LONDON: We must not allow ourselves to be diverted by Downing Street, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the prime minister’s chief spin doctor, from extremely serious issues which go to the very heart of how we are being ruled. Ministers are desperate to reduce it all to a row about the BBC, its questioning of the reasons for going to war in general and a report by its defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, in particular.

On the face of it, they seem to be succeeding. Mr Campbell took on the BBC after giving evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee on Thursday, knowing the media would lap it up. On Friday Jack Straw continued the onslaught on the beleaguered Gilligan.

Mr Gilligan’s crime was to report that an intelligence source had told him last September’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was changed at the behest of Downing Street and the claim that such weapons were ready for use in 45 minutes was inserted into it.

I have no idea who the source was. What is certain is that for months the intelligence and security services had been expressing deep concern about pressure placed on them by their political masters and the use to which their secret information would be put.

They never wanted an intelligence dossier published. They successfully kiboshed the idea early last year by telling Downing Street that there was nothing new to say. But pressure continued to grow. They argued that there was still nothing new to say, adding as an excuse that any new intelligence could not be published anyway since that would reveal sensitive sources.

The security and intelligence services knew full well that any dossier would be shamelessly used by the government to promote a war against Iraq. They were generally opposed a war on the grounds that, far from making the world a safer place, it would make it more dangerous, because they saw the real enemy as extreme Muslim terrorism.

They asked why a war should be fought now. Iraq was being successfully contained. It was an argument which became even stronger when UN inspectors returned to Iraq at the end of last year only to be withdrawn for failing to find in a few weeks what tens of thousands of invading Americans and Britons have yet to discover.

Early in September, the intelligence community was still expressing confidence that Tony Blair and his Downing Street advisers had been persuaded to forget the whole idea of publishing a dossier. “The dossier will no longer play a role, there’s very little new to put in it,” I was told by a well- placed source. I don’t know where MPs get their information, but certainly other journalists were getting the same message as I was.

When it finally became clear that Blair, on Campbell’s advice, was adamant that a dossier which had been drawn up half- heartedly by the joint intelligence committee, would indeed be published, MI6, MI5, GCHQ, and the Defence Intelligence Staff bowed to the inevitable. What John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC, described as a “debate” with Mr Campbell then took place.

The result was a 50-page document containing everything MI6 and others could possibly think of. It included the 45-minute claim — mentioned four times — and the claim that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure uranium from the west African state of Niger.

Only later did we learn through the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that the claim was first made on the basis of forged documents. Subsequently, British intelligence sources insisted there was separate information pointing in the same direction. Blair said nothing about the forgeries.

As the controversy grew over the 45-minute claim, it was said first to come from an Iraqi source “deemed to be reliable”, then a “senior Iraqi”, and then an “Iraqi general”. (Ministers admitted the claim came from a single uncorroborated source, the charge they are now making against Mr Gilligan for his story.)

Mr Campbell insists the claim was in the original draft of the dossier which, he told the Commons committee, had been put together “over many months”. Yesterday, Mr Straw said the claim was not included until a matter of weeks before the dossier’s publication on September 24 last year.

Mr Scarlett and his colleagues may not be politicians but they have astute political antennae. They know what their masters wanted. The dossier was cleverly worded, with enough conditional phrases to satisfy their professional consciences but also enough for ministers and their spin doctors to play with. With gritted teeth, Mr Scarlett took the view that what ministers chose to do with the dossier, once published, was up to them, though others in the intelligence world were not so sanguine. Thus Mr Campbell and ministers can argue that the contents of the dossier was fully approved by the JIC.

By early this year, Mr Campbell clearly wanted more. Without telling the JIC — though he says his relations with Mr Scarlett are excellent — he concocted the now famous “dodgy dossier” which included material from a Californian PhD student.

Mr Campbell told MPs this week that it was intended only as a briefing note for “six Sunday newspaper journalists”. However it was placed in the Commons library, and described by Mr Blair to MPs in these terms and with no hint of irony: “I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this, or giving us this information, and making it up.” Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, described this dossier in his address to the UN security council as “exquisite”. Mr Campbell has apologised for the dossier.

Mr Straw on Friday was still trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel, describing to MPs the discovery of mobile trailers in Iraq as “significant evidence of the existence” of Iraq’s banned weapons programme. There is no evidence for this, as a secret US state department intelligence report confirms.

In evidence to the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry, ministers put intelligence reports into perspective. “In my early days”, said the former foreign secretary, Lord Howe, “I was naive enough to get excited about intelligence reports. Many look, at first sight, to be important and interesting and significant and then when we check them they are not even straws in the wind. They are cornflakes in the wind”.

His successor, Lord Hurd, remarked: “There is nothing particularly truthful about a report simply because it is a secret one. People sometimes get excited because a report is secret and they think that therefore it has some particular validity. It is not always so in my experience.”

It seems that in his determination to go to war, Mr Blair believed his trump card would be the publication of “secret intelligence”, a kind of exotic substance that, he hoped, when released, would convince even the most sceptical. Yet intelligence of this kind is rarely, if ever, foolproof as any practitioner of the art will tell you. It certainly cannot be used to stifle suspicion that we were all taken to war under a false pretext.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.