4.3 |
Iraq WMD assessments, October 2002 to March 2003
659.
In response to
a question about the extent to which SIS had been obliged to
rely
on sources
who were not WMD experts and the implications of that position,
SIS4
confirmed
SIS did not generally have agents with first-hand, inside knowledge
of Iraq’s
nuclear,
chemical, biological or ballistic missile
programmes.273
660.
Sir David
Omand told the Inquiry:
“I think
there were certainly people in the intelligence community, and
there are still
some, who
believe that something will turn up in Syria, and I am certainly
not going
to break my
own rules and say categorically that won’t happen. We could all
still be
surprised.
But there was a sense in which, because of past successes – very,
very
considerable
successes supporting this Government, that SIS overpromised
and
underdelivered,
and when that became clear that the intelligence was very hard
to
find … they
really were having to bust a gut to generate the
intelligence.
“I think
the Butler Committee really uncovered that the trade craft at that
point
wasn’t as
good as it should have been for validation … that’s one of the
background
reasons why
people were very unwilling to actually conclude: no … we may
have
miscalculated,
or misassessed this.”274
661.
As the current
version of National
Intelligence Machinery explains,
JIC
Assessments
put intelligence in the context of wider knowledge available and
past
judgements
and historic evidence.275
They also
need to try to understand, drawing on
all sources
at their disposal, the motivations and thinking of the intelligence
targets
and sources.
662.
Reflecting the
findings and recommendations of the Butler Review in relation to
the
nature of
intelligence and the way in which it was used before the conflict
in 2003, the
document
also states:
“Intelligence
… may by its nature be fragmentary or incomplete. It needs to
be
analysed in
order to identify significant facts, and then evaluated in respect
of the
reliability
of the information in order to allow a judgement to be made about
the
weight to
be given to it before circulation either as single source reports
or collated
and
integrated with other material as assessments.
“SIS and
GCHQ evaluate and circulate mainly single source intelligence.
The
Security
Service also circulates single source intelligence although its
primary
product is
assessed intelligence. Defence Intelligence produces mainly
assessed
reports on
an all-source basis …
273
Private
hearing, Part 1, page 68.
274
Public
hearing, 20 January 2010, pages 63-64.
275
Cabinet
Office, 19 November 2010, National
Intelligence Machinery, page
24.
409