Intelligence case oversold?

Tony Blair is flying back from the Evian summit into heavy turbulence. His angry denial of Clare Short's allegation that the public was "duped" over the question of WMD has not reduced the temperature.

Robin Cook has called for an independent inquiry. 73 MPs, including 50 Labour backbenchers, have signed a motion deploring the failure of the coalition to find any weapons of mass destruction. And the Opposition is threatening to drop its support for the government.

Now, we've spoken to a senior figure, intimately involved in the drawing up of the Blair weapons dossier, who says the intelligence community was uneasy at the way some of its information was handled.

Susan Watts reported.

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CLAIRE SHORT:
They weren't saying there was a link to Al-Qaeda and they weren't saying it was weaponised and threatening us in 45 minutes. That's where the spin came in.

UNNAMED MAN:
It is beginning to look as if the Government's committed a monumental blunder.

SUSAN WATTS:
Over the weekend, the storm over the missing weapons of mass destruction focused down on one key point. Was the British public duped over the urgency of dealing with Iraq's banned weapons? The Government's claim that Saddam could mobilise these within 45 minutes is already looking shaky. But Jack Straw has suggested it had never been a key part of the argument.

JACK STRAW:
If you look at, for example, the key speech that the Prime Minister made on the 18 March before the House of Commons, from my quick rereading of it this morning, I can for example, find no reference to this now famous 45 minutes.

WATTS:
But the reference to 45 minutes was there in the Prime Minister's speech to the Commons on the day he published his famous weapons dossier.

TONY BLAIR:
It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which coud be activated within 45 minutes, including against his own Shia population.

WATTS:
And it features in the dossier itself four times. Notably in the Prime Minister's foreword and the executive summary. Today at the G8 summit in Evian, Tony Blair once again found himself in rebuttal mode.

BLAIR:
The idea that we doctored such intelligence is completely and totally false. Every piece of intelligence we presented was cleared properly by the Joint Intelligence Committee.

WATTS:
It's a surprising claim to make, given that it encompasses the other so called dodgy dossier part of which was plagiarised. In any case, today Tony Blair appeared irritated that the weapons issue won't go away.

BLAIR:
I think it's important that if people dully have evidence, they produce it. But it is wrong, frankly for people to make allegations on the basis of so-called anonymous sources when the facts are precisely the facts we've stated.

WATTS:
But in some cases, anonymous sources could be the only way to gain insight into the intelligence world. We've spoken to a senior official intimately involved with the process of pulling together the original September 2002 Blair weapons dossier. We cannot name this person because their livelihood depends on anonymity.

Our source made clear that in the run-up to publishing the dossier, the Government was obsessed with finding intelligence on immediate Iraqi threats. The Government's insistence the Iraqi threat was imminent was a Downing Street interpretation of intelligence conclusions. His point is that while the intelligence community was agreed on the potential Iraqi threat in the future, there was less agreement about the threat the Iraqis posed at that moment. Our source said:

UNNAMED SOURCE:
That was the real concern - not so much what they had now, but what they would have in the future. But that unfortunately was not expressed strongly in the dossier, because that takes the case away for war - to a certain extent. But in the end it was just a flurry of activity and was very difficult to get comments in because people at the top of the ladder didn't want to hear some of the things.

WATTS:
Our source talks of a febrile atmosphere in the days of diplomacy leading to the big Commons debate of September last year. He also talks of the Government seizing on anything useful to the case, including the possible existence of weapons that could be ready within 45 minutes.

UNNAMED SOURCE:
It was a statement that was made and it just got out of all proportion. They were desperate for information, they were pushing hard for information which could be released. That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it's unfortunate that it was. That's why there is the argument between the intelligence services and the Cabinet Office / Number Ten - because they picked up on it and once they've picked up on it, you can't pull it back from them.

WATTS:
And again specifically on the 45-minute point:

UNNAMED SOURCE:
It was an interesting week before the dossier was put out because there were so many people saying "well I'm no so sure about that", or in fact that they were happy with it being in, but not expresses the way that it was, because the word-smithing is actually quite important. The intelligence community are a pretty cautious lot on the whole, but once you get people presenting it for public consumption then of course they use different words.

WATTS:
The problem is that the 45 minutes point was not corroborated. For sceptics it highlights the dangers of relying too heavily on information from defectors. Journalists in America are being accused of running propaganda from the Iraqi National Congress.

RAY MCGOVERN:
All these folks have their own personal agendas, all have axes to grind. The most unreliable source are sources that come out of the immigrant or defector circles. More so when you're talking about a fellow like Chalabi, he's been out of Iraq since the Brooklyn dodgers have been out the New York City and that's a long time indeed.

WATTS:
Back in February, Colin Powell talked of the existence of mobile weapons labs, material from defectors is behind the confident insistence by politician on both sides of the Atlantic that they've now found them. But our source who is in an excellent position to know and spoke of being 90% confident these claims were correct on the day the Pentagon showed the trucks to the world, now puts that confidence level at just 40%. A CIA report last week says the Iraqis claim the trucks were used to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons.

But with the war over does all this really matter? Perhaps intelligence service concern about a future threat from weapons of mass destruction was enough to justify military action. But the Government's critics say that wasn't the basis that the British public or MPs were sold the case for war.

MALCOLM SAVIDGE:
This is extremely grave. Politicians who we have to take seriously have made allegations that Parliament and the people were led to war on false grounds. That is a more serious allegation than anything we've faced in recent times. Effectively if it were true it could be the Prime Minister's Watergate.

WATTS:
Of course, overwhelmingly convincing evidence of weapons may turn up tomorrow and former inspectors say that documents still being read may be key. But until something compelling is produced the pressure looks unlikely to let up.

As for the promised new dossier on new weapons evidence, the question will be "Is there sufficient trust in our government remaining for the public and MPs to believe what ever it might say?"

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.