This article appears in the April 11, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
[Print version of this article]
Sir Richard Dearlove should be better known to Americans. He was the head of British Intelligence MI6 when it supplied to 10 Downing Street and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair the phony assessment that goosed the hapless President George W. Bush into uttering, in his “Axis of Evil” 2003 special address to the United States Congress, the “sixteen words” that launched the criminal enterprise known as the Second Iraq War: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Iraq, it was later admitted, had no weapons of mass destruction—but only after the “Coalition of the Willing” had destroyed and occupied that nation, killing as many as a million Iraqis in the process.
Dearlove, moreover, deems Donald Trump’s second term a potential national security threat to Great Britain, whatever he may choose to say about that at the moment. On January 14, 2024, the “former” head of MI6 was asked, in an interview with Trevor Phillips of Sky News, what the big threats are that the UK ought to be paying attention to in 2024. After describing his views on Ukraine and China, Dearlove volunteered a “third threat”: “But … you have to add a political threat, which I’m worried about, which is Trump’s reelection, which I think for the UK’s national security is problematic. Because if Trump, as it were, acts hastily, and damages the Atlantic alliance, that is a big deal for the UK. We’ve put all our eggs in defense terms in the NATO basket. If Trump really is serious about, as it were, changing the balance, I mean the American nuclear umbrella for Europe is, in my view, essential to Europe’s security and defense.”
Dearlove should therefore be evaluated as “armed and dangerous” to the Trump Administration. He has been the most insistent voice on a joint U.S.-Israel mission to start war with Iran. (“Iran Is a ‘Threat’ to British Jews, Cautions Former MI6 Chief,” blared an article in The Jewish Chronicle on May 21.)
Given the way that British intelligence roped an earlier Administration into a war in Iraq, now costing between $2 trillion and $8 trillion, not to mention the millions of lives lost and destroyed, why would Washington trust Dearlove’s view of the “merits” of going to war with Iran now? Remember, this is the same Richard Dearlove who said of Christopher Steele’s now wholly discredited Russiagate dossier in 2017, “I think that there is probably some credibility to the content” and “I don’t think there’s any question that [Russia] got involved in the U.S. election.” Is that the voice the United States should listen to on Iran, as we did in Iraq 2003? Is that the voice to heed, as leader-to-leader negotiations to back away from war, and form a new security architecture, proceed with Russia?
