Failures spanned all major western agencies

ALTHOUGH the CIA must bear the greatest responsibility for the intelligence failure that over-estimated the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programmes, it is not the only intelligence service under scrutiny. Every major western intelligence agency, including MI6, also thought Saddam was continuing to develop his weapons programmes in defiance of UN resolutions.

Even when the arguments in favour and against the war were being batted back and forth at the United Nations in the autumn of 2002, no western agency suggested that Saddam was anything other than in breach of his international obligations.

Every intelligence agency believed he had unaccounted for chemical and biological weapons.

Now, as former UN weapons inspector David Kay reported: "It turns out we were all wrong probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing."

However, when Saddam expelled UN weapons inspectors in 1998, western intelligence services lost their best sources of information on the nature of Saddam’s activities. Agencies had to rely upon technological surveillance and the unreliable evidence of Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi. The CIA had, it has been reported, only four sources inside Iraq.

Among the most grievous errors, it transpires, was the claim that Saddam had the ability to launch a chemical or biological attack at 45 minutes’ notice. That claim referred only to battlefield and not, as was suggested, long-range missile systems that could conceivably threaten British interests in Cyprus.

The CIA knew of, and had rejected, this claim, believing it to be unreliable at best and most probably entirely bogus.

The controversial claim that Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger was also treated sceptically by the CIA. That intelligence made it into George Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, despite the CIA having excised it from a speech Mr Bush had given in October of the previous year.

In retrospect, the principal lesson to be learnt from the ongoing enquiries on either side of the Atlantic could be that policy should come from intelligence, not vice versa.