The Waugh Room

Thursday 12th May 2011 | 14:36

Chilcot Keeps on Giving

As a veteran of the Hutton, Butler and Chilcot inquiries, even I am often tempted to think that there is little new left to know about the whole Iraqi WMD affair.

But newly released documents today gave us some fresh evidence that underlines just why the Iraq Inquiry was worth holding in the first place.

The stand-out document is the submission by a man who has until now not even been named in any of the inquiries to date.

Michael (Mick to his friends) Laurie had a distinguished career as the Director of the Army's Intelligence Corps before ending up as the Director General Intelligence Collection (DGIC) in the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in the key period of 2002 and 2003.

Currently chief exec of the Crimestoppers charity, Laurie was watching Alastair Campbell's evidence to Chilcot in January 2010 when he took exception the former spin chief's testimony.

In particular, he was struck by Campbell's claim that the infamous September 2002 dossier didn't "make the case for war".

In Laurie's note, which is incredibly succinct and rattled off in an email, he tells us that his boss Air Marshal Joe French - the then Chief of Defence Intelligence (CDI)- made clear the purpose of the exercise. He states:

Not surprisingly, the Iraq Inquiry took evidence from Mick Laurie last June. His oral evidence is just as interesting, largely because he makes crystal clear that he knew from several trips to the US that Washington was actively determined on war from early 2002.

Most importantly, he then expands his points about the dossier.

Laurie: Joe French came back from some JIC meeting and said, you know, that dossier which was the four country dossier did not make a case for war and we are going to be doing this all again and we need to collect more information. So over the summer the pressure sort of built up and up to try to collect more.

Sir Martin Gilbert: So already in February/March there was this case for war?

Laurie: Yes, I mean we were quite clear on that.......I mean we were reporting on what we could find and we were being asked the whole time, "Can you not find more? Why can't you find more?", and I think there was an assumption that there was stuff there but we were not capable of finding it.

I wonder whether the Chilcot committee has decided to go back to Joe French and quiz him on this? I recall during the Hutton Inquiry that his evidence was disjointed and unconvincing. 

French is a little-discussed figure, but he was the man who dismissed the concerns about the dossier expressed at the time by Dr Brian Jones (another member of the DIS).

In fact it's quite uncanny that it was another televised witness session that prompted Dr Jones to tell his story to Lord Hutton. (See my Independent interview with him from 2004 HERE at Annex D)

I've chatted to Dr Jones this afternoon about the new Laurie evidence. He tells me:

"His evidence comes closer to my own evidence than any other witness so far in suggesting that the dossier was intended to provide a case to persuade the country to go to war with Iraq."

So we now have several people who had real concerns (each for different reasons) about the Downing Street dossier: David Kelly, Mr A, Brian Jones and now Mick Laurie.

Yet Joe French, the man who could have passed on concerns, went along with the whole exercise.

Mick Laurie gets to the heart of the matter in his testimony last June. Asked what he would have done if he had been in the shoes of JIC chairman John Scarlett, he says:

"One has to have courage and stand up and say 'I can't sign up to that'."

There's plenty of talk in politics of 'speaking truth to power'. Today suggests again that many in Whitehall failed to do just that in 2002/3.