The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
675.
Many of Iraq’s
perceived capabilities, such as relatively small,
transportable
or mobile
facilities to produce chemical and biological agents or
documentation left
over from
past programmes, were seen as likely to be difficult to find in a
country the
size of Iraq.
676.
The JIC
Assessment of 11 October 2002 stated that a good intelligence flow
from
inside
Iraq, supporting tougher inspections, would be “central to
success”.281
677.
On 30 January
2003, Mr Scarlett wrote that it was odd that the Iraqi regime
did
not appear
“to be worried about the obvious risk of leaks from the thousands
of people
aware of
this concealment activity”.282
Mr Scarlett
attributed that success to the “brutal
discipline”
of the regime.
678.
Mr Scarlett
stated that he continued:
“… to be
struck by the regime’s ability to conduct complex surveillance
and
deception
operations without unforced errors or major slip ups. Co-ordinating
the
dispersal
of materials and associated documentation around the country and
fielding
surprise
UNMOVIC and IAEA visits to hundreds of sites in a few weeks is a
complex
undertaking
and evidence of the regime’s continuing grip on the population at
least
of central
Iraq.”
679.
A key
element of the Assessments was the reporting and intelligence
on
Iraq’s
intentions to conceal its activities, deceive the inspectors and
obstruct the
conduct of
inspections, particularly Iraq’s attitudes to preventing interviews
with
officials
who were identified as associated with its proscribed programmes or
who
had been
involved in Iraq’s unilateral destruction of its weapons and
facilities.
680.
The large
number of intelligence reports about Iraq’s activities
were
interpreted
from the perspective that Iraq’s objectives were to conceal
its
programmes.
681.
For instance,
reporting in late November 2002 that Saddam Hussein was
confident
that
inspectors would not find anything was interpreted as confidence
that Iraq’s policy of
concealment
would work, not as an indication that there was nothing
to find.
682.
In his minute
to Sir David Manning of 17 March 2003, Mr Scarlett
described
UNMOVIC’s
failure to uncover significant chemical and biological weapons
as
“disappointing”,
but “not wholly unexpected”.283
281
JIC
Assessment, 11 October 2002, ‘Iraq: The Return of UN
Inspectors’.
282
Minute
Scarlett to Manning, 30 January 2003, ‘Iraq: JIC Assessment and
Personal Observations’.
283
Minute
Scarlett to Manning, 17 March 2003, ‘Iraqi WMD: Evidence of
Possession’.
412