Iraq Inquiry: separating myths from facts over the 45 minute claim

By Greg Pope MP

Greg Pope is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. This is the second of a series of contributions during the Chilcot Inquiry.

Conservative MP Adam Holloway (who, by the way, has recently written an excellent piece on Afghanistan) has now revealed that the intelligence source for the claim that Saddam could launch chemical and biological weapons (CBW) within 45 minutes was, he says, a taxi driver in Iraq’s western desert.

You will recall that at the time, September 2002, many in the media linked this 45 minute claim to Iraq’s increasing missile capacity and reached the conclusion that Britain’s strategically vital military bases on Cyprus were vulnerable: a case of two plus two equalling quite a lot more than four.

I think its fair to say that the media were not energetically dissuaded from this approach by the Government. Add to the mix the widespread view that Alastair Campbell had “sexed up” the Joint Intelligence Committee’s (JIC) dossier by inserting this 45 minute claim and you have a heady cocktail of deception designed to dupe Parliament and the British people into supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Except the truth may be a little different to this version of events. The source for the 45 minute claim was described by the Foreign Office at the time as “an established, reliable and longstanding line of reporting”. Not only was he not a taxi driver but, I was informed by an impeccable source, he was in fact a defecting high-ranking officer in the Iraqi army. This officer talked of chemical and biological “missiles” which could be deployed within 45 minutes. The word “missile” and how it was translated from Arabic into English is crucial here – in English it implies a long-range capacity of the kind that Saddam was developing; in fact, as we now know, the defector was talking about battlefield weapons such as mortars and short-range shells. This would have made much more sense as this was exactly the kind of CBW that Saddam had already used in the Iran-Iraq war.

As for the sexing up of the dossier, the facts are more prosaic than the media hype. Much has been made of the fact that the 45 minute claim was not in the earlier drafts of the dossier, and some have claimed that it was inserted at the last minute on the diktat of Mr Campbell; it is true that it was inserted late on, the reason being that the raw intelligence was only received by the Secret Intelligence Service in August 2002. It was assessed and first appeared in a draft JIC dossier on 10 September 2002, before Alastair Campbell had even seen it. There is not even a scintilla of doubt that Alastair Campbell did not insert the 45 minute claim.

There is much to concern us, not least the over-reliance on a single intelligence source; and, despite the fact that Saddam had previously used battlefield CBWs, the stockpiles to which he referred were never found. But we shouldn’t be distracted by tales of taxi drivers and media myths about Alastair Campbell.