140 • DEARLOVE, SIR RICHARD
years. Born in Cornwall, Dearlove was educated at Monkton Combe
School, near Bath, and at Kent School, Connecticut, before reading
history at Queen’s College, Cambridge. He joined SIS in 1966 and
his first posting was to Nairobi in 1968, where he remained for three
years during which his wife Rosalind bore him a son and a daughter.
In 1973 he was appointed station commander in Prague, returning
to London in 1976. In June 1980 he went to Paris as deputy station
commander.
Following the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C.,
on 11 September 2001, Dearlove flew to New York on the first Con-
corde allowed to land at JFK Airport to see for himself the remains
of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Dearlove’s demands for ad-
ditional funds were granted by a Labour government anxious to avoid
accusations of starving the intelligence community of resources, and
£4 million was immediately allocated to an Afghan Task Force to buy
information and influence from the Taliban, which then controlled
some of the al-Qaeda training camps. Unfortunately SIS’s principal
asset in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Masood, the charismatic leader of
the mujahedin in the Panshir Valley who had fought the Soviets with
British equipment a decade earlier, was murdered by two suicide
bombers posing as Moroccan television journalists two days before
Osama bin Laden’s 11 September attack on the United States, requir-
ing SIS to find new friends among the warlords of the Northern Alli-
ance. Thereafter Dearlove developed a close relationship with the
prime minister and frequently accompanied him on his overseas trips,
including one to Camp David, where the chief almost participated in
a press conference organized by the White House. His name was
added to a list of senior officials accompanying President Bush and
Prime Minister Blair, but he hastily withdrew at the last moment,
protesting that he did not wish to be photographed.
The controversy that was to dominate Dearlove’s tenure as chief
was SIS’s involvement in the preparation of two documents intended
to justify the Blair government’s intention to go to war with Iraq to
remove Saddam Hussein. The first document, drawn up in haste in
September 2002, ostensibly by theJoint Intelligence Committee
(JIC), and accompanied by a foreword written by the prime minister,
purported to detail the threat posed by Iraq’s continued possession of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in defiance of successive UN