JOHN Howard has attacked the Pentagon for ignoring an order from George W. Bush to share top-level intelligence on Iraq with Australia's military planners, forcing the Prime Minister to complain to the US President.
Mr Howard confirmed yesterday he was angry at the Pentagon's decision to restrict Australia's access to its intelligence network on Iraq, and said he had complained directly to Mr Bush twice to clear the military veto.
"Some of these agencies operate like a law unto themselves," he said yesterday. "I wasn't very happy with those delays."
In an extraordinary attack on the defence chiefs of Australia's closest military ally, Mr Howard said he had protested to Mr Bush to ensure Australia had unfettered access to the network.
In July 2004, Mr Bush signed a directive supported by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and acting Central Intelligence Agency director John McLaughlin stipulating that laws preventing foreign powers seeing highly classified intelligence would no longer apply to Australia and Britain when they were planning for combat operations, training with the Americans or engaged in counter-terrorism activities.
But Mr Howard was forced to intervene a second time some months later when it became clear the US military headquarters was still delaying, despite the White House request.
"The point I made was that the commitment the President gave to me had to be delivered," Mr Howard said. "That's why I intervened, and I am now advised the flows are occurring that are meant to occur.
"Bear in mind Australia and Britain are given specially privileged access to American intelligence assessments.
"There is always a degree of inter-agency jealousy about anybody having access to these things, even very close allies, and it did take a lot of pushing. Even the President doesn't always get what he wants straight away."
In September last year, The Australian revealed that Mr Bush had issued a decree upgrading Australia to the highest rank of intelligence partner the US has in the world - with resistance from US intelligence agencies.
This rendition of events concurs with the latest revelations from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward in his book State of Denial, which chronicles the internal battles of the Bush administration and how these hampered the war effort.
The book reveals that Franklin C. Miller, appointed by Condoleezza Rice in 2001 as special assistant to the President and senior director of defence policy, felt the treatment of Australia and Britain was "one of the most inexcusable examples of a failure to get things done".
The Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, a classified system that stored intelligence, operation order and other technical data, carried a security warning known as NOFORN, or not for foreigners.
Unfortunately for the Australian and British troops fighting alongside the Americans in Iraq, it denied them access to information that Woodward says at times "went beyond the absurd".
He cites examples of British pilots flying US warplanes who were not allowed to read parts of pilot or maintenance manuals. In another case, raw intelligence gathered by British operatives was sent to a US centre that would then merge and distribute it to all the forces, but again with the NOFORN label, denying it to the British who had generated it as well as the Australians.
And rather than directly follow the White House access order, Woodward says, the Pentagon established a parallel version of SIPRNET, which still excluded past information the military did not want others to see.
When Mr Miller discovered the President's order was not being implemented, he fought with the Pentagon for months, which eventually led to a furious confrontation with some of the joint chiefs of staff.
"You don't mean unfettered access," one general says. But Mr Miller was blunt, says Woodward: "If the President or the Secretary of Defence had wanted to say give them access according to the following limitations, they would have said so.
"This is an inter-agency cleared document. Your people signed up to it. Access means access. What about 'access' don't you understand?"
Hugh White of the Australian National University, a former Defence Department deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence, told The Australian that Canberra had always had to battle for access to US intelligence and details of US planning in coalition operations.
"The Government sometimes claims that under its stewardship the alliance has changed fundamentally and become much closer," Professor White said. "This (Woodward's account) suggests that this is not the case." |
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