In the fall of 2002, confronting a dearth of solid intelligence on Iraqi WMD, the head of the CIA’s Near East Division turned to his British colleagues for help. The American government was basing its march to war on flimsy intelligence, and the reputation of his agency, the CIA, was at stake. The response by the CIA division chief, an agency veteran by the name of Rob Richer, is revealing - a commentary on the importance of the foremost transatlantic relationship. He ordered his 22 Middle East station chiefs to London, browbeat them about their lack of intelligence output and then brought in his counterpart at MI6, Michael Shipster, for a full day’s working session on Iraq.

Richer later explained the benefit of such contact, saying, “The Brits were much more cautious in terms of interpreting intelligence, which made it very, very worthwhile for me, because I had inherited a shop which had decided that we were going to war basically when the Bush administration came in.”

Just over a year after 9/11, the US government was cresting forward - recklessly, history would show - at a time when policy grew directly out of the political will of a crusading president. George W Bush and his White House viewed having to actually justify the war as a kind of inconvenience, a nuisance.

In a way, the British, in concert with the CIA’s clandestine service - where Richer and others worked - tried to put on the brakes. Shipster told Richer of his relationship with Tahir Jalil Habbush, then head of Iraqi intelligence. Richer’s connections to Saad Khayr, the head of Jordanian intelligence, secured a safe place for Shipster and Habbush to meet in Amman in 2003.

Shipster was told by Habbush much that has since been borne out: that Iraq had no WMD and that Saddam Hussein’s chief concern was appearing tough in the eyes of the Iranians. Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, afterwards, in July 2007, described Shipster’s mission as “an attempt to try, as it were, I’d say, to defuse the whole situation”. The mission resulted in solid intelligence - certainly enough to create doubt about the case for war. But the fact that it went largely unheeded in the US speaks to a worrisome shift in the two countries’ relationship.

America lost interest in deliberative decision-making, in the play of evidence and analysis. The traditional British offerings of prudent advice and strategic clarity held little interest for this White House. Instead, it was the British reputation for such qualities that became of tactical value in Washington. The world grew to expect mendacity from the “dark side” tactics of the Bush-Cheney White House, but it continued to place greater trust in the British, who, in turn, took up the mantle of periodic apologist for the United States and its actions.

Tony Blair was deeply, touchingly cognisant of the fact that the world order rested on the presupposition of American military or economic intervention, and was critical of the “tendency” to pass problems off on the US “and then worry when America wants to sort them out”. But the US did not always reward British faith. When, in 2002, the CIA established contact with Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, the unsourced report on his intelligence offerings that was passed to the British included an introduction in direct contradiction to the Iraqi’s assertions: whereas the foreign minister denied that Iraq had WMD or a serious WMD programme, the Sabri report led with statements affirming Saddam’s possession of biological and chemical weapons and his “aggressive” pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In 2006, when Shipster learnt the true import of the Sabri intelligence, he commented to American colleagues that, had the British been able to put the Iraqi foreign minister’s report side by side with that of Habbush, they “never would have gone to war”.

The tragedy of Anglo-American relations in this era has not only been the gradual erosion of British trust, but also the failure on the part of the US to learn the lessons that Britain, by virtue of its history, has to offer. The US has, in recent years, failed to heed the lucid warnings of such British experts as Sir David Omand, the former security and intelligence co-ordinator, who explained that “it is probably the case that by using methods such as extraordinary rendition, deep interrogation, indefinite detention, and targeted killing, that the US has lost more - and her allies with her - than we have gained in short-term relief from terrorist attacks”; or Dearlove, who, after retiring from MI6, explained that it “is vitally important for all of us in confronting terror . . . that we attempt to climb onto the moral high ground”.

This high moral ground, Dearlove has pointed out, was crucial to the gains the West made in defectors and human intelligence in the battle with the Soviet Union. It will be equally valuable, the most vital asset, against terrorist networks.

In 2007 the British government abandoned the term “war on terror” because of the way its connotations fed into the PR aims of global terrorism. The US persists in using it. Maybe next year, it’ll try to retire it. As Churchill remarked, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.” Here’s hoping that we’re close to the end of that list.

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