Spy Agencies in Britain Erred as Well

British spy agencies used unreliable sources and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq, but the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair did not deliberately mislead the public in making the case for war, an investigative commission concluded Wednesday.

The 196-page report by Robin Butler, a former head of the civil service, was less critical than a similar U.S. Senate document last week that scolded U.S. spy agencies for erroneously describing Iraq’s weapons programs as active and dangerous.

Blair’s critics said Wednesday that the prime minister had benefited from a “whitewash.”

But Blair told Parliament that although he took full responsibility for intelligence failures, the report confirmed that his decision to go to war was justified, even if no weapons of mass destruction had been found and evidence of their existence looked increasingly weak.

“No one lied, no one made up intelligence.... That issue of good faith should be at an end,” said Blair, who remained bruised but defiant after the fourth official inquiry into his unpopular decision to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He added: “I cannot honestly say that I believe getting rid of Saddam was a mistake at all.”

Despite the gentlemanly tone of Butler’s report, he and the four other commission members nonetheless reached some damaging conclusions. The report found that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “did not have significant -- if any -- stocks of biological and chemical weapons in a state fit for deployment or developed plans for using them.”

The report criticized the government for making allegations based on intelligence data without including vital caveats and doubts expressed by British spies. The pressure to provide an analysis that could help the government advocate its aggressive policy toward Iraq put a “strain” on the intelligence community, Butler said.

He singled out the government’s unprecedented public presentation of intelligence data in September 2002, which gave the inaccurate impression that Hussein could unleash long-range chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.

“We conclude that it was a serious weakness that ... warnings on the limitations of the intelligence underlying its judgments were not made sufficiently clear,” the report said.

Recent inquiries by British officials have raised questions about the validity of the source behind the much-debated 45-minute claim, according to the report.

The U.S. Senate report last week found that the CIA and other agencies relied heavily on dubious information from exile groups. British and U.S. intelligence agencies have worked together on Iraq and other trouble spots.

But British spies did not fall prey to manipulation by Iraqi defectors or exiles whose claims have been largely discredited, according to the Butler report.

Butler said three of five main agents working for Britain inside Iraq before the war turned out to be either unreliable or of limited value. The two other agents provided solid intelligence, and “tended to present a less worrying view of the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons capability than that from the sources whose reporting is now subject to doubt,” the report said.

The government’s erroneous portrayal of Hussein’s arsenal was compounded by a shortage of experienced intelligence analysts and a failure to share some information with the Defense Ministry’s arms experts, according to the report.

“The report highlights a failure of the interface between the intelligence community and the government,” said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies. “The government was interpreting the intelligence in the wrong way. The culture was that this is what Tony [Blair] wants to hear, so they were able to cherry-pick the intelligence analysis.”

Critics said this blurring of the line between politics and intelligence resembled the aggressive White House campaign for military action against Iraq that now has become a liability for the Bush administration.

Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative opposition, charged that Blair misled Britons when he called Iraq an urgent threat.

“The prime minister said he was in no doubt and that the intelligence was beyond doubt,” Howard said during the parliamentary debate, contrasting Blair’s impassioned prewar speeches with Wednesday’s report.

“It’s now clear that in many ways the intelligence services got it wrong. But their assessments included serious caveats, qualifications and cautions. When presenting his case to the country, the prime minister chose to leave out those qualifications, caveats and cautions,” he said.

Howard then addressed Blair directly. “I hope we will not face in this country another war in the foreseeable future,” Howard said, “but if we did and you identified the threat, would the country believe you?”

The Iraq crisis has weakened Blair, Britain’s most dominant politician since Margaret Thatcher. Nonetheless, the splintered opposition parties have not yet produced a challenger who seems capable of taking him on, pundits say. Blair’s most serious opposition comes from within his Labor Party, whose left wing vigorously opposed the war and feels both betrayed and vindicated.

“It’s clear we went to war on a false premise, on George Bush’s say-so,” said Alice Mahon, a Labor member of Parliament who voted against the war. “Who is responsible? Why was intelligence so flawed? Why did so many people die?”

Geraldine Smith of the Labor Party, a reluctant supporter of the decision to attack Iraq, seemed to articulate the view of fellow lawmakers who felt disappointed.

“I would not have voted for regime change in Iraq if I had known there were no weapons of mass destruction,” Smith told a television interviewer.

Dissatisfaction with Blair has led to speculation that he might eventually step aside for Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the other powerhouse in the Labor Party. But there were no immediate signs that Wednesday’s events had further endangered Blair or his key aides.

Butler took pains to defend John Scarlett, chief of the MI6 intelligence service. Before the war, Scarlett headed the Joint Intelligence Committee, an agency that coordinates intelligence analysis and acts as a bridge between the prime minister and spy agencies.

Scarlett’s committee prepared the public dossier about Iraq in September 2002 that generated allegations of distortion. It also set off a scandal last summer when a Defense Ministry scientist, who had criticized the Iraq dossier in an off-the-record interview with a BBC reporter, committed suicide after he was later publicly identified by the government.

Butler concluded in his report that the decision to push the intelligence community into the public spotlight was ill-advised.

“It was asked to do things that I don’t think it should have been doing in the sense that I think that intelligence and public relations need to be kept separate,” said Field Marshal Peter Inge, a member of the commission.

Butler told reporters that he hoped Scarlett would not resign because he shared only part of the blame.

Infiltrating Hussein’s regime was difficult, Butler noted, and many other countries believed that Iraq had a lethal arsenal even though they opposed military action.

Britain’s intelligence on Iraq also suffered because many top Middle East specialists were assigned to gather intelligence on the Al Qaeda terrorist network and were shifted belatedly to Iraq as the war approached, said Heyman and other analysts.

Butler’s apparent reluctance to assign individual blame led some critics to dismiss the report as a case of a government insider protecting his bosses. But Heyman said the inquiry was relatively tough within the context of British political culture.

“It barks up the same tree as the Senate report, but it’s not so cutting,” Heyman said. “It’s far more bland. But it’s not a fudge. We have seen a report in the American fashion with some pretty stark conclusions drawn. And we have seen a report in the British fashion where the conclusions don’t have the same cutting edge.”

Stobart reported from London and Rotella from Paris.