Of leaky roofs, secret agents

How many Iraqi officials does it take to fix the leaky roof of a diplomat's house in London? How long does a skilled translator need to convert one of George Galloway's parliamentary speeches into Arabic?

In almost 1,000 pages of Arabic prose, each stamped with the Eagle crest of Iraq, the files found inside the foreign ministry in Baghdad cast a somewhat surreal light on the questions that turned the bureaucratic wheels of Saddam Hussain's regime and its view of Britain.

Five tightly-bound pale blue folders, all labelled Britain in Arabic talk darkly of plots against Saddam, rage against the "lies" of western governments and contain plaintive pleas for the supply of western military publications.

They detail contacts with the British Government and with figures deemed friendly to Iraq. There is a particular focus on George Galloway's political activities. There are 25 separate documents referring to the Labour MP, covering 1998, 2000 and 2001.

It is in this pile of documents that I found, on the second day of reading through the files, the copy of a memorandum signed by the head of the secret police, the Mukhabarat, purporting to show that the Labour MP had secretly benefited from oil and food contracts to fund his campaigning group, the Mariam Appeal.

Galloway denies benefiting in any way from his dealings with Iraq and has said that the relevant document is a forgery planted by western intelligence agencies with the aim of discrediting him.
Much of the material is routine paperwork, ranging from the mundane to the bizarre.

All five folders, each holding about 200 pages, betray the essential hallmarks of Iraq's bureaucratic culture - secrecy, formality, official courtesy and an obsession with compiling meticulous records of everything, however trivial.

Thus ministers are always referred to as "The Respected Mr Minister", and even the briefest handwritten scribble in the margin of an official document conveys elaborate greetings.

A few weeks after the September 11 attacks, when America began to debate whether to topple Saddam as part of the "war on terrorism", some of the powerful men in the Iraqi regime found themselves dealing with the question of the leaking roofs of five diplomatic properties in London.

Naji Sabri, the foreign minister, and General Abid Hamid Al Khattab, the all-powerful head of Saddam's Secretariat, exchanged lengthy "correspondence on the issue" in October 2.

The head of Military Intelligence also got involved. The house once occupied by the defence attache in London, in the days when Iraq had an embassy in Britain, had been "damaged by rain and the environmental effects of the years", he wrote.

Gen. Al Khattab's response was straight from the manual of Iraqi officialdom. He formed a leaky roof committee. The heads of military intelligence, military housing and military works were put on the case, with a brief to "study the subject of renovating the mentioned houses and informing the Foreign Ministry".

The letter on October 15 added: "A report should be written about this subject." I found no record of anything actually being done. The London rain may well still drip through those rafters.

Almost everything inside the room in which I found the documents was intact. Its heavy door, which was scorched on the outside but undamaged on the inside, had evidently protected the room from fire.

Looters had clearly entered the room - the door's lock had been broken and many files thrown into a heap on the floor - but having no interest in paperwork, they had left it intact.

Most of the box files carried a label in Arabic. They were covered in dust and ash and some of the documents had come loose from their folders - letters marked "Confidential and Personal" fell to the floor - but most of the paperwork seemed in good condition.

My Iraqi translator saw that most box files were labelled by country. Some were labelled Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, France and United States. Others carried labels saying Security Council and Political Records.

I asked him to look for any carrying the label Britain. Searching together, we eventually found two, along with one box labelled France. They were plainly abandoned. Flicking through the pages, most of them written in Arabic, I saw a letter written in English with Mr Galloway's letterhead.

It nominated Fawaz Zureikat as his representative in Baghdad. I thought little of it, picked up the box files and headed back to the hotel.

We looked through one folder. I wondered whether we might find something interesting on Iraq's perception of Tony Blair. Did they believe their own propaganda about him being America's poodle?

This was a slow and laborious process, for my Iraqi translator had to read each page out loud in turn. We found nothing of interest. One routine letter, the humdrum correspondence that had crossed the desk of an Iraqi foreign minister, succeeded another.

We called it a day and stopped work. Not until late on the following day, did we come across a letter which caught my eye. It was an Arabic document, written on elaborate paper, carrying the symbol of an iris and the English words "Iraqi Intelligence Service".

The memorandum purported to be a copy of a letter from the head of the Mukhabarat to Saddam's Presidential Secretariat - the dictator's inner office that deals directly with the security services.

It was only when my translator read out the subject of the memorandum as "Mariam Campaign" that I understood this might be linked with George Galloway and that it might yield an important British story.

The memorandum was part of a folder containing 129 other documents, about a host of different subjects. The folder was bound, like the others, with a distinctive single-bow knot.

Leaving aside the question of whether the contents of the memorandum are true, evidence found elsewhere in the files reinforces the authenticity of this document as a genuine product of the Iraqi bureaucracy. There are six other examples of similar Mukhabarat notepaper elsewhere in the files.

Haitham Rashid Wihaib, Saddam's former head of protocol, who fled Iraq in 1993, has identified the signature on the document as that of Tahir Jalil Habbush Al Tikriti, head of the Mukhabarat from 1999 until the fall of the regime. Four other documents carrying this signature appear in the files.

The memorandum outlining Galloway's supposed business dealings is handwritten. Three other documents in the files are written in the same hand. Three other documents also make direct reference to the crucial memorandum, quoting its date and reference number.

One other letter mentions Galloway's alleged oil contracts. If the crucial document is forged, all these must have been painstakingly faked as well and then carefully planted in the files.

The files also contain letters from Sir Edward Heath, former prime minister, Canon Andrew White, director of International Ministry at Coventry Cathedral, Lord Waverley, a crossbench peer, and Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary.