Ex-spy casts doubt on Blair and WMD

Tony Blair today faced fresh questions over the David Kelly affair and his insistence that he was left in the dark about the true nature of the 45-minute claim in his dossier on Iraqi weapons.

A former senior intelligence officer expressed disbelief that the system could have broken down to such an extent that no one briefed the Prime Minister on one of the central planks in his case.

Lieutenant-Colonel Crispin Black, who retired from the intelligence assessment staff six months before the weapons dossier was published, listed a series of checks "which must have been executed incorrectly to allow [Mr Blair] to be kept in such a state of ignorance, at such a crucial time, and on such a crucial matter".

The former Army officer said in an article for The Guardian that from evidence at the Hutton Inquiry, "I could hardly recognise the organisation I had so recently worked for."

He was astonished by descriptions of "meetings with no minutes, an intelligence analytical group on a highly specialised subject which included unqualified officials in Downing Street but excluded the DIS's lifetime experts ... vague and unexplained bits of intelligence appearing in the dossier as gospel ... sloppy use of language, that weird 'last call' for intelligence."

Mr Blair told the Commons last week he was not aware until after the war that intelligence saying Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes referred only to battlefield weapons. Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon and former foreign secretary Robin Cook have said they asked, and were told, what kind of weapons were being referred to.

Mr Black expressed surprise at the way full details of the 45-minute claim were left out of the initial report by the Secret Intelligence Service, and were not passed on to Mr Blair in his daily written intelligence brief from the Cabinet Office or in verbal briefings from Joint Intelligence Committee chairman John Scarlett.

Meanwhile, three doctors who last month questioned Lord Hutton's finding that Dr Kelly took his own life were today joined by three more experts in calling for a reopened inquest.

In a letter to the Guardian, the six said it was "highly improbable" that Dr Kelly could have died either through blood loss from his slit wrists, or from the number of tablets he swallowed.