45 Minutes: Behind the Blair Claim

45 Minutes: Behind the Blair Claim
False Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons Had Dubious Origins, Fateful Omissions

By Glenn Frankel and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 29, 2004

LONDON -- In early September 2002, as the United States and Britain sought to build the case for confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that his government would soon publish a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Racing to meet Blair's deadline, Britain's intelligence services produced a 50-page report, the highlight of which was a claim that Iraqi troops could launch chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order.

The headlines that followed were dramatic. "Missiles Fly in 45 Minutes," read the usually sedate Times of London. "Brits 45 Mins From Doom," blared the more flamboyant Sun tabloid. Its story began: "British servicemen and tourists in Cyprus could be annihilated by germ warfare missiles launched by Iraq."

But the headlines were wrong -- and the dossier proved to be wrong as well.

The dossier had omitted the fact that the claim referred to battlefield munitions such as artillery shells, not to long-range missiles, which meant they could not reach such targets as Israel or Cyprus. Nor did it disclose that the claim had come secondhand from a single, uncorroborated source, and that some of the government's own experts believed it was questionable. And Blair has recently conceded that he did not know what the claim was referring to when he published it.

Weapons inspectors scouring Iraq have found no weapons of mass destruction. And the 45-minute claim has become the focus of a fierce debate here over whether Blair and President Bush used intelligence information to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Experts in the field of weapons and intelligence say the case illustrates the pitfalls that arise when political leaders seek to invoke intelligence findings to justify their policies.

"One of the lessons here is, don't pretend to the public that the picture the intelligence services provide is clear and accurate, because it's not," said Michael Clarke, director of the International Policy Institute at King's College London. "Intelligence is never a picture, it's a series of inkblots."

Blair's spokesman has accused the prime minister's critics of "revisionism" in focusing on the credibility of the claim. "People appear to be implying that the government's case for taking action against Saddam was based on the 45-minute point," he told reporters earlier this month. "That is simply not true. The government's case has been based on the fact that Saddam had posed a threat and had been in breach of U.N. resolutions."

Sources of the Claim

This report retraces the shadowy journey of the 45-minute claim -- where it likely came from, how it got such a prominent place in the dossier and how it exploded into a controversy that still threatens Blair's premiership. It is based on testimony and documents from three British inquiries: one led by Lord Brian Hutton into the circumstances surrounding the death of a British weapons expert last July and two parliamentary investigations, by the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is also based on statements made in Parliament and interviews with some of the principals.

The origins of the 45-minute claim may lie with Abdul Jalil Mohsen Muhie, a retired Iraqi brigadier general, and his son-in-law, Lt. Col. Dabbagh, commander of an air defense unit in Iraq's western desert.

In separate interviews with a Washington Post reporter, the two men said Dabbagh for several years had provided Muhie with intelligence data about Iraqi military installations, information that Muhie passed on to the Amman, Jordan, office of the Iraqi National Accord, a dissident organization of exiles. Their account first surfaced in an article in London's Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

In the summer of 2002, Dabbagh, who asked that his first name be withheld for his personal security, said he witnessed the arrival at his base of members of Saddam's Fedayeen, an elite militia loyal to Hussein. The militiamen set up camp and unloaded silver and yellow crates. After their arrival, Dabbagh said, he was instructed to pick up gas masks for his unit and was informed by one of his commanders that the militia would use special weapons in case of a U.S. invasion.

"If war breaks out we can use them within 45 minutes," Dabbagh said he was told. While he was not directly informed what the weapons were, he concluded, based upon previous briefings, that they were chemical and biological weapons similar to those Iraq had used against Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

"I have no doubt they were weapons of mass destruction," he said.

Muhie, 63, said he forwarded Dabbagh's information in handwritten notes to relatives, who smuggled them to the Iraqi National Accord office in Amman. The information was then dispatched to London, where the group's leader, Ayad Allawi, gave it to the British intelligence agency MI6 and the CIA.

Dabbagh showed a Washington Post reporter a map with tracing paper on which he had drawn what he said were air defense installations and deployments of unconventional weapons in the western Iraqi desert. "The 45 minutes, it's from me," said Dabbagh, who says he is bitter because he has received no expressions of gratitude or rewards from the United States or Britain for his contribution.

British officials declined to comment on Dabbagh and Muhie's story, which is shadowed by one discrepancy: The men cannot remember exactly when they forwarded the information, but Dabbagh says it may have been in September 2002. Testimony at two British inquiries shows the 45-minute claim arrived at MI6 on Aug. 29.

Once there, it was assessed as important enough to be included in what is known as a CX report. It was immediately passed on to the assessments staff of the top-secret Joint Intelligence Committee, which includes the heads of Britain's four main intelligence agencies and provides weekly reports to the prime minister. By Sept. 9, 2002, it was incorporated into a secret assessment that read: "Intelligence also indicates that chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 20-45 minutes."

The analysts were not certain what kind of weapons the Iraqi officer had referred to, but deduced that they must have been battlefield munitions, according to testimony given to the Hutton inquiry by the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett. The staff was not concerned that the information came secondhand from a single source because, according to a memo, "it came from a reliable and established source, quoting a well-placed senior official."

'Desperate for Information'

The intelligence arrived at an opportune moment. The committee was scrambling to produce the dossier ordered by Blair on Sept. 3. David Omand, security and intelligence coordinator at the Cabinet Office, told the Hutton inquiry that the government was "looking in the cupboard to see if anything had been overlooked."

In that climate, the arrival of the 45-minute claim was quickly seized upon. "They were desperate for information," weapons expert David Kelly later told BBC reporter Susan Watts in a taped interview submitted to the Hutton inquiry. He said officials were "pushing hard for information which could be released. That was one that popped up, and it was seized on."

From the beginning, some analysts had doubts. Brian Jones, a senior official with the Defense Intelligence Staff, told the Hutton inquiry that he and his fellow experts in chemical and biological weapons were wary of the fact that the claim was secondhand -- one unnamed Iraqi source quoting another unnamed senior military source. He said they were also concerned that it did not differentiate between chemical and biological weapons and that there was no collateral intelligence to back it up.

"It didn't give us any real feel that the primary source knew very much about the subject," Jones testified.

Jones said he had no problem with the claim appearing in the dossier but thought that it needed to be carefully qualified and hedged, as it was in a Sept. 10 draft: "Intelligence also indicates that from forward deployed storage sites, chemical and biological munitions could be with military units and ready for firing within 45 minutes."

But by the time the dossier was published on Sept. 24, the language had been hardened and the qualifiers removed. The executive summary, referring to chemical and biological weapons, stated: "Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

Dossier's Omissions

The dossier did not note that the claim came from a single source and was uncorroborated. More important, the qualification that the claim referred to battlefield munitions -- and not to long-range missiles -- had been deleted.

A few days before the dossier was published, according to evidence submitted to the Hutton inquiry, Blair's chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, sent an e-mail to Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director, asking: "Alastair -- what will be the headline in the Standard on the day of publication? What do we want it to be?"

Scarlett, the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, and Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary, would later tell the Hutton inquiry that they knew the headlines in various British papers about the 45-minute claim were wrong but had made no effort to correct them.

"It was a fleeting moment," Scarlett testified. He added: "And beyond that, of course, it is not my immediate responsibility to correct headlines."

There the matter rested until the following May, when Kelly, the weapons expert, met with a BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, and reiterated some of his doubts about the dossier. Gilligan's subsequent report, citing a confidential source, erroneously alleged that Downing Street staff members had ordered the 45-minute claim inserted into the dossier at the last minute despite the fact they knew it was probably wrong. But Gilligan was accurate in reporting that the claim was based on a single source, that it had been incorporated into the dossier at a late stage in the process and that it had caused consternation among some members of the intelligence community.

Blair's government denied the BBC report, but Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, acknowledged that the 45-minute claim was from a single, uncorroborated source.

The report set off a chain of events that eventually led to Kelly's exposure and subsequent suicide. In the inquiries that followed, officials disclosed that the 45-minute claim had been misinterpreted by the media, and that it had been secondhand.

Hutton's report ultimately cleared Blair and his government of exaggerating the dossier. But the two parliamentary committees were more critical.

The select intelligence committee concluded last September that the omission of the context for the 45-minute claim "was unhelpful to an understanding of the issue." The Foreign Affairs Committee said the claim "did not warrant the prominence it was given because it came from a single, uncorroborated source."

Muhie says he still believes the claim was real. "When the army began retreating, the Saddam Fedayeen withdrew those weapons," he said. "They must have destroyed them or hidden them. Nobody knows what happened to them."
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Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad.