Ex-ASIO chief called in after 11th hour discovery of missing Iraq War secret papers

The misplacement of highly sensitive documents containing advice from the nation’s spy agencies used by John Howard’s government to go to war in Iraq in 2003 has prompted a high-level inquiry so they can be made public.

The National Archives on Monday released the cabinet papers of Howard’s government but this did not include the submissions relied upon by the national security committee (NSC) to justify the decision to join the “coalition of the willing” in a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilised the Middle East for years.

John Howard with George W Bush on a visit by the prime minister to the president’s Texas ranch in 2003.Credit: AP

But in a rare public statement hours before the 2003 cabinet papers were due to be released, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet revealed that the key security committee documents had not been handed over to the national archives in 2020 when other records were transferred.

While the statement described the missing papers as “administrative oversights ... likely as a result of COVID-19 disruptions”, department secretary Glyn Davis has called in former ASIO director-general Dennis Richardson to conduct an independent review of the transfer and to ensure all documents have been moved to the archives.

The National Archives have previously released submissions created for the national security committee and its predecessors. It is also today releasing some of the committee’s records that were submitted to the Howard cabinet of 2003.

That year’s cabinet papers release was of particular interest as it covered the decision taken on March 18 by the Howard government to officially commit troops to Iraq. Australian troops entered the country less than 40 hours after the decision.

In mid-December, the archives said that the national security committee documents were not yet held by the institution.

“National Archives does not hold records for 2003 documenting NSC decisions relating directly to the conduct of the Iraq War,” it said in a statement to this masthead.

“As a result, they were not considered for public release along with other selected cabinet records from 2003 that have been released proactively.”

According to the department, the missing records were discovered on December 19. Archives staff jointly inspected the records three days later and they have now been transferred to the agency.

The archives will review the documents in consultation with security agencies before they become available for release.

The missing papers have already prompted calls for the detailed notes taken of the inner workings of the security committee and cabinet from 2003 to be immediately released so the public can better understand one of the Howard government’s most important and contentious decisions.

Every year, the archives releases the cabinet documents of previous governments 20 years after their creation. They are mined by historians and the general public to gain an insight of the issues debated around the cabinet table as they contain official submissions from departments and agencies.

Key players including Howard and Peter Costello have discussed the major issues around the decision in interviews and in their memoirs and referenced some of the confidential information. But the full picture of the advice from security agencies has been kept secret.

The six-page note

The official documents reveal the full cabinet met on the morning of March 18 where Howard — who had earlier that day talked to US President George W Bush — delivered a verbal briefing on the possible war.

The six-page note, which records 18 separate cabinet decisions, noted that Howard had received a formal request from Bush that “Australia participate in military action by a coalition to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and advice that it was the intention of the President to issue an ultimatum to Iraq very shortly”.

Noting that Iraq’s weapons represented a “real and unacceptable threat to international peace and security”, the cabinet agreed they posed a direct risk to Australia’s own security.

The note confirmed Howard talked to the then governor-general, Peter Hollingworth, about sending troops to Iraq. Hollingworth would resign his post two months later after an inquiry found that while he was the Anglican archbishop of Brisbane in the early 1990s he had allowed a known paedophile to continue working as a priest.

Just hours after the cabinet meeting, Howard went into the House of Representatives with a motion to support going to war that had already prompted protests from opponents.

The prime minister made clear that one of his greatest concerns was the possibility of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists who could then use them on Australians.

“This is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent,” he said.

“Possession of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by terrorists would constitute a direct, undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people.”

While the government argued the war was about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Howard used the same speech to acknowledge Saddam Hussein’s reign would come to an end.

‘This is the ultimate nightmare which the world must take decisive and effective steps to prevent.’

John Howard, March 18, 2003

“The government’s principal objective is the disarmament of Iraq; however, should military action be required to achieve this, it is axiomatic that such action will result in the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime,” he said.

Throughout Howard’s address to parliament, he was interrupted by Anthony Albanese, who alleged the government’s decision to go to war had been made six months earlier. Albanese was ejected from the House, along with other members of the Labor Party which was opposed to the decision.

Within weeks of the ground invasion of Iraq, it became apparent that Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have weapons of mass destruction.

Then-defence minister Robert Hill, who believes the security committee submissions should be released, said the absence of the weapons of mass destruction had come as a major surprise given the intelligence the government had received ahead of the invasion.

“There was a lot of scratching of heads and different experts had different ideas on what had happened,” he said.

The submission that never was

National Archives cabinet historian, associate professor David Lee, described the absence of documentation surrounding the war decision as “the cabinet submission that never was”.

“There was no submission to cabinet on costs, benefits and implications of Australia’s entry into the war,” he said.

This was notwithstanding the fact that the Iraq commitment was in Howard’s words the “most controversial foreign policy decision taken by my government in the almost 12 years it held office.”

In 2015, the Abbott government committed $12.7 million over seven years to compile a six-volume official history of Australia’s operations in Iraq and Afghanistan with a standalone volume on the peacekeeping operations in East Timor.

The East Timor history, entitled Born of Fire and Ash, was published in December 2022.

But the Australian War Memorial says it is unknown when the other histories will be released.

“There is currently no fixed date for the publication of the official histories of Iraq or Afghanistan,” the memorial said in a statement.

Australia’s historians are not expecting anything on Afghanistan or Iraq until at least 2025 and maybe as late as 2027. The histories have been complicated by findings by the Brereton inquiry that up to 25 Australian soldiers were involved in the murder of 39 unarmed Afghan civilians or prisoners.

‘Today we are committed to a war which is not necessary.’

Simon Crean, March 18, 2003

Acting Greens leader Nick McKim said the delayed release of some of the papers surrounding the Howard cabinet’s 2003 decision was another argument to overhaul the powers of governments to go to war.

“Politicians rarely make decisions more consequential and fateful than committing a country to war. Those decisions should be made by parliaments, not prime ministers,” he said.

“When politicians lie, people die. We need a safeguard to protect peace, and that needs to be in the form of a parliamentary vote before committing to war.

“It’s critical that additional intelligence documents, including National Security Committee documents used to justify the war on false grounds, are released.”

Australian soldiers manning the air traffic control tower in Baghdad, 2003. Credit: Jason South

Apart from cabinet submissions, the National Archives also holds cabinet notebooks. These are written records of cabinet discussions and are overseen by three public servants. They are released 30 years after their creation.

But Peter Costello, in his 2008 memoir, observed that notetakers were not present in the three-hour discussion of March 18 to discuss going to war.

Costello wrote that the military advice was that Saddam’s regime would be defeated, but members of the coalition of the willing would suffer significant casualties.

The most wide-ranging overseas inquiry into the Iraq War was Britain’s Chilcott inquiry.

Covering 12 volumes and 2.6 million words, it was highly critical of the Blair government’s decision to go to war, its tactics and its planning, arguing it was all based upon “flawed intelligence”.

The closest Australia has ever got to a wide-ranging inquiry into the decision to enter the Iraq War was the Flood inquiry of 2004. Prompted by a parliamentary committee report into the war and ordered by Howard, it examined the nation’s intelligence organisations and covered the war, the Bali bombings of 2002 and the deployment of the military and police to the Solomon Islands in 2003.

It was headed by senior diplomat and former head of the Office of National Assessments, Philip Flood.

While its original focus was on ways to improve agencies such as the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, it did review the pre-war intelligence reports presented to the Howard government.

It found there had been a “failure of intelligence on Iraq”, noting the ONA was “more exposed” on its insights than the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO).

According to Flood, the two agencies’ judgments on Iraq were consistent until late January 2003 “when ONA reporting assessed that Iraq must have WMD while DIO reporting did not”.

“On the key points of Iraq’s possession of WMD, and the significance of its concealment and deception activities, ONA judgments were expressed with fewer qualifications and greater certainty than those of DIO,” he found.

Flood found Australia’s intelligence agencies showed independence from their foreign counterparts despite being heavily reliant on insights from American and British spy organisations.

He noted that despite the failure of intelligence assessments on Iraq, Australia’s agencies reflected “reasonably” the available information.

“Prior to 19 March 2003, the only government in the world that claimed that Iraq was not working on, and did not have, biological and chemical weapons or prohibited missile systems was the government of Saddam Hussein,” Flood argued.

John Howard releasing the Flood inquiry report, 22 July 2004. Philip Flood wrote: “Australia shared in the allied intelligence failure on the key question of Iraq WMD stockpiles.”Credit: Andy Zakeli

The inquiry talked to a range of senior political and intelligence figures including Howard, Costello and then foreign minister Alexander Downer and took submissions from the spy agencies. But those submissions, and their reports to the Howard government, were not released.

The war itself cost Australian taxpayers at least $2.3 billion. Two soldiers were killed, although not in direct action, 27 were injured while hundreds have endured post-traumatic stress disorder. Troops would remain in Iraq until 2009.

Iraq was left devastated with some estimates putting the death toll above 300,000. It also directly unleashed forces that led to the creation of the terror organisation Islamic State that was at the centre of a civil war in Iraq’s north and into Syria through the 2010s.

Howard, in his book Lazarus Rising, revealed that a week before the decision he had written in his diary that there would be a personal reckoning if the war went poorly.

“I think all of us realise that if this really does go “pear-shaped”, then that would be it for me. I should take the rap, for the sake of the party’s future,” he wrote.

John Howard in a flak jacket prepares for the Anzac Day dawn ceremony in Baghdad, 2004.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.