The Dark Side of British Diplomacy

Hello and welcome to Deeper, a vodcast where we have honest conversations with fascinating people who have lived unique lives, and the companion piece to our YouTube series Deep. We want to give you a deeper window into the experiences and worlds of our amazing guests, so if you enjoy today's interview, please consider subscribing. There'll be a new video every week. My name is Ben, and today I'm joined by Khanh Ross. Khanh, it's great to have you here today. Thank you for coming.

Thank you for having me.

For anyone who isn't aware of who you are or what you're known for, could you let us know?

Sure. Well, if I'm known for anything, it's because I was a British diplomat and I was one of only 2 British diplomats to resign over the Iraq War in 2003. I was Britain's weapons expert at the UN Security Council. And since then, I've become, well, I don't think known for, but what I do is I I'm interested in bottom-up democracy, self-government, what some call anarchism, and I write about that.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you grew up? You know, what was childhood like for you?

Pretty conventional. South London. I went to private school. In fact, the same school that Nigel Farage went to, for good or ill. Probably ill, but anyway, very, you know, kind of normal middle-class upbringing, didn't really travel until I was 15. Very much part of the mainstream, a belief in the system, the status quo as it was. Went to university, studied economics and politics because I wanted to understand the world. And I thought that those disciplines would— I rather naively thought that those disciplines would teach me how the world operates. Yeah, so that was my journey to adulthood.

Diplomat is a word that everyone's heard. It's a title everyone's sort of vaguely aware of, but just at a very basic level, what is a diplomat? What do they do?

Well, you represent your government, your state. So I was representing the United Kingdom. I became a diplomat in 19— gosh, '95, '96, I can't remember exactly. You speak for the state. So when you speak to a foreigner, you say, we believe X, Y, Z. And when you say we, you don't mean your family, your friends, or yourself. You mean the UK. You mean your state. So sometimes that means you negotiate on behalf of your state, which I did a lot of when I was at— when I was posted to the UN in New York. Sometimes you just represent the state and say, Britain thinks this. this about this problem, or, you know, we want to promote trade in this country. So, you represent your government at its core. That's what it's about.

There must be quite a lot of pressure there in terms of, you see these days with celebrities or anyone really on Twitter that has a job, if they say something that's kind of not representative of the brands that support them or the companies that hire them, people can get fired or dropped by labels and things like that. That's one thing. But when you're representing an entire company, I mean, the ramifications for representing what they want incorrectly must be quite severe.

They are. I mean, ultimately, you lose your job if you stop representing what you're told to represent. And you have— I mean, to make it easier, you have very clear instructions. I mean, instructions go out from London, signed by the Foreign Secretary, telling you what to say, and indeed, to a degree, what to think about all kinds of things, from trade to the environment to terrorism to the Israel-Palestine issue. So you kind of have a script, and that script becomes— you very much imbibe that script, so it becomes part of you. So you know what to say, but if you do go off script, that's trouble. I mean, Minor instances can be forgiven, but even those might harm your career. And the people who do best are the people who seamlessly weave themselves into the identity of the state and think about what we need, meaning we Britain need. They start to think like the state. And indeed, that's what happened to me to a degree.

And that sounds like you must have to be choosing all of your words extremely carefully. But who's your ultimate Boss in terms of like when you say that if you go slightly off the script, it's forgivable. Who's looking at what you say and then going, we didn't like that joke you made there, or we didn't like the fact that you said this, but we're not clear on what our stance is on this? Who's ultimately—

Yeah, well, you have a boss. It's a deep hierarchy. So, you know, in the Foreign Office, there's various levels that you go up to. When you're overseas, your boss is your ambassador, the head of your embassy. But even he or she is ultimately subordinate to London, ultimately subordinate to the Foreign Secretary, who's obviously politically elected, and they decide what policy should be. But they are, of course, subordinate themselves ultimately to the Prime Minister and indeed to the monarch. So one of my most treasured possessions is a certificate that the Queen signed appointing me her trusty and most beloved servant. So ultimately, you serve the sovereign, you're serving the state, not even the government. The government interprets what the state wants. but you ultimately work for the state itself.

And just taking a step back, you know, we heard a little bit there about your sort of path through education and stuff like that. But why did you decide that you thought you'd like to become a diplomat? And what is required to become one? You know, what are the skills that you need that made you think you'd be good at it?

Yeah, well, I think there are 2 motives for me. One sort of exterior, which was I was very interested in international relations, still am, very interested in how the chess pieces move across the board. If you think that the world is a chessboard, which I used to think, I don't anymore. But there was a kind of more interior emotional motive, which was the Foreign Office was venerated in my family. My grandfather worked for the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park, breaking Nazi codes during the Second World War. Both my parents and my sister had tried to get into the Foreign Office and failed. And I was thought of very much as the stupid one in my family.

Wow.

My twin brother was put in the year ahead of me at school. And so, uh, there was a lot of doubt that I could ever do something like join the Foreign Office. And indeed, when I was about 12, I announced to my family that I wanted to be a diplomat. And my father turned to me and said, you have to be very clever to be a diplomat, Khan. And thus was my ambition sealed. Um, so, you know, joining the Foreign Office, which is very difficult, there are very few people get in from the many thousands who apply. you know, was a big way of saying to my family, that showed you, that showed you. So I can't, you know, admit to being driven by primitive emotion as well as highfalutin ambition.

Fair enough. I imagine lots of people go into their careers based on proving people wrong.

Yeah.

And then, like, just in the first few years of your career, you know, like, how did you find the job? You mentioned a minute ago that you started to take on board and really, you know, buy into being part of the fabric of what the UK stands for.

Yeah.

How did you find the first few years of the job?

I loved it. I mean, it's a very interesting job. I mean, you're dealing with the stuff of international relations. You're one of the elite few who know what goes on between governments. You have extraordinary access to intelligence, both intercepts of other people's communications or what's called HUMINT stuff from MI6 about, you know, from spies essentially. So you think that you get this extraordinarily privileged access to information. So you think you're kind of at the heart of what knowledge is. And that's very exciting when you're young. It's exciting when you're old. And there's a kind of deep status to it. You wear a nice suit. I got leather-soled shoes, which I soon realized are very foolish things to buy because they wear out so quickly. But, you know, I was deeply into the whole status of it. I loved mentioning that that I was in the diplomatic service, um, you know, at parties. My parents were very proud of me, um, and it's interesting, so I enjoyed it.

It's interesting though that you say that you get to learn how the governments interact with each other. That's one thing that I always find interesting, uh, when you see that you have countries that sort of openly dislike each other, uh, and would say that they're not aligned on their, you know, motivations for business or morality or whatever else, but then you have You know, people, presidents or prime ministers saying, I've just got off the phone from Russia and you talk to them. How are those conversations carried out? Are they— do they tend to be very cordial? And it's like, okay, we're away from the cameras, let's be friendly. Or are they stiff and icy?

They're friendly by and large. When I was at the UN in New York, I was— there were only 2 places in the world where the Brits talked to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, and New York was one of them. And so I was designated the person who talked to Iraqi diplomats. And I would go and have coffee with them in the delegates' lounge, as it's called, in the UN building. And we would sit and talk. I mean, it wasn't, you know, discussing our, you know, what cooking we liked and our hobbies. It was work. So I would talk to them about how Iraq should comply with the UN Security Council resolutions, and the Iraqis would say that they had. And the Iraqi counterpart I dealt with, even though he was a servant of the Saddam regime, was a perfectly straightforward, decent guy, even though he worked for a horrible, tyrannical dictatorship. So diplomacy does teach you that. It is rather extraordinary. I mean, outside the UN Security Council. Inside the room, we'd be arguing with Russia ferociously about, I don't know, something about weapons inspections or something. And outside the room, I'd take a break, have a cigarette, and talk to my Russian counterpart, Vladimir, who was a great guy. You know, we'd often go and have a beer together, you know, and we'd talk about how idiotic the discussion was in the Security Council. Sometimes he'd even show me his instructions from Moscow. So I wouldn't have to bother to listen to his ambassador to take my notes because my job was to note down what the Russians said or the Americans said or the French said. And to save me the trouble, he said, my ambassador's going to say X, Y, and Z. So I just put that in my notebook and he made my life easier. So, I mean, it was pretty extraordinary, though sometimes it does get very nasty. I've had colleagues of mine break down in tears at the end of a negotiation because it was so Rough. So, it's not always nice.

And do you feel a sense of pressure in the sense that, when you say there you're talking to your Russian counterpart or your Iraqi counterpart, you know, we'll get into this later, but I suppose there was a shadow of war with Iraq. Do you feel a sense of pressure in terms of, we can potentially ease this situation, or are you very much just a mouthpiece that just conveys information and they take it back to their government? Do you feel that you had to— That's interesting.

In that conversation with the Iraqis, you have very, very little flexibility. We were exceptionally careful, and see, I'm using we. We were exceptionally careful about what we said to the Iraqis, partly because I knew the Americans were monitoring, or we were, I don't know which, were monitoring the communications from the Iraqi mission to the UN back to Baghdad. So they would record the conversation with me, um, and send that back to Baghdad as, you know, this is what the Brits are saying. And so I was very, very careful about what I said because I didn't want the Americans to think I was going off script.

Mm.

Um, uh, you know, because if they saw that, they would immediately complain, uh, ferociously to my government. And I obviously didn't want that to happen. So, You know, at the same time as being relatively relaxed and informal— well, not informal, you're sitting there in a suit and a tie, and we all know what's going on in that conversation— you do have to be scrupulously careful about what it is you're actually saying. And it's actually, in diplomacy, it's actually pretty unprofessional to say, well, this is what I'm required to say by my government, but this is what I can really think. Because in truth, what you can really think doesn't matter. You know, they're not interested in your views unless they're trying to recruit you as a spy themselves and sense that you're deeply disaffected and therefore recruitable, which is sometimes the case. I mean, when I was talking to Iraqis, one thing on my private agenda was looking out for them to see if they were disillusioned and could be recruited as British spies. And indeed, I think the deputy head of mission at the Iraqi mission to the UN was recruited. He defected to the US. the FBI organized his defection. So he was disaffected from the Saddam government. So you are looking out for those signs when you're talking to somebody.

Wow, that's fascinating. I'd never thought of that. So you— what a dance that you're playing with each other, because you're thinking that they might be looking out for signs in you that you could be turned, and you're looking for signs in them that they could be turned.

That's right. And the regular diplomat is often the front line of what How can we put it? The less regular diplomats at what they're doing, because they are asking you, is so-and-so a potential target for us? And, you know, they're at the UN to look for targets. They're posted to the UN to try and recruit people, and they succeed.

Would you ever make that approach, or would you go back to them and say, I think you could approach this person, they feel like they're unhappy?

Yes.

Both, either.

Yeah, it does happen. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. I mean, particularly for something like Iraq, because it was such a big national security issue for the UK. So, I mean, at the UN, it was probably our number one issue. I mean, later it was to become al-Qaeda and terrorism and all of that. But at the time I was working at the UN, it was Iraq. We, the CIA, the FBI, everybody was exceptionally interested in Iraqi diplomats.

Did you ever get a sense that while you were talking to any people, not just Iraqi, but over your career, that people were trying to give you signs that they might be susceptible to being turned?

Yeah, well, I mean, I was later diagnosed as autistic, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to read signs. It's very difficult to tell because it's, you know, if you're an Iraqi diplomat, it's exceptionally dangerous to start signaling, you know, to a British diplomat that you're actually recruitable as a dissident, as a spy. I don't think that was ever really possible.

When we were talking there about, you know, you're talking to your Russian or your Iraqi counterparts, obviously there's tensions with those countries. Is there also a kind of, you know, the different countries you're talking to, are you talking to countries that are essentially allies and are very much aligned? And is that a kind of more pleasant experience? Or is it always the same in terms of like, you're always trying to get something? Is it always a negotiation and a compromise?

To an extent. I mean, even, you know, there's a great saying in diplomacy is nobody is ever entirely your friend and nobody is ever entirely your enemy. And even when you're working with your closest ally, and in that case, the US was, we very much worked in cahoots with the US. I mean, I would call every morning, I would start my day by reading the telegrams from around the world. And then I would call my American counterpart and coordinate how we're going to handle the day at the UN Security Council. And he was a friend of mine, we would go out together a lot. So it was a very, very close relationship. But it was not always— it wasn't always an easy relationship. In fact, the rudest any diplomat has ever been to me was an American diplomat outside the Security Council when one senior American diplomat said, what the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck are you fucking saying, Khan? How dare you fucking say that? I'm gonna fucking get your prime minister. You know, nice, really charming. What had you said? Well, I was daring to deviate from the party line on Iraq because our policy was very, very problematic for all sorts of complicated reasons which are not often talked about today. But we tried to move the US to a more flexible position on Iraq. We failed by and large, and that caused a lot of tension in the relationship. And the British Embassy in Washington, which, you know, it was the kind of poodle-in-chief in the relationship with the US, because they would often see themselves just as relaying instructions from the Americans to us. You know, that was the kind of relationship we had with the US. If I said something off script in New York, which sometimes I did, trying to move our policy along, you know, trying to negotiate, because negotiation is often about making your own policy change, not just the other guys. The embassy would immediately ring me up and say, what the hell are you up to, Khan? You know, State Department's furious about what you've been saying, and all this kind of stuff. And I was quite proud of that because it showed that I was actually independent of mind, though of course I wasn't. I was only operating within a very narrow framework of what British-American policy actually was.

Okay, that's, that's an interesting point, I think, to get into what we'll talk about for a while, um, which is, you know, where you basically changed— essentially what led to a massive change in your, your life and career, which is the Iraq War. Can you just take us through what happened around that time, what the whole— what the situation was, what your role was in it, what, what level were you when it started to sort of accelerate into conflict?

Yeah. Well, I was, from 1997 onwards, I was Britain's Iraq expert at the UN Security Council, which meant that I was responsible for the UN resolutions on sanctions and weapons inspections on Iraq, which was essentially that Iraq should disarm itself of its so-called weapons of mass destruction, its chemical, biological weapons, and its missiles and nuclear weapons. It didn't have nuclear weapons, never did, by the way. And that was my responsibility. That was very much a policy of containment for many years, where we claimed that we didn't know whether Iraq had substantial stocks of weapons of mass destruction, but we did know that there were many unanswered questions about Iraq's stocks of weapons. What had happened to these chemical bombs? What had happened to those missiles? And there was a long-running to and fro with Iraq about whether they would accept inspections by the UN weapons inspectors to verify, to answer these questions. All of that changed with 9/11, which, you know, I was in New York that day, very shocking, dramatic event. And the US suddenly went on a war footing. People in Washington, the neocons, had convinced the administration that Iraq was a danger. a threat to the region, a threat to the US, and Saddam needed to be got rid of. Bush convinced Blair of that, and Blair went along with it. The casus belli, the excuse for war for the Brits, less so for the Americans, was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and had refused to cooperate with the weapons inspections. And this required the UK to change its story. We had been saying for many years that we had unanswered questions about the weapons stocks. We thought there might be a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But suddenly the story changed to, we think that Iraq has significant stocks of weapons of mass destruction which pose a threat to the UK. You know, the 45-minute claim that Iraq was 45 minutes from launching a weapon of mass destruction at the UK, which was ridiculous because it never had that capability. It wasn't even close to that capability. But I and others worked on these claims in the form of— one was the famous Number 10 dossier. Another was there was a Labour Party statement, different documents that were made public, which made these exaggerated claims about weapons of mass destruction. And those of us who worked on it were very concerned about it. We didn't know what was happening. When I would get these drafts of these claims from London, sitting at my desk in New York, I'd be like, what the hell is this? You know, we're saying stuff we've never said before. What's the justification for this? Where is the intelligence justifying this? And that was an important aspect because as the expert on Iraq, I was given a big, often a folder full of intelligence every day on what we knew about WMD. And I worked closely with the weapons inspections experts, people like David Kelly, who was Britain's expert on biological weapons, who did inspections in Iraq on behalf of the UN about biological weapons. And he and I gave presentations to UN Security Council members, to other experts on this subject, where essentially we had been claiming that we don't have concrete evidence of actual stocks, but we do have very serious questions. about what has happened to those stocks. Anyway, I left the mission in 2002 on sabbatical. And so I wasn't there in the months leading up to the war, when the claims became even more exaggerated, leading me to think, well, what on earth is going on? Why are they making these claims? And I discussed this with David and others. And I had helped set up the UN weapons inspection body, UNMVIC. In fact, I'd named it. That acronym was—

Really?

was credited as my work, my small, very small footnote in history. And I talked to the weapons inspectors about what they were finding. Of course, they were finding absolutely nothing in Iraq. So that was a big, big shock to me, what was going on, what my government was up to.

That was perfectly explained, by the way, very clear. And at that point in time, was it When you were talking with other people, other diplomats, was there a sense of, what's happening? Do they have the weapons? Don't they have the weapons? Or was the sense more of, why are the government saying this when they know it's not true?

A bit of both. I mean, nobody knew for sure that they didn't have weapons, because we didn't have CCTV cameras in every Iraqi base, airbase, missile storage facility, and things like biological weapons, you only need a tiny laboratory to produce it. So how could we monitor everything? And this was one of the concerns of the people who opposed sanctions, which had been placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, and which had done a lot of damage to the Iraqi economy and civilian population. And they said, you can't prove a negative. How can you prove that Iraq doesn't have biological weapons when that requires oversight of every chemistry lab in Iraq, which was a fair point, to be honest. And we wanted sanctions on Iraq because we wanted to so-called contain Iraq. We knew that Iraq with enormous oil reserves could rearm very quickly. Before the 1991 war, it had the 3rd largest army in the world, which is a piece of propaganda I worked on during that war. years before. So Iraq could reconstitute itself as a major military threat, which would in turn require substantial allied forces to contain them. And it was easier to contain them through sanctions, which controlled their oil revenue. So we, the UN, had control over Iraq's oil and what they spent it on. So it was an effective containment mechanism. But that view changed after 9/11. when the so-called neocons in Washington said, overthrow Saddam and we'll create democracy not only in Iraq, but the rest of the Middle East. There'll be a new kind of domino theory that democracy in Iraq will produce democracy elsewhere. I mean, ludicrously naive. And we can all see how it turned out, but that's what they convinced the Bush administration to do. And they in turn got Blair at a famous meeting at Bush's ranch in Texas, Blair agreed to go along with it, to go along with the war.

And it's interesting, you said a minute ago that the weapons of mass destruction weren't as big a thing on the American side. It was more the UK that was pushing that.

Yeah, there's a complicated reason for that. And forgive me for getting a bit technical. And most people don't really know this because they just think, oh, the Brits lied about the WMD. But there was a reason why they had to make that claim. The Americans were going to do Iraq anyway. They were like, we're going to smash whoever is against us in the world, whoever we think might be a danger. There was this real, really bellicose mentality that got into Washington after 9/11. A very powerful thing to witness. And I saw it for myself. I'd see it in the State Department. I'd see it in American diplomats. You'd see it in the press. Anyway, the Brits needed a legal justification to go to war. Blair needed legal justification in order to persuade his own party to support the war. The only way they could get legal justification was twofold. Number one, claiming Iraq was a threat. Number two, having inspections blocked by Iraq in such a way that this gave legal authority that had been granted in 1991 to apply again in 2003. It's a complicated story, but basically the Brits needed to show that Iraq was not cooperating with the weapons inspections, and in turn they needed to show that Iraq had a significant WMD threat. So that required them to exaggerate the intelligence on WMD. It also required them to get inspectors back in and for them to be blocked by the Iraqis. That part of the equation went badly wrong because the Iraqis didn't block them. They cooperated with them. I mean, they had blocked them many times in the past. Iraq was no angel about this. I'm not trying to paint the Saddam regime as anything other than what it is, which is a brutal tyranny. But they didn't give Britain the legal justification that it was looking for. And the Brits then sought a UN Security Council Authorization for the invasion. This was the sort of thing I'd worked on for many years, and they didn't get it. They didn't get the votes, so they didn't have legal authority to go to war. And this is why the other person in the Foreign Office resigned. She was the Deputy Legal Advisor of the Foreign Office, and she said, without authorization from the UN Security Council, this is an illegal war of aggression. That's what it was in legal terms.

So why, if there was not evidence of WMDs and it was not legal, why did Blair want to pursue it? And when I say Blair, that's because you have just mentioned the meeting in the sort of Texan ranch between Blair and Bush. But was it Blair or was it the Labour Party?

Was it Blair?

It was specifically Blair. So why did Blair want to pursue it?

Well, what he said, and trust that or not, He's never been entirely honest about this war. He claims he is. But what went on inside government has never been fully revealed. He says that the Americans were going to do it anyway. And they looked to us for support. So we had to do it. And implicitly, he's acknowledging that it wasn't about the threat from WMD. And he felt I think, and I don't know him, I've never met him, that after 9/11, the Americans were dividing the world into people who were with us or against us. That's what they said. And as a close ally of the US, we needed to be with them. And one of the things you realize about being a British diplomat, when you're a British diplomat, is how completely dependent the UK is on the US for its national security. It's a very, very deep, intimate relationship with the Americans. You know, from nuclear weapons to sharing intelligence to diplomatic cooperation. I mean, it goes up and down. But at that time, it was a very, very intimate relationship.

A special relationship, so to say.

Yeah, and it is a special relationship. I mean, the Americans sensibly never called it that. And I don't think we should call it that. But the extent of sharing of intelligence is unique. And maybe they have that relationship with Israel. I don't know. But With the Brits, the sharing of intelligence is extraordinary, of top secret stuff, huge amounts of it, sharing intelligence facilities. And of course, essentially Britain rents its nuclear weapons from the Americans. I mean, the Americans basically produce the missiles. We produce the warheads, but they produce the missiles, the design of the submarines, all this kind of stuff. Britain pretends it's an independent deterrent. But you can tell that it's not independent because when we test the missiles, even from British submarines, there's an American launch officer on board who orders the launch. So it's essentially a subordinate rental arrangement for our nuclear weapons. That's why Blair, I think, supported it. But that required a lie. And that's how he got Britain into lying about the WMD. and forced the rest of his administration basically to produce a lie. And this was basically produced in propaganda terms, in different statements from the government, which, you know, if the press had been paying attention, which they didn't, they would have seen were dramatically different claims from what we had been claiming for many years before. I mean, we didn't let Iraq off the hook before, but we did say there are unanswered questions about the WMD. We didn't say, in fact, We said this very often, we don't think Iraq is a threat. We would say this to the Americans in our bilateral private talks with them. We would say, policy is working, containment is working, Iraq is not a threat.

At what point— I mean, that was a very clear description of— and very impassioned, but at what point when you were working in it, you know, you've just talked a minute ago about starting to feel— you took a break and when you come back, you were like, what's happened? Something's changed. Why are they saying this? At what point did that start you down the path to what would later become— I don't know if you mind this phrase or not, but a whistleblower, you know, that's how you're sort of described. What point did you go from being slightly confused about what was going on to the point where you're like, I actually think the government's lying?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it took a while because I trusted my colleagues. Many of them were my friends. I thought maybe there's something I didn't know. Maybe there's a piece of intelligence that's the smoking gun that I wasn't aware of. And I was on sabbatical during the time, so I wasn't seeing the regular intelligence feed. So I thought maybe I just didn't know what was going on. But it turned out I did. And over time, I gradually realized that the government— I talked to my colleagues, I talked to people like David Kelly, the BW inspector. And, you know, who confirmed that there was no new intelligence pointing to substantial stocks of WMD. So I began to realize that a lie had been perpetrated before the war. And this all kind of crystallized in my head when David was hounded to his death by the government for saying that the so-called dossier had been, quote, sexed up, unquote. I.e., the WMD claims had been exaggerated. And that was the point when I suddenly thought something very, very wrong has happened here. It all became clear to me. And eventually, I was asked to testify to the first official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the war. An inquiry that only came about because of David's death, the scandal of David's death and the media furore and public pressure for there to be a proper inquiry. Those of us who worked on Iraq were asked to testify to that inquiry. I knew that my testimony would be profoundly critical of what the government had done, so I negotiated for that testimony to be submitted in secret, which the inquiry agreed to. And I'm listed as an anonymous witness, one of 2 anonymous witnesses to that inquiry. And then I wrote down everything I thought. that they'd lied, that they'd ignored alternatives to war, that they'd broken the law in a fairly, you know, 7-page note, which was, you know, the turning point in my life, that note. Anyway, I sent that in and that was the moment where, you know, me and the government basically went in 2 separate directions.

And just jumping back a little bit, you know, there's a really horrible event that happened that you sort of touched on there, which is the death of David Kelly as a result of all this. Would you mind for people who aren't aware of that, would you mind just explaining who he was and what happened through that process?

It's funny because it's such a salient event in my life. And, you know, I think for a certain— for older people in Britain, it remains a salient political event, a very— one they certainly remember. But obviously for younger generations, it's less— it's more obscure. But David was, as I've mentioned, a senior weapons scientist, an expert in biological weapons, one of very, very few experts in biological weapons. And he had worked on weapons inspections in Iraq. He and I were colleagues. We'd worked quite closely together for several years. And what happened was, there was a lot of media interest in the government's claims about WMD, especially when after the war, after the invasion, it was discovered there was literally not a single fragment of WMD in Iraq. The claims were completely inaccurate. And the BBC broadcast a report on the radio saying that an official source, a senior official source, had told them that the government dossier on WMD had been, quote, sexed up, unquote. And the government was furious and said, this is not true. You know, we absolutely deny it. And who is the source? And that became the big question. Who is the source? And David, because he's a very honest man, went to his boss and said, in the Ministry of Defense, and said, I have spoken to this journalist, but I can't believe he's saying this, you know, because I'm not a senior official source. I was just giving him a background briefing about what we knew. And the moment his name came out, he was vilified by the British government. They called him names, they insulted him. They belittled him, they humiliated him in public. One of the government's press officers called him a Walter Mitty type figure, a kind of fantasist, which was appalling because he was a very serious, modest, careful scientific man, an expert, one of the few on that subject. And they humiliated him in public. And there was a huge media storm about it. And he was kicked around, he was interrogated in Parliament. And fairly soon after that began, he was found dead in an Oxfordshire wood with his wrists slashed. Some people still believe that he was murdered by the government. But certainly he was dead. And he'd been, in my view, humiliated to his death. by the government, which is almost as bad, perhaps as bad as murdering him. So that was a very, very shocking episode for many people, but I was certainly very shocked. Somehow, lying about a war was one thing, but killing our own was another. He was one of us. He was a loyal, very loyal member of the British government. He was one of the very small group of us who worked on Iraq. So, you know, I was very, very shocked by that.

It makes complete sense. And obviously, he had a family, which is a tragedy as well. And I don't want to get into conspiracy theories because I don't think they're necessarily helpful. But as you said there, there's a lot of conversation around his death still. At the time it happened, when I remember it as happening, and I remember there being a lot of conversation around his death from the kind of like, Again, I don't want to get into specifics, but from the very conspiratorial-minded to what was presented by the government as having happened, was there a sense of fear sent out to people working in the government that if you weren't on board, that could be an end result?

No, I mean, they never did that. But those of us who worked on Iraq realized we had to be exceptionally careful. I don't think I personally felt a threat of death, but I do remember when I first drafted a resignation letter to my government, which was when I was living back in New York, I do remember feeling, if you send this, you're going to be destroyed in some way. Because living in America at that time, you felt this appalling momentum towards war.

Right.

like a steam train barreling towards war. And that if you stood up and put your hand up in front of it, you were going to get crushed by it. And somehow intuitively, I knew that. And so I didn't have the guts to send my resignation in at that point. I didn't resign until I testified to the inquiry. I wish I'd done otherwise. I wish I'd resigned before the war took place because I could have said, this is you know, the government's not telling the truth, they're exaggerating. But I knew if I'd done it then, they would have done much worse to me than they did to David. And the other kind of private thing is that I knew that David's death would in some way inoculate me against what the government would do to me if I came out and resigned. because it was such a scandal for the government when he died, that they would not want to repeat it in my case. So they would be much more careful with me if I came out and said what I believed. And that, to an extent, was true. You know, one of the strange things that happened was when I did resign, I sent my evidence in as my letter of resignation to the Foreign Secretary. He didn't reply, but within a couple of weeks, the Foreign Office sent me a letter from my personnel officer. And I went to see him and he offered me psychiatric counseling, presumably to prevent me committing suicide and embarrassing the government again like David had. They also sent me a letter threatening me with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act if I talk publicly about my work. So, you know, that's government for you.

Is that still active? As in, you know, right now you're talking about your work, obviously not in great detail, but do you still— is the threat of that still hanging over you, or has that sort of dissipated?

I mean, it's a lifetime thing, the Official Secrets Act. It's the most extraordinary piece of legislation that you're required to sign when you become a diplomat. So in theory, it still applies. And I hope I'm right in saying I don't think the government's going to come after me. I mean, there've been a couple of occasions when I've sailed close to the wind. When I first wrote about it in a newspaper, I had to get a lot of legal advice to protect me from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. And the government is is unforgiving about this kind of thing. The culture of secrecy and not allowing people to speak about their work is very, very strong in government. And they have a deep incentive in maintaining that culture because they don't want some whistleblower to come out today and talk about, you know, what nefarious activities the British government is under, or, you know, the weapons supplies we're giving to Israel, or the secret surveillance flights the RAF is conducting over the Gaza Strip. You know, they want to deter people from blowing the whistle about that. So coming after somebody like me remains a possibility.

And when you're talking about the secrets and the lack of transparency in government, when someone like Trump comes to power and one of his immediate things is saying that he's going to make government more transparent and declassify the JFK files and what happened around that and other kind of secret files, do you see something like that as a positive?

No, because he won't do it about all of government. I've come to believe that government is itself a coercive force in our lives that isn't agreed to by consent. We don't consent to all the things that government— how government controls us. And secrecy is one of the ways it maintains that authority, because government pretends to the population that it knows best. The basic claim of government is it knows best how to protect our security. And secrecy is a crucial part of that. And if they let the veil down and we see what they really know, like what they knew before the Iraq War, I think we would be pretty shocked at how incompetent much of government is and how little it knows. There is a deep-seated belief in society that authority knows best, the authorities have this in hand, whatever problem it is. And I have come to distrust that sentiment. Even after the Iraq War, and even after my resignation, my father voted again for the Labour Party, for Blair at the next election. And I said to him, why did you do that? I was very angry because to me, it was a betrayal, a personal betrayal. I said, why did you do this? And he said, oh, they must have known. I.e., they must have known about Iraq's WMD and his own son didn't, who'd worked on it. That's how deep-seated it is that ultimately we think they're right, that we put our faith in them. And in fact, we've got to if this basic contract where we give up our liberty, we agree to obey the law, in return for security. That's the basic contract of government. And part of that contract, in order to preserve that contract, the government needs to pretend it knows best. Well, I have been at the heart of the security state. I've been involved in several wars. I served in Afghanistan. I've worked on 2 Iraq wars, if not more, if you count others. And I'm here to tell you that government doesn't know best and it's often making it up as it goes along.

And are you talking about the British government there or all governments?

Well, the British government claims that it's amongst the best governments in the world, honest, law-abiding. We can see that that's not true. I don't know how other governments work. I have some insight into it. I mean, I've advised— since leaving the Foreign Office, I've advised many democratic governments around the world. many democratic political movements. And they're just struggling human beings like the rest of us, struggling to make sense of the world, struggling to make their way through it. They don't have the arrogant claim that the Brits do, that somehow they're better than other people, somehow we offer a model to the rest of the world. So if you're a guerrilla movement fighting for self-determination for your country, you don't pretend that you know best. You know you're up against the power. And that gives you a humility about what you know and your abilities. And that humility is actually a very powerful thing. It's very foolish to think you know best because that arrogance weakens you. It actually closes you to new knowledge and to the flexibility that actually understanding the world today requires. And I talk to— this sounds rather cruel, but I talk to Friends, former friends of mine who joined the Foreign Office at the same time as me in 1989. And they're now ambassadors, got their knighthoods, some of them. Some of them have been ambassadors in 5 different places. And I meet them and I think, you're so much less than you used to be. Your brain has become frozen. You don't think as flexibly as you used to. I remember you when you were a young man. And you were great. You were cosmopolitan, thoughtful, had real flair. And now you've just become— I mean, he's still a nice guy, but you could just tell by the way they thought that they've just become more rigid, that the state had circumscribed the space in which they allowed themselves to think. And that's terrible. I'm so glad that didn't happen to me. Because it was happening to me before I left. I was beginning to think like the state. And I was doing very well in the diplomatic service. I was very well thought of. I was on a pathway to senior positions, ambassadorships, and all the rest of it. But that would've required me to kill that independent part of me that thought for itself, that thought for myself. And that part was diminishing year by year as I stayed in it. And I'm so glad I left.

You used to be obviously very pro-democratic government and very, well, I'm assuming pro-capitalism because that's what this government stands for. You have quite a different view on government now and what they should be. Can you talk us through that now, where your feelings are in terms of how countries should be run?

Sure. Well, I've been on a long political soul-searching journey since I left the Foreign Office back in 2004, 20 years ago now. And I set myself the task of working out why things were going wrong in our world. And I studied, read a lot. I took a sabbatical from the Foreign Office before I resigned, sat in New York University Library and thought about this. And I came to the conclusion that democracy is not truly representative as it claims to be, that it's run by a very small number of people taking decisions for the mass. That is not only in itself problematic, but that small group is eminently corruptible because access to them is limited. And those with the most resources, the most money, get access and thus influence over policy. And you see that today if you are a donor to the Labour Party, or to the Conservative Party, you get access to ministers. This is openly advertised as legal. And it's of course much worse in the US where political corruption is open, legal, massive. And I also felt, came to the conclusion that one of the deep crises we have is a crisis of agency, that people feel they have no control over the things that really matter to them. And the only way to give them control was actually for them to be in charge of their own affairs. Um, to make decisions for themselves. Self-government, not violent chaos and anarchy of everybody doing whatever they want, but collective decision-making on an equal basis. Um, and that, that collective decision-making would reweave the fabric of a very tattered and angry society. Um, that philosophy is called anarchism. It's bottom-up self-government. And at the same time, I became and always had been very skeptical of capitalism, that its central claim that we are driven by the desire for more consumption. That's the central claim of neoclassical economics, which underlies capitalism, that that is the point of our lives, to maximize what they call utility, which is an invented term to justify the theory through consumption of goods and services. And that's what humans are about. I don't think anybody actually believes that that's what humans are really about. We need things to survive, to be comfortable, of course. But actually, the most important things are not that. They are things without names. They are what happens between human beings. They are our relationships. They are things like meaning, purpose, belief, love. And how do you construct a society that puts love at its center? it doesn't look anything like the society we've got today. So I don't think— I think we're in deep crisis now. And I've gone on this journey. I've written about it to a degree. I'm still writing about it. I'm still exploring. It's partly even a spiritual journey into meaning, into the meaning of the self, into—

Meaning?

that unnameable, untermable thing that we're all aware of that is arguably more important than anything else.

What would you say to people who would say something like, you know, during this conversation we've been talking about the fact that you say people trust the government know how to do something, but actually they don't. You know, they're just a collection of people who know as much as anyone else. Someone watching this who might say, well, an example of the public having control is Brexit, where I'm not saying that Brexit was right or wrong, you know, with my personal feelings of which side of it I might have voted aside.

Yeah.

What feels like happened there is people took control and made a vote in a way that the government might not have done. And they were easily influenced because they don't have the kind of critical thinking, having spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing, and they were sort of easily influenced, and it's turned into, and has turned into, a huge chaotic mass of opinions. And I would say a sort of, yeah, a mess and a kicking-off point for culture wars, where now I, I feel like the country is divided not into shades of grey, but very much like, if you agree with this, then we can't be friends.

Yeah, yeah, that's the way it's going.

Would that be—

Just like it is in the US now.

Sure, yes. I mean, they're potentially, um, trailblazers in that area and slightly more progressed, but would Would that be an argument against having a kind of bottom-up control structure?

No, on the contrary. I think that when you give people genuine decision-making power, they behave responsibly. The social science suggests this. We begin to see each other as real humans, that antagonism, that hatred that is so evident today begins to disappear because we see the reality of other people's lives and we acknowledge it. We acknowledge that guy down the street who I don't like the look of has actually got kids at the same school. That my kids go to. We share that. You know, we listen to that single mother with 2 kids talking about not being able to afford her food bills. We feel genuine compassion rather than hatred towards somebody we think is a sponger off the welfare state. Our human emotions are triggered by that interaction. Our real humanity is triggered. And a referendum is not that. A referendum is a single moment in a long history of not having any agency, where finally people are given a say. And what do they say is, screw you, we're going to do the opposite to what you want us to do. This is one chance we have to stick 2 fingers up at you, and we're going to take it. And it happens to be Brexit, but screw you, we're going to take that chance. And that's how I see Brexit. I didn't support Brexit, but my views don't matter. I think what it shows is more interesting, that it precisely demonstrates this crisis of agency that I talk about, that people feel immensely frustrated that the system is not working for them. The political system, the economic system, most people feel cheated. They feel they don't have a voice, they're not heard. The economic system humiliates them by making them feel like losers compared to the the stars on social media, the Kardashians, the social influencers who sit in swimming pools in Dubai, making everybody else feel bad about their lives. And I think that sense of humiliation runs very deep. And that is now having political expression. And the right have understood how to exploit that anger. Trump demonstrates that anger. He shares it, he claims. I mean, of course, it's absurd because he's a deeply privileged man. But it's about that anger that the far right— the far right is feeding off that anger. And that's why it's so dangerous, because that anger is very widespread. A great many people feel it. I ran for Parliament at the last election. Doesn't matter for who. It was very interesting talking to people, quote, on the doorstep, unquote, because the main thing people said was not, I support this party or that party. They all hated the government. Of course, but the main thing people said was they hated the system. They hated politics, and that's a very widespread sentiment. There's an interview today with a you know very good thoughtful MP who says the level of abuse of MPs has never been worse, and that's because no, I don't think people hate individual politicians, though they may express it in that way. I think they feel intense frustration with a system that they don't feel answers to them doesn't really answer their concerns. That might be immigration. The right have made it about immigration, hatred of the other. Their appeal is based on division and hatred. But I would like to answer that crisis of agency by not less democracy, but more, by giving people more decision-making power, making the economy more about what we genuinely want rather than what we're told we want by advertising And the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Fantastic. It's been a really interesting conversation, Kahn. Thank you so much for coming in. Really appreciate your time.

Totally my pleasure. Thanks for the interview. Really my pleasure.