Demolishing the JIC myth

But the claim that the dossier was produced by the JIC is simply not true. It was not claimed at the time of publication to be the work of the JIC, only when the government needed a shield to hide behind. The dossier was subtitled "The Assessment of the British Government" and refers to the JIC throughout in the third person, while "we" refers to the government. Tony Blair had (falsely) claimed that the dossier would "disclose" the JIC's assessments, not that it represented a JIC assessment in its own right. It emerged during the Hutton Inquiry that during the dossier’s drafting Alastair Campbell had tried and failed to attribute it to the JIC. He had produced a draft of Blair’s foreword that stated unambiguously: "The document published today is the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee." This wording was expressly rejected by John Scarlett , who added five words that should have spelt out that the JIC was neither the document’s author nor seeking to own it: "The document published today is based, in large part, on the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee." That the Butler Review could attribute the dossier to the JIC in spite of this shows how inept that inquiry really was.

The Spin Doctors

But a letter from Scarlett to Blair on 4 June 2003 raises the question of how Hutton could assert that "the dossier was prepared and drafted by a small team of the assessment staff of the JIC."

"The drafting of the revised document was co-ordinated by Julian Miller working with representatives of Departments, including DIS, SIS, GCHQ, and FCO. There were two meetings of two to three hours each, numerous exchanges of drafts and constant consultations between the experts concerned. With the agreement of the Agencies, representatives from the No 10 (Danny Pruce) and FCO Press Offices (John Williams, Paul Hamill and James Paver) were involved."

The spin doctors were on the inside of the process of drafting the dossier, taking part in the actual drafting and in the oversight meetings. This is the untold story of the dossier's authorship. Although the document in question has long been in the public domain, it was released to the Hutton Inquiry too late for the parties to the Inquiry to realize its full significance and has otherwise been overlooked. But it confirms what other evidence to Hutton had suggested - that people whom Alastair Campbell had described as "not terribly closely involved in the process" (Section 36) were more closely "involved" than Campbell himself.

What we now know for certain is that John Williams, then the Foreign Office press secretary and a former Mirror colleague of Campbell, actually wrote the first full draft of the dossier. In fact, it has been revealed that Williams based his draft on an earlier document sent to him by the Coalition Information Centre, a propaganda unit set up by Alastair Campbell to promote UK involvement in US-led wars. So Williams was re-working material that others had produced, such as the JIC assessment staff’s early drafts of the WMD section.

The fact that at least one of the spin doctors took part in actual drafting changes everything about the dossier. None of the official inquiries made any mention of this and all accepted the government's claim that the document was drafted by the same people who would normally draft internal JIC assessment papers. When evidence of the spin doctors' involvement in the dossier emerged late during the Hutton Inquiry, it was falsely claimed by John Scarlett (Section 83) that they had only attended drafting meetings and not taken part in actual drafting. This appears (Section 145) to have been believed by the BBC's counsel. It is very likely - and indeed there is evidence - that that the spin doctors continued to be involved in the actual drafting throughout the process of producing the dossier.

Williams and Pruce did indeed attend both meetings of the dossier drafting group, which took the key decisions on the dossier’s wording. Hamill and Paver may well have attended those meetings as well or may also have taken part in the actual drafting. It is not clear because the government has all but written them out of the story, although the fact that so little has surfaced to justify Scarlett’s description of them as "involved" suggests that their involvement was very much behind the scenes.

Pruce, who was described by Campbell (Section 36) as "making contributions effectively above his pay grade", was Campbell's liaison on the dossier throughout the process, as numerous documents demonstrate. He had at least one suggestion, that the dossier include a section on the role of intelligence, taken up.

Campbell

But Campbell himself was involved throughout and made significant structural changes and "drafting suggestions" that amounted to real sexing-up. He was probably responsible for the sexing-up of the notorious 45 minutes claim, if not for its actual inclusion. Among the other changes that Campbell had made to the dossier were having a claim added that Saddam was making progress in spite of sanctions and rewriting the nuclear section so that a fabricated claim the Iraq could make a nuclear weapon within 1-2 years appeared to be a judgement of the JIC.

Did the JIC approve the dossier?

Given that the dossier was not issued in the name of the JIC and an attempt to have it said that it was the JIC's "work" was expressly rejected, the government’s claim that the JIC approved it is already quite meaningless. In fact, the JIC also rejected an attempt to have it said that it "endorsed" the dossier's judgements. The executive summary of the 16 September draft, which was probably written by the spin doctors, used this wording but the draft of 19 September only said that the dossier's judgements reflected the views of the JIC.

A straightforward account of the JIC's involvement in the dossier can be found in the Foreign Office’s memorandum of 24 June 2003 to the Foreign Affairs Committee:

"The draft dossier was circulated to JIC members for comment in advance of publication. The JIC Chairman approved its contents." (answer to Q4)

This confirms what every contemporaneous document shows – that JIC members were only ever asked to comment on the dossier as individuals. Not only is there no evidence that the Committee itself was asked to approve the dossier, Scarlett and other Hutton witnesses made clear that it did not discuss the text at its meetings. Dr Brian Jones of the Defence Intelligence Staff, who famously told Hutton that one of his staff thought the dossier was "over-egged" (Section 77), also commented:

"What was unusual or what did not follow the normal practice was that this was not a paper that was going through the process by which it was examined and argued over at a full meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee at the stage that we are talking about." (Sections 125-6)

The absence of either a request for approval or any discussion of the text knocks both feet from under the government’s defence of last resort – that the JIC approved the dossier out of Committee under "silence procedures". In fact, it was the dossier drafting group, which had been packed with spin doctors, that carried out the scrutiny that the JIC itself would have carried out if the dossier was to be issued in its name. Indeed Scarlett's note to JIC members of 16 September makes clear that a meeting of that group to take following morning would take decisions on the text and JIC members were invited to make further comments by 1pm on the afternoon of the 17th, with no question of any discussion at the JIC meeting on the 18th. JIC member Tony Cragg, the former Deputy Director of Defence Intelligence, told Hutton (Section 39) that when Dr Jones wrote a formal memorandum of complaint about the dossier, he deferred to that group:

"I took the view that on the question of the 45 minutes and of the chemical weapons production, this had already been considered at length with the Cabinet Office in their meeting of 17th September and that I was satisfied with the decisions reached and consequently with the wording of the dossier at that point."

But is is also clear that Campbell had another false claim added to the dossier after the deadline had passed for JIC members to comment on the dossier. Scarlett claimed that he accepted or rejected Campbell's "drafting suggestions", depending on whether they were consistent with the intelligence and standing JIC judgements, but in this case he allowed Campbell to add a fabricated judgement that Saddam would use WMD against the Shia where the standing JIC judgement was merely that it was "possible" that Saddam would use them against an internal uprising.

Conclusions

To sum up: the dossier was not issued by the JIC; it was not produced by or within the JIC, which refused to allow it to be claimed that it was its work or that it endorsed it; it was not scrutinized by the JIC; it was not approved by the JIC. The government’s spin doctors contributed significantly to the actual drafting of the dossier, which was scrutinized and decided upon by a group on which they themselves sat. In overall charge and giving final approval was JIC Chairman John Scarlett, who reported to – and has since been promoted by – Tony Blair.

More than anything, the fact that the dossier was not a JIC document destroys the conclusions of the Butler Review, which blamed the JIC for its failings. It is clear that the JIC was fully aware of the dossier's failings and tried to dissociate itself from the document. What is unclear is why JIC members later felt obliged to help the government perpetrate the myth that they had approved the document.

Next: Who wrote the executive summary?