This is an intriguing choice of words. It didn't explicitly say that Tetra Strategy believed Werritty was an official advisor. It might be thought slightly remiss of a public affairs company not to know who the Defence Secretary's official advisors were.

Very quickly the question of whom Werritty was working for became a key issue. Eventually, a report by the Cabinet Secretary confirmed that Werritty had a company called Pargav, which was funded in turn by six other entities.

Even, after the Cabinet Secretary's report, which was in many respects quite cursory, it took a while to establish who the companies he named actually were. They all turned out to be quite interesting: the businessman Jon Moulton, the private security company G3, a very mysterious company IRG Ltd.  But for the purposes of Spinwatch's report on BICOM, the interesting thing is that three of them were linked to BICOM supporters.

•    Tamares – a company owned by Poju Zabludowicz, who acknowledged making a donation of £3,000.

•    Oceana Investment Corporation, chaired by former BICOM deputy chairman Michael Lewis which donated £30,000.

•    Mick Davis, chair of the Jewish Leadership Council, of which BICOM is a member, donated £30,000.

The question then became one of why Werritty was receiving this funding. One suggestion was that the money had been solicited by the Conservative party, whereas the Conservatives were briefing that the initiative had come from the donors. It turned out that the Conservative fundraiser who had originally introduced the donors to Fox some time previously, was Howard Leigh, who was himself a member of the Jewish Leadership Council.

Some of the donors reportedly complained later that they had been led to believe that the money would be used for peace and reconciliation projects.  That in itself suggests that they had some idea of what Werritty was actually doing, which seems to have been a sort of private diplomacy, with two key areas of activity being Iran and Sri Lanka.

Fox and Werritty in Iran

Fox and Werritty both visited Iran in 2007, and following that they took a close interest in the Iranian nuclear programme, becoming involved in discussions with the Iranian opposition and with officials from various countries. We know something of the discussions Fox was having because he had one conversation with a US diplomat which ended up on Wikileaks.

One suggestion that has been made is that all this activity was about preparing the ground for a military attack on Iran. Our conclusion on that in the 'Giving Peace a Chance?' report is that while there's no doubt that Fox and Werritty were very hawkish, it's not clear that all the people they were talking to were quite the same.

There was an elite consensus that something needed to be done about the Iranian nuclear programme, but within that there were people who were very hawkish like Fox in Britain, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Mitt Romney in the United States. 

On the other hand, however, there were people who opposed an outright strike but favoured other quite aggressive options such as some form of covert action. That would seem to have been the position of the Foreign Office and MI6, and also a number of key people in the Israeli security agencies. In our report we use the shorthand terms "neoconservative" and "realist" to describe these tendencies within the elite consensus.

One place where these differences were played out was on the sidelines of the Herzliya conference in Israel in 2011, where it was reported that Fox and Werritty had met the head of Mossad. This would have been around the time that Meir Dagan was replaced by his deputy Tamir Pardo, so it is not clear which of them he met.

Dagan was opposed to an early attack on Iran, and he was publicly criticised for this by Liam Fox in the House of Commons a few weeks before the conference. It was a stark illustration of Fox's hawkishness that he would criticise, in this way, a man reputed to be responsible for ramping up an aggressive covert action programme against Iran.

What can be said is that Fox and Werritty were playing a role within that elite debate about Iran, and some of the meetings that Werritty had, suggest that he was playing a larger role than the Cabinet Secretary's report allowed for.

In our report we resist any attempt to identify BICOM with either the neoconservative or realist tendencies within elite opinion. Instead, we argue that BICOM's publications sought to strengthen the consensus uniting both tendencies about the urgency of the Iranian nuclear issue. Thus, a September 2012 BICOM briefing stated:

Israel will hope that a further escalation in sanctions, backed by the threat of force can compel Iran to change course. But how long Israel can wait before its window of opportunity for a military strike closes, is a matter of judgement that only those with access to the most sensitive of information can make.

Liam Fox and Sri Lanka

Another key area of Werritty's activity revolved around Sri Lanka, a country where Liam Fox had long-standing links.  Fox made a number of visits to Sri Lanka from 2007, paid for by the Sri Lankan Government and by an entity that turned out to be linked to G3. Adam Werritty made a number of visits to Sri Lanka, where officials involved in defence procurement were reportedly interested in his Israeli connections.

But the Sri Lankan issue matters not just because of this connection to the Israel lobby, but because of the parallels with it. The Israel lobby is not unique, but part of a wider problem in which transnational power networks evade democratic accountability.

The Cabinet Secretary's report concludes that Adam Werritty didn't actually influence British policy noting William Hague's comment that 'If I asked [Fox] not to go to Sri Lanka, then he didn’t go.' This statement in itself arguably shows that Fox was pursuing his own agenda in Sri Lanka, to the extent that he had to be reined in.

The other problem with the Cabinet Secretary's report is the subsequent revelation that Werritty had other unexplained meetings with British officials at which Fox was not present.

Those meetings were uncovered by former diplomat Craig Murray using the Freedom of Information Act. Events following that discovery underline some of the arguments we make in the report about the importance of a rigorous critique of the Israel lobby that avoids prejudice.

Based on the fact that Werritty had meetings with the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, some chose to question whether Gould had so-called "dual loyalties" because he was Jewish. That argument's racist overtones killed the story stone dead, and consequently gave the Foreign Office a free pass.

If one accepts the Foreign Office position, as we do, that Gould was acting in good faith as a Foreign Office official at all times, that raises a much bigger issue, the question of how Werritty was able to get meetings with officials independently of Fox and even before Fox was in Government.

That is completely at odds with the picture in the Cabinet Secretary's report, and that - cursory as it was - was the only official investigation, other than the criminal investigation, into Werritty's impact on government. Cameron refused to refer the affair to his advisor on ministerial interests, and was arguably in breach of the ministerial code himself as a result.

Geneva and after

The failure of accountability demonstrated in the Werritty Affair, is all the more troubling given Britain's key role in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran.

Since the publication of our report, diplomatic progress in these talks has prompted a fracture between those we describe as realist and neoconservative elites. The Governments of the United States, Britain, France and Germany are all party to the P5+1 interim agreement with Iran.  In line with our analysis, there has been significant support for the agreement from elements of the Israeli security establishment.

In contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with some Republicans in the US Congress, denounced the agreement as a "historic mistake".

BICOM has continued to seek a middle course, staking out a position close to that of Israel's Institute of National Security Studies, which has avoided outright rejection of the Geneva deal, while crediting Netanyahu with strengthening it.

There has nevertheless been a perceptible hardening of BICOM's rhetoric.  In the run-up to the Geneva agreement, Alan Johnson, the editor of BICOM's journal, Fathom, warned of a 'looming bad deal' that could lead to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran. He argued that 'There is widespread concern - in Israel, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and beyond - that President Obama did not enforce his own red lines on Syria, and thus can’t be trusted on Iran.' An analysis of the deal itself, written for BICOM by Major General Michael Herzog, identified many more negatives than positives. BICOM's research director Toby Greene has insisted on the need for a continuing military threat against Iran. This is not so much a change of position, as a shift in tone, reflecting the increasing difficulty of bridging the gap between the realist and neoconservative positions, amid a widespread belief that Benjamin Netanyahu would reject any conceivable deal.

Nevertheless, that shift arguably brings BICOM's position on Iran somewhat closer to that of Fox and Werritty than was apparent at the time the research for this chapter of our report was being conducted. The overlap between BICOM's backers and those of Adam Werritty appears even more troubling as a result.

This article is based on the new Spinwatch report 'The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre: Giving peace a chance?'

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