Government must FACE SCRUTINY ON WMD

THERE seems little doubt that a third-term Tony Blair, like the second term George W Bush, will use his reelection to bat away any further questions about Iraq's non-existent WMD. The newsmanagement process has already been in full swing with highly selective and misleading briefings.

The release of Elizabeth Wilmshurst's resignation letter shows there are fresh questions to be raised about the legality of the war and the Attorney Generals advice.

But the Government should also face scrutiny over their attempts to muddy the debate over the WMD fiasco.

In essence they repeat "intelligence was to blame" and add "but it will never be allowed to happen again".

Yesterday's ministerial statement about the implementation of the conclusions of the Butler Review simply adds to the smokescreen.

The "key actions that have already been taken" are largely cosmetic.

Improving the quality of reporting from MI6 cannot be a bad thing, but none that crossed my desk justified the exaggerations I saw in the Prime Minister's foreword to his September dossier.

As Butler observed, there was nothing fundamental that prevented the distribution of vital sensitive intelligence reports to me or my staff, so I can only wonder about the "new" arrangements that have been put in place.

The confidential guide to readers of intelligence will soon be lost and forgotten in the mountain of paperwork they have to deal with.

This does nothing to remove the incentive for individual agencies to curry favour by briefing inadequately assessed intelligence to influential customers, to impress rather than inform them.

The absence of a Staff Councillor

did nothing to prevent me and other colleagues clearly "speaking truth unto power" and what is needed is a means of ensuring the JIC understands it has experts and listens to them.

Future plans to increase the Assessment Staff by about ten bodies will hardly begin to enhance that organisation's capability of keeping pace with the full scope and volume of the requirement. Further, there is no explanation of how the real engine of intelligence analysis that resides in the Defence Intelligence Staff will be extracted from the MOD's highly centralised career management system, which does not properly cater for specialists, to make an interdepartmental "Professional Head of Intelligence Analysis" at all relevant. There is also no mention of the process of central funding of the DIS recommended by Butler to provide it with a degree of independence from the pressures and priorities of its parent department.

What desperately needs to be "fixed" is the quality of the leadership. A full sense of "community" must be reestablished in intelligence. It should be ring-fenced - organisationally and financially - to isolate it from undue political influence on the product (but not the tasking). Within the fence, barriers and competition between organisations should be eliminated probably by the creation of a single intelligence entity - intelligence cannot operate effectively in an internal market place. There should be more professional intelligence analysts both on the JIC and within its Assessment Staff.

Finally, the Intelligence and Security Committee should be established as an extraordinary parliamentary committee, rather than a Cabinet committee that reports to the Prime Minister. All its members should be cleared as privy councillors to see as much intelligence as possible. Ideally, its chairman should not be a member of the party in government but should have had experience in government at the highest level. It should be supported by well qualified analysts who are prepared to be awkward, like the recently sacked John Morrison.

This new ISC should be recognised as the organisation to which the intelligence community is responsible for the quality of its product. There may be some disadvantage in such an arrangement with respect to a few exceptional intelligence-related tasks, but these problems would not be insurmountable.

The opportunity is receding fast for the real lessons of the Iraq WMD intelligence failure to be learned.

Dr Brian Jones is the former head of the Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons section of the Ministry of Defence's Defence Intelligence Staff

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