Evidence Revealed - CIA And M16 Spy Agencies KNEW Iraq
Didn't Have WMDs Before Invasion
. 
Fresh
evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret
channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence
that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony
Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear,
chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active",
"growing" and "up and running".
A
special BBC Panorama programme tonight will reveal how British and US
intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion
that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not
passed to subsequent inquiries.
It
describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station
chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq
had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.
Sabri
said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally
fabricated".
However,
Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's
head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had
no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days
before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi
weapons dossier in September 2002.
Lord
Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of
intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that
he was not told about Sabri's comments, and that he should have been.
Butler
says of the use of intelligence: "There were ways in which people were
misled or misled themselves at all stages."
When it
was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was
the British public, Butler replied: "Yes, I think they're, they're, they
got every reason think that."
The programme
shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to
information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.
One
unidentified MI6 officer has told the Chilcot inquiry that at one stage
information was "being torn off the teleprinter and rushed across to
Number 10".
Another
said it was "wishful thinking… [that] promised the crock of gold at the
end of the rainbow".
The
programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from
Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including
the French.
It also
shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the
CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably
about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan
al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian
in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.
Panorama
says it asked for an interview with Blair but he said he was "too
busy".
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