Dossier so dodgy its WMDs were weather balloons

THE first draft of the 2002 dossier by John Scarlett’s Joint Intelligence Committee admitted there was ‘very little i ntelligence’ about Saddam’s WMD programme.

But just over two weeks later, Scarlett had hardened this up to: ‘Iraq could produce more biological agents within days . . . and nerve agents within months.’

No new proof had been produced for this new conclusion. The JIC’s judgment had been sharpened after Alastair Campbell’s intervention. Campbell had told Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, it required: ‘A substantial rewrite . . . It had to be revelatory and we needed to show what was new.’

Campbell relied on Scarlett, whom he called a ‘mate’, and the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, who was praised as ‘really helpful’, to deliver the goods. Scarlett’s solution was to offer a compromise: Saddam did possess WMDs, although he admitted the intelligence was ‘sporadic and patchy’.

MI6 lacked trustworthy Iraqi agents. An Iraqi chemical engineer, who arrived in Germany in 1999, claimed to have worked in a mobile biological warfare laboratory. Codenamed Curveball, he was interrogated by German intelligence for two years. Dearlove accepted his eyewitness account of there being WMDs.

There was also an assortment of information gleaned from highranking Iraqis who had flitted across the border to Jordan.

Among them was Hussein Kamel, who said Saddam’s WMD programme had been destroyed in 1991. But intelligence agencies could not agree if Kamel was reliable or had been planted by Saddam.

But, in 2002, there was a prejudicial mindset that Saddam was concealing his WMDs. So when an MI6 operative in Jordan was told by the head of Iraqi intelligence that Saddam’s weapons development had been halted by the Anglo-American bombing in 1991, the intelligence agencies didn’t believe it. They simply did not grasp the dictator’s unwillingness to admit his weakness.

Scarlett, who was under intense pressure f rom Campbell to produce the most convincing case, deliberately omitted from the final dossier his damning summary that the evidence for WMDs was ‘sporadic and patchy’.

Instead, he wrote that Saddam ‘continued to produce chemical and biological weapons’.

Desperate for something new, on the eve of publication he made what he called a ‘last call for any items of intelligence that agencies think should be included’.

That produced a golden nugget suddenly discovered by MI6. Based on information from an Iraqi informant, Scarlett included in the dossier hard new evidence that Saddam possessed ‘weapons’ that could be armed with chemical or biological warheads.

‘The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.’

Scarlett never publicly explained the genesis of that account or described the weapon. But he should have known MI6’s contact was an Iraqi brigadier passing on gossip about a short- range artillery shell and not, as was later assumed, a long-range rocket.

BLAIR’S critics would refer to the omission of that detail as an example of ‘sexing up’ the dossier. Conditional words, such as ‘indicates’, ‘probably’ and ‘could be’, were removed.

On September 17, Campbell emailed Scarlett, saying that, after reading the latest draft, Blair was pleased, but asked whether a ‘might’ and a ‘ may’ could be replaced with concrete assertions. No sooner said than done.

To reinforce the dossier, Blair decided to express his own opinion in a foreword (written by Campbell) to the JIC’s report. It made mention four times of ‘WMDs to be ready within 45 minutes’. Scarlett read the foreword but made no adverse comment — and his silence deceived Whitehall insiders.

Three weeks after the fall of Baghdad, ministers heard that Curveball’s ‘mobile laboratory for the manufacture of biological agents’ had been tracked down. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a machine that manufactured meteorological balloons.