LONDON: Britain's spy services emerge less bloodied and battered than their US colleagues from investigations into the quality of intelligence on Iraq and the way it was used to justify war.
Compared with last week's devastating indictment of the US intelligence community by a Senate committee, the conclusions of a British inquiry on Wednesday were relatively restrained.
But in many respects the reports highlighted similar weaknesses: shortcomings in supervision, failure to circulate key intelligence to those who needed to see it, and a tendency to assume worst-case scenarios on Iraq's weapons programmes.
Above all, they emphasised an over-reliance in both London and Washington on patchy intelligence material and a failure to recognise gaps and limitations in the knowledge of the security services.
The US intelligence community "did not accurately or adequately explain to policymakers the uncertainties" behind their assessments, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported last Friday.
A British inquiry on Wednesday said it was a "serious weakness" that caveats from intelligence chiefs were not spelt out in a September 2002 dossier which set out the government's case for disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "More weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear," the report by a former top civil servant, Lord Butler, said.
ASSIGNING BLAME: Intelligence assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons were used by President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify going to war. Both leaders have come under intense political pressure as more than a year has passed with no such arsenals having been found.
In examining what went wrong, Butler highlighted some crucial mistakes, including the notorious claim that Saddam could deploy some weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice. But he apportioned no blame for the quality of the intelligence and the way it was used.
By contrast, last week's Senate committee placed the fault squarely with the US intelligence community, citing "a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytical trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection".
It portrayed a "group think" dynamic in which the security establishment collectively assumed that Iraq had an active and growing programme to produce weapons of mass destruction.
While CIA chief George Tenet stepped down weeks before the US report, citing personal reasons, the British inquiry voiced strong support for the appointment of John Scarlett, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as new chief of MI6, responsible for foreign intelligence gathering.
SIMILAR DIAGNOSIS: But the sharply contrasting outcomes masked similarities in the underlying problems diagnosed by the two probes. Both found that key security personnel had failed at times to be supplied with intelligence they needed to know, because of what Butler described as unduly strict "compartmentalization" within the system.
Both had drawn mistaken conclusions about alleged weapons programmes from analysing Iraqi imports of "dual use" materials with both military and civilian applications. In the United States, the Senate found a "failure of intelligence community managers throughout their leadership chains to adequately supervise the work of their analysts and collectors".
In similar vein, the Butler report urged steps to ensure "effective scrutiny and validation of human intelligence sources" and to make sure this was properly resourced and organized.
Both reports highlighted the scarcity of intelligence sources inside Iraq after United Nations inspectors left the country in December, 1998. While the Senate report said US intelligence did not have a single source collecting information inside Iraq about weapons programmes after that date, Butler said Britain had retained a small number.
But a "high proportion" of these sources and their reports had been thrown into doubt since the war. "I think it is very much as people expected, in the sense that it was always going to clear Tony Blair and the government to some extent," said Alex Standish, editor of the influential Jane's Intelligence Digest periodical.
"I do not think that the problems identified will be things that were not already known," Standish said, noting that it was sometimes hard to prevent spies from coming up with the answers their political masters wanted to hear.
"At times the problem is not so much pressure as expectation of what should be found, a sort of self-censorship," he said. "Career intelligence officers can be very aware of what their superiors are looking for."
Few intelligence officials would be overly shocked that Blair escaped blame, given that he had been at pains to stress a key pre-war dossier on Iraq's WMDs was explicitly the work of the spy services.
"There was never really any doubt" that Blair would get off, Standish said. He had been very clever in making sure that the intelligence service accepted, in the management-speak, 'ownership' of the dossier."
As for the political fall-out, Blair might also be fortunate, analysts said. For all the media fuss about the Butler report, most Britons were more concerned about issues such as health services, education, crime and the economy, said Dr Stephen Driver, from the University of Sussex. "I think the key thing is that the war in Iraq does not figure highly," he said. -Reuters/AFP
