it was necessary. I had an input to all three of the next three groups in here, the regional, international and Iraq piece. In terms of allies, frankly I do not think we saw it as an information campaign. This was an issue for ministers and senior military personnel to persuade around the conference table, rather than to use messages and themes, our close allies that they needed to understand why it was important we worked together on this campaign. Q1610 Mr Cran: Again, so that the Committee can be absolutely clear, I wonder if you would set out again, and I know you have touched on this, what you feel the key priorities of the Information Operations campaign was. Was it to keep the Iraqi army at home? That seemed to be the case in 1991, very successfully as I recall. Was it to turn the leadership against Saddam Hussein? Was it to keep the population quiescent? What was it? Or was it a mixture? Air Vice Marshal Heath: It was a mixture of all of those and priorities changed quite dramatically through the coercion phase of the conflict and through the reconstruction. I would break down the three key elements of the regime during the dissuasion phase as follows: this was their last chance to understand that we were intent on a successful conclusion, and if that meant conflict we were willing to take that step, so this was their last chance to turn around. The Iraqi people were - I will not say secondary at that stage but peripheral to the main aim and the main thrust. Once we started to move towards the inevitability of the conflict then we needed to persuade the Iraqi people that we would do whatever we could to make sure they were safe and that we minimised damage to both their country and they as individuals, and therefore they became a very predominant group in the next phase. They, of course, are the entire focus of the reconstitution and reconstruction phase. Across all of that the military needed to do whatever we could to make sure that those who perhaps were not committed to the Ba'athist ideal would be willing to throw their hands up when the war started. So throughout the entire theme up until the end of the conflict the military army and the Republican Guard were a focused audience as well. I am very sorry but there is no simple answer to your question. The priority shifted but, if I was going to break out three groups, those are the three I would focus on. Q1611 Mr Cran: Just so I can understand this, how successful did you feel you were in those three phases, because at times it seemed as if you were battling against events. Air Vice Marshal Heath: We come back to measures of effectiveness here. Q1612 Mr Cran: Indeed. Air Vice Marshal Heath: If, in years to come I am sitting here again and we had just avoided a war, I suspect the last thing people would say is what a brilliant information campaign. They will say, "Well, wasn't that good that the opposition spotted early enough that they did not want to go into conflict?" So without a demonstrator of how capable you are it is very difficult to say how well you do at Information Operations. What I do believe compellingly is that you have to try at all stages. The truthful answer to the conflict phase is we met soldiers and interviewed soldiers who never saw the leaflet, never heard a radio broadcast, and had no idea that we were making overtures to them that if they formed up in certain patterns or procedures they would be safe. On the other side, we have seen generals who did capitulate and did form up in correct surrender positions, and that could have only come through the information piece. In the reconstitution piece, the audience is different. We walk on the streets, we talk to the people: it might be worth at this stage telling you that we sponsored putting a free democratic newspaper into Iraq within hours of the war ending. It was being produced in Kuwait; we got General Brims' soldiers on the ground as a priority to deliver newspapers. That is not what they thought they would be doing when the day before they had been shooting people, but those newspapers were compelling. It was the first free democratic press in Iraq and people were fighting in the streets to get the newspapers. This was something that was worth doing, and the benefit to us is that we were able to carry messages in that newspaper. Some of it was just trivial in the sense of what do I want to do and influence. It was telling youngsters to stop picking up disposed ordnance in the streets and telling them what it looked like. Some of it, unashamedly, was how to influence people to understand that they needed to stay calm, that the electricity did not work, but we were doing whatever we could to rebuild and reconstitute. Q1613 Mr Cran: Operations Security, as I understand it, and I am reading these words, "is designed to deny the enemy access to information of use about one's own forces and seeks to reduce the amount of information available to the enemy . . .". Did it remain good once the coalition forces had entered Iraq, or did it break down? Air Vice Marshal Heath: No, it did not. It was good throughout. I think we have one recorded incidence of a journalist overstepping the mark and he was dealt with, and the rest of the community were left in no doubt that that was the first and last breach. In terms of military security within the military, it was absolute; we had no breaches. In terms of managing the media and the information piece, we were finely tuned from the very beginning to the need to make sure that messages were controlled. This was one of the reasons why this document was Secret and one of the reasons why we wanted to be closely engaged with the Campbell group. It is high risk, particularly when you have journalists in the field, but those are risks that you have to take and those are elements of trust that you have to demonstrate. If you do not demonstrate trust and the willingness to take risk, then you will have journalists making things up or compromising you purely because they are not in dialogue with you. Mr Cran: They do it the whole time in this place, so there we are! The Committee suspended from 3.52 pm to 4.02 pm for a division in the House of Commons. Q1614 Mr Blunt: You have laid significant emphasis on the importance of not lying and it is fundamental to the credibility of your information campaign. How much do you think you were handicapped by the fact that, whatever Members of the House of Commons believed when the Prime Minister spoke to us in September 2002 and March 2003, the majority were not inclined to take him at his word? It has now been shown that there were exaggerations within the documentation the government were putting forward and it would appear on the face of it that the exercise that was going on in that whole period was one of the government seeking evidence that supported its thesis rather than looking at the whole of the evidence across the piece and coming to a conclusion. That would explain two million people on the streets, a very widespread concern now on the basis of the exaggeration of the threat and all the rest. How much do you think you were undermined in the course of the campaign by that? How much do you think your future credibility has been put at stake by the manner in which the case for the campaign was presented at the political level? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The truth is that information operations has to role with the punches and has to be a living art that you reflect on a day to day basis. What is the information that is in the public domain? What is the reaction of the target audiences? Although I am not suggesting that I own the domestic audience, we are very closely tied to media operations in this sense. The impact on me was that it would be so much easier if you had total, national buy-in to the concept and the government's position. If you do not have that, you have to look for messages and evidence that would support the legitimacy of what you are doing. That, by and large, was not my gift. I am not ducking out from under the question because I do think it is very important. This fell very much more into the media operations piece in terms of what does the domestic audience need to be told now that will calm them down or allow them to understand why the United Kingdom is still proceeding down this path. I do not feel that I am very qualified to say much more than that. I am very sorry that that is not a complete answer. The answer to your question in terms of my information operations is it did not have much effect because for me that was not the predominance of the audience at that stage. I was very focused in the Middle East, on the wider regional players and Iraq in particular. Q1615 Mr Blunt: You gave an example. We came second to Milosevic in terms of information operations. Again, you put emphasis on telling the truth and we saw the Serbian army at the end of 78 days' bombing largely leave Kosovo astonishingly in tact. It would therefore appear that the Serbians were telling rather more of the truth about what was happening than we were. It would seem that we perhaps reinforced our reputation for not being entirely complete with the truth. Air Vice Marshal Heath: I will not say Kosovo was a failure. Kosovo was a weakness. When we went into the Kosovo crisis, I was director of targeting. Information operations were two embryonic words that we were beginning to understand. There was no UK information campaign during the Kosovo crisis. When we came out of it and we had firmly come second, we realised that this was something we needed to do pretty quickly. I happened to be the right person on the block at the time, so we build a directorate around Mike Heath and we moved forward in terms of understanding a new and burgeoning art. In terms of Kosovo itself, I do not think I entirely agree with what you have said. I believe that we represented it as honestly as we saw it and as honestly as we were able to interpret from the intelligence that was coming in to us, whether that was reconnaissance or human intelligence. We were subjected to limited inputs. What we were able to ascertain led us to where we were. When we moved into Iraq, our ability to obtain reconnaissance and human intelligence was better and was also frankly deemed far more important. Therefore, we were able to ascertain what effect we were having much more clearly than we did during the Kosovo crisis. The difficulty with people like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein is that they have no difficulty in using apparent outrage to their advantage. A lot of the people that we would deem as military targets in Iraq were wearing traditional Arab clothes. They instantly become civilians rather than legitimate military targets. We have no rebuttal process against that. The story that the media would far rather run with is "Coalition creates outrage and kills 37 innocent civilians." We know that those were 37 military personnel on active duty but, without - a dreadful phrase - that awful smoking gun, just saying it is not enough. It is not persuasive in terms of telling the population they are lying and we are telling the truth. They were not civilians; they were military. Playing that sort of catch up game is always immensely difficult. I am not remotely suggesting that mistakes do not happen and that there are not unfortunate consequences of military action, of course. More often than not, we were always on the receiving end of bad news and finding it very difficult to counter. Q1616 Mr Blunt: If one looks at one's images of the first Gulf war, one would think about a bombed bunker and all the people killed in the bunker. One thinks of the operation against Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was the pill factory that was mistakenly bombed. One thinks of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, if one thinks of the Kosovo conflict, or one thinks of the refugee convoy in Kosovo that was mistakenly bombed. Is there any way that you are going to be able to change that ability of the media to present things in the most negative context so that, for people who want to create images of conflicts that we have been involved in, those are always the most major ones that leap to mind first? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The best you can do is anticipate the worst. I was very keen before we moved into the conflict that we established a rebuttal cell in anticipation of the worst. I will not say it was a foregone conclusion but there had to be a chance that eventually there would be unfortunate civilian casualties throughout whatever context. Those things need addressing. There would be mistakes. There could possibly be blue on blue incidents. You do not need, if you have the right team crafted together to work on it, to know exactly what the specific detail is. What you need to do is anticipate what you are going to say when you turn on the television and Sky is reporting 22 civilians were killed. The best you can hope to do is to be quick in your rebuttal, still working on the principle of honesty, and, if there is releasable information that would support and demonstrate why you believe you are right, you have to use it. If I could give you an example during Kosovo - I choose my words with caution here - a certain respected broadsheet journalist carried an outrageous story on the editorial page of one of the broadsheets which was entirely false. We could have written to that particular newspaper and had a letter printed that said, "This is rubbish", but we chose not to. We chose to compromise intelligence, call the journalist into the MoD and, over a cup of tea, asked him to understand that everything he had written was a fabrication. He was talking about a monastery that had been destroyed, a 15th century bridge that had been destroyed, both of which were still standing some two weeks after his story. At the end of the conversation when he accepted that his story was untrue, he said, "Do you want me to publish a retraction?" We said, "No, because it will be lost on page 27 in the obituaries. It will be in small type and meaningless. We would like you to just be a more responsible journalist in the future." The same journalist for the same newspaper ran a very similar story during Iraq, so he did not learn. Perhaps we should have learned that he was not to be trusted, but there you go. Q1617 Mr Blunt: On 11 January, the Americans began an e-mail campaign e-mailing political figures using telephone messages as well and text messages about providing information on weapons of mass destruction and the rest. There appears to have been a huge effort placed on the existence of weapons of mass destruction and around dissuading their willingness to use them; yet it now appears that there were not any. Therefore, why do you think the regime were prepared to have this attack happen if they simply did not have any of these weapons? Why did we fail to dissuade them, which was our primary objective? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I hope I am allowed to express my personal opinion. I do not personally believe that currently lack of evidence is a demonstrator that there were no weapons of mass destruction. I believe that the jury is still out. On the job I am currently employed in, I believe that there is a possibility that there will be demonstrators at least of intent. I would be willing to go into closed session to discuss that further but I would not like to do that in open forum at the moment. Beyond that, this was a regime that was immensely difficult to get inside. This man created an environment of distrust at all levels, even with his own sons. Nobody talked to anybody else because the chances were they would be dead in the morning. No one trusted anyone else and he had over the years replaced, murdered, cajoled, threatened, held people to ransom so that they understood they belonged totally to him. The biggest problem that we had to overcome - and I think this is an admission of failure - is that we could not break through that inevitable wall of silence. People might have been influenced, but they were not going to pass that message on. They had experienced over the last 20 years similar messages that purported to come from people against Saddam Hussein but had actually come from Saddam Hussein. Once they had either failed to report the message, failed to react to it or indeed had reacted to it, they were dead in the morning. This was a culture where no one trusted anyone else. It was very difficult to break through that. Q1618 Chairman: $25 million appears to be the answer. Air Vice Marshal Heath: Absolutely. I wish it was mine. Q1619 Mr Blunt: As far as the information operations themselves, when would you identify coalition information operations as commencing and when did British information operations commence? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The preparation started back in October. When did we first press the button and when did start actively operating? The answer is both a date and a statement. The date is on the first day of military action when the conflict started. The second answer is too late. We should have been doing a large element of this activity beforehand, but the preparation phase led us through virtually up to the conflict. We were doing some lower level stuff in terms of the theming and messaging that was going on. The work through such bodies as the Campbell Group was happening. We were providing information. We were looking at how we should deliver messages. We were contributing to the American message delivery but the national message delivery did not start until the first day of the conflict. Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1620-1639) AIR VICE MARSHAL MIKE HEATH AND WING COMMANDER IAN CHALMERS 16 DECEMBER 2003 Q1620 Mr Blunt: How effective was the use of radio broadcasts and leaflet drops in preparing the ground for entry into Basra? Air Vice Marshal Heath: As effective as we could expect. If you were going to write a cheque for me this afternoon, I would go out and buy an AM transmitter rather than an FM transmitter. Everyone has FM on their radios these days. The big disadvantage is it has an effective radius of about 35 kilometres. An AM transmitter will reach virtually the entirety of Iraq. It was effective in the sense that, as we moved north, we got a greater overlap of the Basra area. There is no doubt they were all listening to the radio but it was a very high risk activity for them. People who were caught listening to coalition broadcasts were being killed. That is in a very effective counter information campaign run by the Iraqis. If you do not want people to listen to the radio, shoot a few people. It is a dreadful thing to say but that is exactly what was happening. We have no doubt that they were all listening to the radio under the cover or darkness, under pillows or whatever. We did not drop leaflets at the beginning but we delivered leaflets with soldiers with them in their ammunition pouches handing them out, distributing them, leaving them on street corners. They were all being taken up and they were all being read. Those who were caught with leaflets were paying exactly the same price as those listening to the radio. They were being murdered by the Ba'ath Party. Q1621 Mr Blunt: How long was the Ba'ath Party remaining in command of Basra? In other words, what sort of intelligence picture did you have of Basra? Obviously, the intelligence picture and the command structure is one side of the picture that you would be trying to paint for forces outside Basra, but given the history of Basra and its opposition to the regime over a prolonged period how much was the campaign against Basra a psychological one as much as a military one? Air Vice Marshal Heath: I believe that the whole of the conflict period was an information campaign. I believe that all of the kinetic activity, both on the ground and in the air, was in direct support of the information piece. We started off with the disuasion. We moved through the persuasion and ended up with the restitution and reconstruction. If you look at the bombing campaign and the ground campaign, all military activity was crafted towards an information campaign. In Basra, you chose your targets very carefully. Initially, we planned to bypass the city. That was not going to be feasible, so we had to enter the city. We entered it very carefully, obviously not just to keep our own lads and lasses out of harm's way but to make sure that the Iraqi folk knew that this was not an overrun. We were not threatening them. We were getting through to get to the Ba'ath Party. You will recall from the conflict that the Ba'ath Party was the last element of resistance in the north east corner of Basra and they fought to the bitter end to one final showdown which led to a considerable number of their deaths. Robin Brimms at that stage was a considerable instrument of information. He was demonstrating to the Iraqi people exactly what we here in Whitehall wanted him to demonstrate. They were safe; the Ba'ath Party was at risk. Q1622 Mr Blunt: In what seemed from here a rather lengthy wait outside Basra, before Basra was taken, was an information campaign being waged? Air Vice Marshal Heath: No. I cannot answer that question. You would have to ask Robin Brims that. I do not know. We did not ask for a strategic pause for the information campaign. We were using radio broadcasting to the city. By then, we were dropping leaflets into the city. We were sending messages in by other means which I would prefer not to go into here at this stage. We were messaging Basra and the other towns in the vicinity but, no, we did not ask for a strategic pause to allow us to situate the battle space with Robin. I am not qualified to answer you but I believe that he was rebrigading his own forces before he moved forward, but I do not know. Q1623 Mr Blunt: The information campaign was not critical to the military operations around Basra. Did we know enough about what was going on in Basra to be able to have an effective information campaign or was the timetable a military one about rebrigading and resting before the forces got ready? Air Vice Marshal Heath: The judgment on what is critical is quite difficult. There are a lot of people who do not understand what psyops in particular can and cannot deliver. I am talking about people in uniform. I am not talking about people in the wider public. A lot of people do not understand what is being delivered or fully understand, based on where we were ten years ago, how much this has moved on as both a science and an art. The concept of a joined up information campaign across both government and coalition is something that most of our armed forces personnel are still blissfully unaware of. We are in a major education programme now to change that position. Would the average soldier tell you that the psyop campaign was necessary or critical to their success in Basra? I am certain the answer would be no, he would not. Am I sitting here today and telling you that it was a necessary part of the campaign? Very firmly, yes. I believe it is more than just a force multiplier. It is a definite demonstrator of how you can reduce risk and casualties once you move into conflict. Q1624 Mr Blunt: How far has the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction undermined the information campaign being run now for phase three or phase four operations? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Not at all now because the focus is not on justifying, in terms of the information campaign, why we were there and why we did what we did. It is on what we have to offer to Iraq to allow them a full democracy, freedom, a future, and what we are doing in terms of rebuilding their country. Q1625 Mr Blunt: During the campaign itself, when the regime had hung on for rather longer than people anticipated, did that cause any change in how you waged that information campaign? Air Vice Marshal Heath: Yes, it did, because we always recognised that Fortress Baghdad was going to be the most difficult target. Having seen relatively little resistance, to suddenly come up against a major hold out in the Baghdad area meant that we needed to start to re-energise the process of how we could get to the regime. At that stage, we did not need to message the Iraqi people. We needed to try every means we could to message the regime. Do I have any demonstrators that that was effective? No. Do I believe it was effective? The truth is minimally. I do not think we delivered major effect at that stage. Q1626 Mr Crausby: I want to ask a couple of questions on the two main aspects of information operations, the influence activity and counter command activity, being the soft side and the hard side. Can you tell us what in Operation Telic you would say was the balance between influence activity - that is, perception management - and counter command activity - that is, degrading the enemy's decision making? Air Vice Marshal Heath: First of all, I think what you are describing really is the tactical, doctrinal answer to information operations. At the strategic and the operational level, the first two layers before you draw down to the practitioner in the field, there is no difference. There is no distinction that is broken out in terms of we need to look at the command control or we need to look at the wider influence piece. It is only once you break down to the lower level that you are now trying to specifically craft messages and themes against specific audiences. In this particular instance in this particular campaign, very little emphasis went into the command control piece. The majority went elsewhere into the management. Wing Commander Chalmers: That is entirely the case. The difference between the two that you have probably read in some of the documents is that they are really to provide a framework for practitioners, so that they have some basis on which to craft a campaign, but there is not a tem |