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530 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
Division Chief, who worked closely with Britain's SIS, has
revealed that Naji Sabri, Iraq's Foreign Minister, did a deal to
reveal the country's military secrets. Drumheller recounts that
once policy-makers learned what Sabri had to say - that Iraq
had no active WMD programme - 'They stopped being interested
in the intelligence.'71
There was also blatant political dishonesty. The British government
had made three assertions in its WMD dossier. First, that
there was plausible intelligence to suggest that the Iraqis might
have hidden some old biological or chemical stocks from 1991.
This was true, but these weapons were unlikely to be usable,
and were at best of historical interest. Second, that there was
evidence that Iraq continued to seek nuclear components on
the world market, and nurtured future ambitions. This was also
true, but no one thought for a moment that the country had
got far with reconstituting its nuclear programme. Everything
turned on the third claim, that Iraq was engaged in continued
production of WMD. This assertion was made forcibly by the
Prime Minister in his personal foreword to the Iraqi WMD dossier
in September 2002. There was no credible evidence for this.72
Later, Blair assured the House of Commons that the intelligence
was 'extensive, detailed, authoritative'. This statement was also
deeply misleading. 73 Equally, Butler noticed that there was no
change in the intelligence reports on Iraqi WMD during the
period between 2002 and 2003, when the British government
shifted dramatically from a policy of containing Iraq to one of
confrontation. 74 Alastair Campbell summed this up best in his
diary, noting that the hardest question was: 'Why now What
was it that we knew now that we didn't before that made us
believe that we had to do it now'75
In one respect, Lord Butler's report was odd. As we have
seen, GCHQ produces the majority of Britain's intelligence.
Astonishingly, in the 216 pages of the report 'GCHQ' appears
only once, and that is in the list of abbreviations. It seems that
Cheltenham was referred to in the text of an earlier draft, but
in the published version all discussion of it has mysteriously