Smash hit

All our cases are hard, by definition they wouldn't come to us if they weren't and if they weren't we wouldn't take them. You may be trying to get evidence from abroad, you may be trying to get evidence of payments to people of a very high level in government and that, they are not going to want to do that.

It is a tricky thing to do and BAE case, the Saudi case was I hope unique in that they way that the reaction, that the continuation of the case was likely to do very serious harm to our national interest, or so I could see, or so I was convinced. I hope that won't happen in any other case but they are all difficult.

TT - Tony Blair said it was his decision, his responsibility...

RW - He said he was responsible for the advice as to the damage. He then went on to talk about other things that were not relevant to my decision, like jobs and the like.

They were not relevant, I did not take that into account. I took into account only the damage to national security.

TT - What did you actually see that led you to that decision?

RW - I saw the advice given to, the letter given to the Attorney General [Lord Goldsmith – since replaced by Baroness Scotland of Asthal] asking him to consider the national interest. That was from the Prime Minister and it included the security and intelligence assessment.

But I also had the benefit of talking to our Ambassador in Saudi [Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles] about how it would actually pan out and I met him on three occasions.

So, there is a limit on far you can go behind an assertion the damage would cause. But if I can give you an example in a completely different case, a non-SFO case, one of the reasons you might stop an investigation is that a prosecution or an investigation might reveal the name of an informer and you might be told that if criminals know who the informer is he would suffer serious injury or perhaps death. It is very difficult to second guess that.

You can go through it, you can discuss it with them, assure yourself as much as you can that you have got the right information or your assessment is correct. But at the end of the day, national security? I cannot second guess so I had to take that at face value but I went more to simply just looking at a letter. I was able to discuss it and probe it to some extent.

TT - Where was the information from? Did it come from MI5 and MI6?

RW - It was, yes, it was coordinated I think by the Cabinet Office and from the intelligence coordinator there, I think it was, there may have been other sources as well.

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