Kelly 'sounded spin alarm'

Weapons expert David Kelly sounded the alarm over Government "spin" on Iraq as long ago as last September, it was revealed today.

He warned colleagues at the Ministry of Defence that he was concerned about the way evidence on Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was being
presented in the dossier on Iraqi weaponry then being drafted. And his concerns were relayed to No 10.

The revelation from the Hutton Inquiry into Dr Kelly's death came as Tony Blair's chief spin doctor Alastair Campbell gave evidence.

It demonstrated that Dr Kelly voiced objections months before he talked to reporters, including the BBC's Andrew Gilligan who accused Downing Street of "sexing up" the document.

An email revealed today is dated 10 September. The official who sent it - unnamed - says: "I have just spoken to Dr David Kelly."

The email says that the scientist raised concerns about a section of the dossier detailing growth cultures for biological weapons and complained: "The existing wording is not wrong but it has a lot of spin on it."

The new evidence overshadowed a strong defence launched by Mr Blair's communications chief Alastair Campbell, the key witness at today's hearing.

Mr Campbell produced his private diaries to back his assertion that the dossier had been drawn up not by Downing Street but by the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir John Scarlett.

He also said that they had urged that the language in the document should be toned down rather than sexed up - "the drier the better".

He also said that three "very senior" members of the security service requested a meeting with him to assure him that reports that the intelligencecommunity was unhappy with the way intelligence material was being used to prepare the dossier were wide of the mark.

Mr Campbell's evidence, however, uncovered an extraordinary picture of officials in No10 and the Foreign Office scrambling to play a part in compiling the document.

Mr Campbell said that Sir John Scarlett was determined to hold on to "ownership" of the document, which meant it must be written by the intelligence chief and his team. Mr Campbell said he fully agreed with that.

We're in trouble

The flood of high-level messages brought a further jolt for Downing Street with evidence that another senior No10 official was seriously unhappy about the dossier. Special adviser Phil Bassett was sent an early copy of Scarlett's draft completed on 10 September. The following day he emailed tersely: "A very long way to go. Think we are in a lot of trouble with this as it stands now."

Asked when he first became aware of plans for a dossier in 2002, Mr Campbell said he had been aware for some months of plans for a dossier on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and became aware of a specific Iraq dossier during August.

Mr Campbell was referred to a document by counsel to the inquiry James Dingemans QC.

Mr Campbell said he was aware of that document "probably on 5 September at that first meeting I had with

John Scarlett and others about the dossier that subsequently replaced this".

Mr Dingemans asked him if it had ever been intended to publish an earlier draft of the dossier. Mr Campbell said that there was a document commissioned several months earlier "on the general issues of WMD relating to four countries, one of which was Iraq".

He said: "At some time, I cannot recall exactly when, but a decision was taken effectively to drop that and then during August and into September there was a decision to do a WMD dossier exclusively on Iraq."

Mr Dingemans said it was suggested in the media that the decision to drop the dossier was because there was nothing new in it.

Mr Campbell replied: "No, that wasn't the reason." He said there were two reasons: "The first is that it wasn't a terribly good document overall as a document, as something we would want to put in the public domain.

"The second reason was the fear of doing it at the time it was being suggested was going to ramp up the issue at a time when, in fact, the Prime Minister and the Government were trying to calm it.

"By September the Prime Minister took the view that this exclusively Iraq document should be put into the public domain."

Mr Dingemans asked Mr Campbell when the Prime Minister decided to make the dossier public.

Mr Campbell said: "The decision was made on 3 September at a press conference in Sedgefield. I cannot remember if that was the exact date but it was the first press conference he did after coming back from Africa."

Frenzy of rumours

He said the frenzy was such that there were rumours that Britain was "about to take military action".

It was at this stage that the Prime Minister decided that the dossier on Iraq would have to be made public. Mr Campbell was asked about his personal diary entry for 3 September, which has been provided to the inquiry.

At the time he identified the key questions about Iraq as "Why now?" and "Why only Iraq?

Mr Campbell said: "The answer I think the Prime Minister gave was that it was a unique threat.

"What the Prime Minister said in his answers was to explain that he was seeing all this intelligence material coming in which made him more and more concerned about Iraq as a threat and he wanted to put some of that into the public domain."

Mr Campbell was asked about meetings on 5 and 9 September which he said were "ad hoc meetings" to discuss the production of the dossier.

The inquiry was shown an email listing the people due to attend the meeting, which included Sir David Manning (Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser), Mr Scarlett, Julian Miller (senior Cabinet Office official), John Williams (Foreign Secretary's press secretary) and a handful of officials from the MoD, Cabinet Office and Foreign Office.

Lord Hutton asked if it was a meeting of the Iraq communications group, which was later set up to handle the crisis, but Mr Campbell said that it was simply an ad hoc meeting.

Referred to his 5 September diary entries, Mr Campbell told the inquiry that the meeting was held amid discussions about what could be included in the dossier.

He said: "That discussion was about whether to recall Parliament, and the Prime Minister felt at that time that the press conference (held in Sedgefield) had steadied the public-debate on this in the way he wanted."

Asked about discussions at the meeting about the contents of the dossier, the communications chief said it was agreed that "it (the dossier) had to be revelatory, we had to show it was new and informative and part of a bigger case".

Mr Dingemans asked Mr Campbell whether Mr Williams had offered to be responsible for the dossier and whether that offer had been accepted.

Mr Campbell said it had not and that discussions at meetings on or before the 9th had shown that John Scarlett wanted "ownership".

Mr Campbell said: "I emphasised that the credibility of this document depended fundamentally on it being the work of the JIC. That was the touchstone of our approach from the very first moment."

Mr Campbell said he chaired a dossier planning meeting on 9 September 2002.

He said first he was joined by John Scarlett.

Dossier process

Mr Campbell said: "We were then joined by three very senior SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6) officers who ... used it to indicate they were very unhappy at two press reports that suggested SIS were unhappy in their involvement in the dossier process."

He said the officials "said that the stories did not remotely reflect their views or the leadership of the agencies who were perfectly content to co-operate with the Prime Minister on the dossier".

The inquiry was told Mr Scarlett was eventually given full charge of writing the dossier.

Lord Hutton asked him if he was made aware of any unhappiness in the lower ranks of the Secret Intelligence Services about the information being prepared for the dossier.

Mr Campbell replied: "Not at that stage."

Asked if he became aware of that at a later stage, he said: "Only what I read in the newspapers."

He added that Mr Scarlett had repeatedly assured officials that they had the support of the senior ranks.

Mr Dingemans then highlighted several emails and documents which showed senior staff within the intelligence community were unhappy with the dossier.

He asked Mr Campbell whether he was aware of such dissatisfaction, to which he replied he was not.

In Mr Campbell's diary of September 11 2002, he recorded a meeting with Mr Scarlett about the dossier.

Mr Campbell said: "I said 'The drier the better, cut the rhetoric'. That is raising the point ... I think there were areas where the language was too colourful.

"I also said the more intelligencebased it was, the better." He said this was the first time he showed the draft dossier to the Prime Minister.