4.3 |
Iraq WMD assessments, October 2002 to March 2003
578.
Asked what
conclusions he had drawn when reviewing the case in
2004,
SIS3 replied:
“Well, I
think it illustrated, first of all, the dangers of a chain of
sourcing …
“The second
point is that when you have senior people who reach down
into
the
machinery and try moving the cogs, if I may put it like that … you
obviously
disenfranchise
the operational chain of command. You cut out expertise,
and
perhaps you
also disable that element of challenge which is, I think, a very
important
part of
operational life in the Service.
“The third
point is there was a judgment … that we had overpromised
and
underdelivered.
I absolutely agreed with that judgment. It’s precisely what we
did.”223
579.
Pressed to
clarify to whom he was referring, SIS3 told the Inquiry he was
reporting
what people
had said about Sir Richard Dearlove, and that it had been
controversial at
the time at
an operational and working level where he thought “people were
genuinely
annoyed and
concerned”.224
580.
Asked whether
there were political pressures not to be as careful as SIS
should
have been
over an unvalidated, untested source, SIS3 replied:
“Well, it
was obviously pressure – whether you describe it as political
pressure
or merely
pressure from Assessments Staff – to have more material, in a
sense
responding
to the tasking that we had received. Clearly when you are under a
lot of
pressure to
produce intelligence, there is a risk that you will take short
cuts.”225
581.
The
information in the report issued on 11 September was very striking
and
further
information confirming the material as the source promised would
have
been of
great importance in providing proof that Iraq had chemical and
biological
programmes.
582.
The way the
report of 11 September was used to support critical
judgements
in the
dossier without being subject to evaluation and challenge by
the
appropriate
technical experts or properly assessed by the JIC is addressed
in
Section
4.2.
583.
The
judgements were then carried forward into assessments, briefings
and
public
statements without those involved in providing advice to Ministers
and
senior
officials or the recipients of that advice being aware of the
doubts which
had emerged
within SIS about the sourcing chain at any point before the
decision
to take
military action.
223
Private
hearing, 2010, page 17.
224
Private
hearing, 2010, page 18.
225
Private
hearing, 2010, page 19.
391