On Tuesday, 24 September 2002 Tony Blair stood up in the House of Commons and waved a dossier. ‘The threat of Saddam and weapons of mass destruction is not American or British propaganda,’ he said. ‘The history and present threat are real.’ These words were vital, at the time, since many MPs believed this country had no business waging war in Mesopotamia. It was in Mr Blair’s interests to point up the threat from Iraq. ‘The document discloses that Saddam’s military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them,’ he wrote in the foreword. As Mr Blair’s officials had foreseen, these words had a big impact. A banner headline in the Evening Standard read ‘45 minutes from attack’. In so far as these claims made sense, they were quite untrue.
Saddam turned out not to have such stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and certainly no capacity to launch them ‘within 45 minutes’. These errors would have emerged anyway, in the course of the defeat of Saddam. What would never have emerged, had it not been for one enterprising reporter, was a series of other amazing facts about the production of this influential dossier. Neither the public nor the Commons knew that on 18 September, six days before publication, the contents had been challenged by Brian Jones, an MoD official who described himself as ‘the most senior and experienced intelligence community official working on WMD’. One member of Jones’s staff protested that the 45-minute claim was ‘rather strong, since it was based on a single source’. On 19 September, Brian Jones had a meeting to discuss the dossier with Dr David Kelly CMG, who acted as a consultant to the Defence Intelligence Staff, and who had enormous experience of Iraq.
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