DEARLOVE, SIR RICHARD• 141Security Council resolutions. In particular, the paper reported that
Iraq had been detected in several efforts to purchase nuclear material
and components and had been prevented from buying uranium yel-
lowcake in Niger, the third largest producer of that precious com-
modity. This latter assertion—passed by SIS to the Central
Intelligence Agency(CIA) and used by President Bush in his State
of the Union address to Congress in January 2003—was later discov-
ered to be fatally flawed. The evidence for the illicit procurement in
Niger was a series of letters which, upon detailed examination by the
International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, turned out to have
been forged. The issue proved to be a great embarrassment for the
CIA, with CIA director George Tenet taking personal responsibility
for the inclusion of the 16 ‘‘offending words’’ in the president’s
speech that should not have been included. Nevertheless, SIS insisted
to theParliamentary Intelligence and Security Committeethat it
had acquired additional evidence of Iraq’s attempt to buy yellowcake
in two other African countries, implying that the origin of the infor-
mation had been an allied intelligence agency that had demanded its
role remain confidential. The paper included a claim, made by a sin-
gle unverified source, that Iraq’s WMD could be ready for deploy-
ment within 45 minutes of the order being given in Baghdad.
However, the text in the September report presented the reference to
45 minutes as being the time in which British interests, the two sover-
eign bases in Cyprus, could come under attack once Saddam had
taken the decision to launch.
The second paper, to become notorious as ‘‘the dodgy dossier,’’
was a document released by the government in February 2003 in an
effort to justify the imminent coalition attack on Iraq. This publica-
tion was presented as an intelligence analysis, written and cleared by
the JIC, setting out the current threat posed by Hussein’s regime, but
it was quickly exposed as having been constructed from some open
sources, among them a 10-year-old doctoral thesis written by a uni-
versity student in the United States and apparently downloaded, with-
out any attribution, from the Internet. A line-by-line comparison with
the original version showed that it had been deliberately edited at
Downing Street to exaggerate the threat from Baghdad. Worse, the
chairman of the JIC,John Scarlett, complained that the dossier con-
tained some authentic intelligence that had not been cleared for pub-