calm and impassive – as an investigative journalist should – but my stomach was doing turns. Judging from previous intelligence documents I’d encountered, I felt this was the real thing because it looked so ordinary. No red stamp in thirty-point shouting TOP SECRET. It was far more subtle than that. Its real significance was hidden in the rubrics or lettering and numbers which, when translated by an intelligence contact later, revealed the document to be highly classified.[5]
‘It was the real thing. I called a former colleague of mine on the Daily Mirror. I was crestfallen when, after being badgered by me daily, he said that no one in the newsroom had been able to authenticate it and therefore it could not be used. However, journalist Chris Hughes did return it to me by a high-speed bike through Canary Wharf back to my home in Soho.’
Next, Yvonne did the obvious. She called Martin Bright, the London Observer’s home affairs editor. His title seems misleading, as he is an expert in international affairs, human rights, and Islamic issues – in concerns that seem outside the realm of ‘home affairs’. Yvonne and Martin were old friends, and over the years, the two journalists had developed a trusting professional relationship. Among the newspapers for which Yvonne once worked was the Observer.
She says: ‘It might sound pretty naïve, but I really thought this could affect the decision to go to war. If the Observer could authenticate the document it would, I imagined, cause a furore across the world through the pages of the media. The news would jolt the United Nations into acting, and the British government might just pull back from the abyss. If all of that happened, I felt the United States would not go into Iraq on its own, that this would have a domino effect, with publication of the story in the Observer the start.
‘The reason I did not write the story myself was that I had become well known as an anti-war speaker and was one of the founders of the Stop the War movement. I felt if my name were attached to the story, it might have diluted its strength, and so I did something I never thought I would do – I gave up a scoop and the exclusive byline tag for the greater good.’ They met at a café in Central London, not far from the Soho flat Yvonne shared with her young daughter, who was with her this day. A number of media colleagues have been critical of Yvonne for leaving her daughter at home while she adventured in Afghanistan, but Martin takes exception to this criticism. He admires Yvonne as a colleague and as a mother. She is not only a reliable journalist, but also a good, decent person.
‘Yvonne handed me a scrap of paper, with this memo typewritten on it,’ Martin says.[6] ‘There were no markings on it at all, no evidence of who sent it or who it had been sent to. My immediate reaction was, “what use is this to anybody? You could have typed this out.”’
‘No, no. Really, honestly, it’s for real,’ Yvonne insisted. ‘You need to check it out yourself.’ She said she did not know the source of the message, and Martin believed her. If Yvonne’s anti-war, Islamic stance crossed Martin’s mind it did so quickly and did nothing to shake his trust in the woman beside him.
Yvonne had written on the back of the paper some identifying marks from the memo’s header. They included Frank Koza’s name and organization.
Back at the Observer, a vetting process began. It was vital to prove Frank Koza and his message were real. Quiet contacts made with intelligence sources led to some amazing responses, the first being that the memo was a likely forgery. There were cautions expressed about the infamous Hitler Diaries, all forgeries. One had to be careful. Most interesting was word from one source within the intelligence community that a renegade operation within MI6 was leaking the message to discredit the government. The idea seemed to have legs.
‘We became, at the time, convinced that there were elements within the intelligence service that were so unhappy with the war that they would do this,’ Bright says. ‘We thought renegade elements against the war had managed to receive this leak through contacts at GCHQ and thought, “One way of stopping this war is to get this out.”’ Eventually, the journalists believed differently, but for a time, the argument held and the newspaper team moved ahead carefully.
‘When you’re dealing with areas of intelligence, you are constantly in a strange world,’ Bright says, a world in which manipulation of the media by sources is always possible. By now, Observer colleagues Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont, also in London, joined Martin. Both, Martin says, ‘are older and more experienced’.
Ed, from New York, made the call to Frank Koza at the NSA in Maryland. To his amazement, a switchboard operator responded to his request for Koza’s office and immediately put him through to a receptionist. According to Bright, the conversation went like this:
‘Frank Koza’s office.’
‘May I speak to Frank Koza, please.’
‘Who may I say is calling?’
‘Ed Vulliamy of the Observer newspaper in London.’ Pause.
‘Who do you want to speak to?’ the receptionist asked.
‘Frank Koza.’
‘Sorry, I’ve never heard of him.’
The Observer team now believed they were on solid ground. Ed was asked to check around with various insider sources and learned that the style and content of the message seemed consistent with authentic communications of this nature. They decided, after three weeks of investigation, that the memo was not a forgery, that there was no way it ‘could have been set up’.
One final concern was the possibility of legal action against the newspaper.
‘More of a concern to us was that we would be joined in the prosecution,’ Martin explains. ‘To publish is an offence under the Official Secrets Act. We were as culpable as Katharine. But they’re cowards. So, they preferred to take on the little guy – in this case, little woman – rather than us big guys.’
The editorial team had to be careful in speaking to sources about the NSA message. Loose talk could lead to a legal injunction prohibiting publication. Earlier, the newspaper had been successful in fighting an injunction in the case of former MI5 officer David Shayler, also charged with violation of the Official Secrets Act. The court’s decision had been close, but the Observer had prevailed. Bright and company were counting on the government’s not coming after them again. The Shayler case had become so high profile that it now stood as a principle against the police going to journalists for evidence. The Shayler injunction application had asked for all meeting notes and tape recordings concerning the case, a broad ‘trolling’ request eventually denied. Bright notes that a different decision would have meant that every time a journalist wrote about an investigation, an application could be made to ‘turn over everything that might be of interest’ to law enforcement.
Going on the experience with Shayler, trusting their gut feelings about the authenticity of the Koza message, and figuring that the government would not prosecute the Observer for an Official Secrets Act violation, the decision was made to publish three weeks after Bright and Ridley met in Central London.
It was still a risk.
In Washington, last-minute preparations for Powell’s historic and, as it would turn out, inaccurate report to the United Nations must surely have been aided by the information requested by Frank Koza and eagerly scrutinized by the folks behind the operation. It was advantageous to know what the opposition was thinking.
The operation continued beyond Powell’s performance. For four weeks, the surveillance ‘surge’ went according to plan. Despite the continuing problem with Aguilar Zinser and Valdés, there was hope
