Part II: Trouble deepens for Blair

By ANDY MCSMITH, ANDREW BUNCOMBE and RAYMOND WHITA

George Tenet, director of the CIA, defended his agency last week, saying: "Let me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of these [WMD] programmes and those debates were spelled out … in [a classified report to the White House]. They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programmes that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

As the Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has admitted, talk of ousting Saddam started just days after the attacks of 11 September, even though officials accepted there was no evidence that Saddam was involved.

Just when Tony Blair signed up for "regime change" in Iraq – whether it was in the first weeks of 2003, when the "UN route" failed, or much earlier, in 2002 – remains obscure. But a clear picture has emerged in which the Bush administration, in tandem with its friends in London, aggressively pursued pieces of intelligence to support its claim that Saddam possessed WMD – and was therefore in breach of UN resolutions.

Those analyses that did not support that view – notably the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002, which included 40 caveats about claims regarding Iraq's WMD – were simply ignored. The White House preferred the British dossier, produced the month before: in his State of the Union address in January last year, George Bush approvingly quoted Britain's claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons, ignoring warnings from his own intelligence agencies that it was false.

American appreciation for British efforts in the information war went back to Afghanistan, when Downing Street produced an eloquent dossier detailing the crimes of the Taleban regime and its support for al-Qaeda.

In his Security Council speech Mr Powell commended another British document, produced a few days earlier, on Iraq's tactics of intimidation and deception, before it became known as the "dodgy dossier". Large chunks had been plagiarised from an old student thesis.

"I call it faith-based intelligence gathering," said Greg Thielmann, a former analyst with the State Department's Intelligence Bureau. Some analysts have claimed they were pressured into skewing the information to provide the sought-after "product", but Mr Thielmann, now retired, believes no arm-twisting was required: analysts and their managers were well aware what was needed, and a form of self-censorship took place.

"Analysts want to maintain relationships," he said. "Tenet spoke to the President six days a week [for his daily intelligence briefing]. If he went and said, 'Mr President, you have misrepresented what my analysts said,' how long would he keep going to the White House?"

But the senior officials in the Bush administration, their attention caught by the neo-conservative voices calling for the ousting of Saddam, to stabilise the Middle East and secure one of the biggest untapped oil supplies in the world, did not simply rely on the established analysts to provide them with information.

They established their own units to analyse and gather information and report directly to them without the usual process of filters – "stovepiping" information straight to the White House.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who is still unrepentedly making lurid claims about Iraq, had his own team of cherry-pickers. The Pentagon had the Office for Special Plans (OSP), which sponsored the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a group of Iraqi exiles headed by Ahmed Chalabi, currently the chair of the Iraqi Governing Council.

The exiles provided defectors and witnesses who told the OSP exactly what it wanted to hear: that Saddam was producing WMD, that he was ready to use it and that the people of Iraq would greet American troops with flowers should Washington decided to oust Saddam.

With few exceptions, all of the information provided by the INC defectors was incorrect. A report issued last year by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) said defectors invented or exaggerated their claims to have personal knowledge of the regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The US paid more than $1m for such information.

And while Britain fed dubious items of intelligence to the US, experts on this side of the Atlantic believe at least some of the equally unreliable INC material made its way here. With its intelligence headquarters in London, the INC had direct contacts with British officials as well.

Each side steered clear of certain allegations made by its partner, however. After one mention by Mr Bush on the day the British dossier was published, the Americans never picked up on the notorious 45-minute claim.

Britain, meanwhile, was silent on attempts in the US to link Saddam Hussein with al-Qaeda, though that did not prevent vaguer warnings about the danger of Iraqi WMD falling into the hands of terrorists.

Robert David Steele, a former CIA operative, said: "Yes, I think there was a intelligence failure, but I don't think there can be an intelligence failure without a preceding policy failure. In the absence of adequate intelligence we allowed political mendacity to fill a vacuum."

Such suspicions, which have dogged the Prime Minister for months, are now eroding support for George Bush in an election year, and he is not likely to have much room for concern about his ally as he looks for an escape route.

The Independent on Sunday reported exclusively last week that Mr Blair's allies feared he was about to be hung out to dry by the White House. The newspaper had barely reached the shops before this prediction came true. President Bush announced an inquiry into whether the intelligence services got it wrong, something Mr Blair had resisted for months.

The Prime Minister hoped that Lord Hutton's hearings into the narrower question of why Dr David Kelly killed himself would satisfy the British public's appetite for inquiries.

Lord Falconer, Mr Blair's oldest ally in the Cabinet, said on Sunday that "little would be achieved" by any other inquiry.

Hours later, Mr Blair found his reverse gear. When Washington announced it would hold an inquiry, Downing Street conceded that Britain must have one too.

On Monday evening, the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, had a telephone call from the Prime Minister asking if he would agree to let the Conservatives be represented on the inquiry team.

Mr Howard insisted that the inquiry must look not just at the intelligence gathered, but the use that the Government made of it. Mr Blair agreed to that in principle, but was not willing to yield to the Liberal Democrat demand for an inquiry which would judge whether the Government was right to declare war.

While the Tories signed up to Lord Butler's inquiry, the Lib Dems have decided to stay out. It may prove a wise choice: confidence in the inquiry, which will meet behind closed doors, was hardly reinforced by the rush last week to elevate all its members to the Privy Council, on the grounds that a PC after your name means you can be trusted with a secret in a way that other people cannot.

Ann Taylor, the former Chief Whip, was the only existing PC, so the other four members – Lord Butler of Brockwell, Michael Mates MP, Sir John Chilcot and Field Marshal Lord Inge – all had to be raised to the same level.

As one fellow Privy Counsellor remarked: "The dear old Queen has been kissing hands all week."

The Butler inquiry is due to report this summer, but Mr Blair may well have more to fear from the parallel exercise being conducted in Washington, which has been given a deadline to report next March – after the November presidential poll, but uncomfortably close to the putative date of a British general election.

No one in the US will have anything to lose if as much blame as possible can be shifted over here.

Whether the Prime Minister can escape being judged a fool or a liar depends crucially on the "45-minute" claim.

It was the strongest evidence the British government offered before the war that Saddam Hussein was not merely defying the authority of the United Nations, but presented a "serious and current" threat to the West, as Mr Blair put it when presenting the dossier to the Commons on 24 September 2002.

The document alleged that Iraq had "military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

It resulted in headlines the following day such as "Saddam can strike in 45 minutes" in the Daily Express and "Brits 45 minutes from doom" in The Sun, which said British troops and tourists on Cyprus were within range.

Mr Blair's statement in Parliament last week means that he would have believed The Sun's report was correct. Mr Hoon, who would have known otherwise, said he didn't see the news coverage until several months later.

The first official clarification of what the "45 minutes" referred to did not come until the Hutton inquiry last August – four months after the war had ended and nearly a year after the claim was first published.

John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and author of the dossier, said it referred, not to missiles for warheads, but to "battlefield mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles".

Mr Hoon confirmed when he appeared before Lord Hutton that he knew this at the time.

We now know that the Joint Intelligence Committee sent three assessments of Iraqi weaponry to Downing Street between September continued from page 9 2002 and 18 March, when MPs voted to send British troops to war.

The last of those assessments arrived just before the war, according to Mr Cook.
According to the Government, it highlighted "intelligence indicating that chemical weapons remained disassembled and that Saddam had not yet ordered their assembly".

The JIC also said other intelligence showed that "the 750km range Al Hussein ballistic missiles remained disassembled and that it would take several days to assemble them". But Mr Blair still apparently did not know what could be deployed in 45 minutes.

Mr Cook suggested yesterday that this discrepancy should be investigated by the Butler committee. If Mr Blair is right, then the committee would surely have to give the JIC a severe rebuke for withholding vital information from the Prime Minister.

But if it turns out that the correct information was among the three assessments, Mr Blair could have trouble explaining his answer to Mr Ottaway last week.

Another possibility is that he did not read the assessments, even though Britain was on the brink of war. That would save him from the charge of mendacity, at the cost making him appear irresponsible.

With no experience of defence or foreign affairs before arriving in Downing Street, one Whitehall veteran pointed out, he might not have grasped the intelligence : "I doubt whether we will ever find out what Tony Blair knew at any particular time," he said "unless he signed a piece of paper which turns up. He believes what he is saying."

Mr Thielmann, the former intelligence analyst, expressed little optimism that either British or American inquiry would get to the crux of the issue – the politicisation of intelligence: "We are like-minded in whitewashes, [twisting] intelligence, and going to war when it is not necessary."


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