LONDON: He is there at almost every official photo-opportunity with Saddam Hussein, a compact and wiry military officer, his khaki shirt rolled up to his elbows, a beret pulled across his brow. A heavy handlebar moustache hangs over a solid jaw, grey with a permanent five o’clock shadow.

The recent prominence of Abdul Tawab el-Mulla Howeish, Deputy Prime Minister and Military Industrialization Minister of Iraq, has not gone unnoticed by independent analysts and intelligence officers.

Few things in Saddam’s world, say experts, are without significance. In this case, they speculate his constant presence at the dictator’s side may be a message to the Iraqi people and his own Baath Party cadres.

It was the Military Industrialization Commission which was responsible for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes in the Eighties. The assumption is that, as its present head, Howeish has primary responsibility in this field.

The meaning of the recent meetings between Howeish, the scientists under his command and Saddam, say Iraq watchers, is simple: it is a warning to the West, and an assurance to members of his regime, that over the past year Saddam has been accelerating his efforts to arm his military again with weapons of mass destruction.

If true, it is part of an intelligence picture that is at best fragmented. But what Howeish and Saddam are up is the biggest question. And the ability of intelligence agencies in Britain and Washington to find out what their intentions are is already in doubt in the wake of their failures before September 11.

There are other ifs besides Howeish: about Iraq’s capability to produce, stockpile and deploy weapons of mass destruction and its willingness to use them.

There are the persistent claims - taken seriously by intelligence agencies - that Howeish’s organization may have built as many as 300 new chemical and biological facilities, including a biological weapons plant codenamed ‘Tahhaddy’ - or ‘The Challenge’ - on the banks of the River Tigris. Most worrying is the claim that some weapons may already have been deployed.

Recently an Iraqi opposition leader gave US officials a paper - allegedly an assessment provided by Iranian intelligence - indicating that Saddam had authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shia Muslim resistance should the United States attack. Worrying as these claims are, they are still ‘ifs’.

Next week, as Tony Blair issues his long-heralded dossier on Iraq’s efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction, the credibility of the intelligence gathered on Iraq - including accounts delivered by defectors such as Adnan Saeed al-Haidari - will once again be under the spotlight. The challenge will be to turn those ‘ifs’ into hard facts.

While few expect that dossier to reveal much new, those familiar with the document say it provides the most thorough assessment of the available intelligence - intelligence gathered not only by MI6, but also by the CIA and other friendly foreign agencies on Saddam’s programme to develop weapons of mass destruction. Among that intelligence is material on Iraq’s nuclear procurement efforts that US officials promise will be ‘declassified’ in the next few weeks.

But the question detractors will be asking is, how good is the intelligence on Iraq? And what does it mean?

Senior US officials have warned sceptics not to expect either Bush or Blair to produce a ‘smoking Iraqi gun’. Instead, Bush administration officials have said, the case against Iraq will be constructed from a ‘mosaic’ of new reports underscoring warnings about Iraq’s military ambitions.

Sources familiar with the British dossier, compiled under the auspices of the Cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee, stress that the dossier will not simply be a ‘greatest hits compilation’ of publicly available reports on Iraq.

They say that while the ‘headlines’ of the document may be familiar, describing Iraq’s retention of hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, while pursuing anew its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb, it is the new detail produced by the intelligence community that will be persuasive. It is on this detail that the legitimacy of war against Iraq will be judged.

Defectors have told US intelligence officials that building a nuclear bomb is Saddam’s ‘top priority again’, and how his efforts to acquire chemical weapons have been equal in vigour. They provide the routine stories of torture, murder, rape and mutilation.

Undoubtedly, some of the accounts are true. Equally, some of the stories will have been fabricated to please the intelligence agents handling the defectors.

But there is no doubt that some of the defectors have been of the highest quality as intelligence assets, not least in revealing the degree to which Saddam had hidden some programmes from inspectors after the Gulf war.

Iraq’s biological weapons facilities were so well hidden that UN officials discovered them only in 1995 - four years after the start of inspections - and then only after the defection of the programme’s chief, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, who disclosed that secret laboratories were producing lethal bacteria by the ton. Regarded as the ‘star’ defector, Kamal was murdered after being persuaded to return to Iraq.

Now America’s Defence Intelligence Agency has a new ‘star’ defector — al-Haidari, a civil engineer who escaped from Iraq last year and has told his handlers he was asked to build secure dust-free ‘clean rooms’ in the laboratories for Iraq’s new weapons programme.

After fleeing Iraq last December, al-Haidari claimed that 300 secret weapons facilities have been ‘reactivated’ since the withdrawal of UN inspectors.

If none of the intelligence sources mentioned is likely to be convincing, argue those familiar with the sources, that does not mean that, combined, they fail to make a compelling case. Instead, the long history of Iraqi evasion, in the face of UN resolutions and even with UN inspectors on the ground, combined with what is known, means it is impossible to leave Saddam to his own devices.

Significantly, they argue, Saddam’s past use of chemical weapons means he is likely to do the same again. This is the last and most controversial area of intelligence work: analysis of the available facts. And it is here that intelligence is in danger of becoming overtly politicized.

But it is in the area of professional objectivity, say some, that the intelligence community, particularly in the US, is being undermined by figures of the Bush administration.

Among those who have been most critical of the way America’s intelligence has been handled are two of those officials most hawkish over Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz has argued that the senior analyst of any intelligence material should not be the intelligence professional, but the elected official. Rumsfeld, as chair of the Rumsfeld Commission in 1998, proposed an even more worrying doctrinal shift for US intelligence gathering, insisting that ‘absence of evidence’ should not be regarded as ‘evidence of absence’ in issues such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

It is this approach that is likely to contribute to the greatest scepticism about any intelligence assessment over Iraq.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.