One Year After Dossier, UK Intelligence Under Fire
Wed September 24, 2003 08:22 AM ET
By Dominic Evans
LONDON (Reuters) - Ten years ago, Britain's MI6 intelligence service was so secret the government would not publicly acknowledge its existence.
A decade on, the agency which helped produce Prime Minister Tony Blair's contentious dossier on Iraqi weapons might wish it could slip quietly back into the shadows.
On the first anniversary of the dossier's publication, it stands accused of pandering to political pressure to "sex up" the threat from Baghdad to help Blair make the case for toppling Saddam Hussein.
Worse still, the failure to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq five months after Saddam's overthrow raises the possibility that spies who said he could launch the weapons at 45 minutes' notice committed a major intelligence blunder.
"We have not to date found anything in Iraq that comes anywhere near a weapons of mass destruction program," said Andrew Garfield, director of the International Center for Security Analysis at King's College London.
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And: One Year After Dossier, UK Intelligence Under Fire
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